This is the Aug. 27, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
President Donald Trump has few good options to bring the war with Iran to a close. A massive bombing campaign lost its effectiveness — and Trump is reluctant to order another, likely in part because the U.S. is running so low on the defensive weapons it would need to repel an Iran counterattack. Diplomacy has gone nowhere, and Iran has strengthened its control over the Strait of Hormuz.
So that leaves an economic pressure campaign, which, as we have been discussing on the show all week, has a chance to end up being the right strategy to finally push Tehran to serious negotiations. But it also accomplishes something else, as I wrote in The Atlantic:
If nothing else, the new approach allows the White House to say it’s trying something and then — importantly — to stop talking about the war. Part of the plan, Trump advisers and allies tell us, is to try to push Iran to the background, while hoping that gas prices come down even a little and that Republicans can shift the nation’s focus to more politically palatable topics ahead of the midterms.
That won’t change the reality on the ground in the Middle East: Alliances have been strained, the U.S. military has been overtaxed, and Iran wields far more power in the region than it did at the beginning of the war, about six months ago. But it could allow Trump, a master of distraction, to turn to other priorities — a trade war with Canada! Claims of election fraud! His skill at flagpoles! — to try to save at least one chamber of Congress for his party this fall.
“We’re just trying to hang on until the midterms,” one Trump adviser said.
CHARTS OF THE DAY
ON THIS DATE
On Aug. 27, 2008, at the Democratic National Convention, a junior U.S. senator from Illinois won his party’s formal nomination to run for president of the United States. With that, Barack Obama became the first African American to win the presidential nomination of any major political party in the U.S., and eventually the presidency itself.
WHAT THEY SAID
Jon Meacham on Trump’s staying power
“Almost everything we’ve predicted about Donald Trump since 2015 has proven to be wrong. We are such a closely divided country. This notion of a Democratic landslide feels premature, and President Trump, let’s be honest, has a remarkable capacity for political resurrection.”
Mike Barnicle on White House priorities
“What Mr. Meacham says is all true. But we are involved in a war we seemingly can’t get out of. The president spends more time vilifying Canada than he has Vladimir Putin and Russia, and the White House goes out of its way to trim programs aimed at helping middle-class people, with a level of planned cruelty that is a shock to a lot of people.”
Vaughn Hillyard on Trump’s foreign policy failures
“The president has nobody he can point the finger at. At the forefront of his campaigns was the claim that he was the most powerful man in the world, and these wars have completely undercut that image. He is struggling in real time to convince Americans that it’s not his fault.”
Kat Abughazaleh on “DSA candidates”
“‘DSA candidates’ is this new term used by establishment Democrats for progressive candidates standing for where most Americans want the center to be. We have been failed time and time again by leaders, and democratic socialists, while they’re being painted as radical, are pushing for the true center — a popular agenda that includes passing Medicare for All and not sending weapons to Israel.”
The post Could Trump’s economic pressure approach to Iran be the lifejacket Republicans need? appeared first on MS NOW.
