This doesn't seem a free press to me.

It's not.

And banning media is not permitted under the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The three news organizations have filed suit.

Others are joining in it.

And I'm absolutely convinced that the courts will rule what the president did was unconstitutional and cannot stand.

He excluded a reporter in the first term, Jim Acosta, took his credentials away because Trump didn't like what he was reporting.

To ban those questions in the first instance, that to me is stymieing something that American democracy and back here Australian democracy is built on.

Is Donald Trump, do you think he's going to call a national emergency before the elections?

Yeah, a lot of people raise this.

I don't think so.

I mean, I've seen it reported as well.

Yeah, he's going to call a national emergency.

Um, it's, it's hard to see the basis for it, but, but particularly under the stress of this presidency on the American people, the Iran war is not working for Trump.

He can't settle on terms that he wants, but the Iran war is also not working for the American people.

What's your feeling?

So the excuse that Australia and these other countries are not doing enough to deal with slavery, is that a ruse, an excuse, or is there some truth to it?

Given the uniformity of it here, he's not choosing certain countries which have a long history on this issue.

He's talking with all the major trading partners.

This is over 90% of the trade that comes into the US.

So it's contrived.

It's arbitrary.

There's no intellectual basis for it.

has it been impacting the u.s economy in a good way all this all these tariffs

So the excuse that Australia and these other countries are not doing enough to deal with slavery, is that a ruse, an excuse, or is there some truth to it?

Given the uniformity of it here, he's not choosing certain countries which have a long history on this issue.

He's talking with all the major trading partners.

This is over 90% of the trade that comes into the US.

So it's contrived.

It's arbitrary.

There's no intellectual basis for it.

Why is Australia, why are we getting that higher one?

What does it tell us?

It tells us everything.

It's one of the most, I mean, there's a list of, there are many books that have come out since Watergate on presidencies.

And I believe this is on a par with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their accounts of the Nixon downfall.

And what struck me, two things.

Maggie Haberman has been covering Trump for over 20 years.

Jonathan Swan is a native son of Australia.

If it's a Republican, will

that went down like a lead balloon.

It's a unifying force in the Persian Gulf, so I mean, that was there.

But Lebanon is really important, really serious because it can threaten to upend everything.

So Hezbollah is Iran's proxy in Lebanon.

Hezbollah hates Israel.

They want to damage it as much as possible.

Israel wants that stopped, and they've undertaken an enormous campaign that has inflicted massive damage inside Lebanon.

Do you think or not?

So I don't know why people say that was all such a formidable performance.

Also, I mean, everyone on this continent who's not a First Nations, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander person, all their parents were born overseas, too.

You know, I mean, that's just the fact of life.

A couple of issues here.

She's unlike Trump.

I mean, it's pure Trumpism that you're hearing.

And the virtue of it, not to say this is good, the virtue of it is she's doing exactly what Trump is.

yes.

How do you think that's going to play? I mean, to the MAGA base, the Make America Great Again base, to the MAGA base, him losing his cool, stomping out, stamping on the microphone, etc., may not play so badly anyway.

But it's based on what he's contesting.

And this issue of keeping America, that it's America first.

We're not going to get involved in endless foreign wars.

And now we have a war where a lot of people are afraid it's going to become open-ended.

And the events of the past 24 hours, where Israel attacked Beirut, Hezbollah fired rockets, and then Iran fired rockets, and Israel retaliated against Iran.

And Trump all the while is saying, well, everyone's job is to get back and let's finish this deal.

Yeah, well, that's the president of the U.S. You think he

What do you make of your president's

The good people at Politico, I came across this this morning.

They did, just for the month of May, they categorized his true social postings and when they occurred.

Most of it, a lot of it, and the highest volume is after 11 p.m. Washington time at night and the couple hours that follow.

But we have, there are several wars on.

And I think if you step back and look at the world, you know, today, this morning, we're in the world of unfinished wars.

Ukraine is not finished.

Do you think there are genuine concerns in the White House about his mental capacity?

They think Trump is giving away too much, don't they? Yeah.

Well, if you recall, at the outset of the war, one of his first statements, true social is just the biggest go-to place that we have these days, right? And what Trump said was unconditional surrender in all caps.

I mean, he's going back to Ulysses Grant and the Civil War.

Well, congratulations on that.

And yes, compared to that objective and where we are today, you have conservatives and they're, you know, inside the Republican Party.

There are led by conservatives generally, Trump then on top of it.

You have several senators who are not happy with where this is going because it's not getting the results that Trump said he wanted from the outset.

If you want a career on the Republican side, there's no career without Donald Trump, is there?

Mm.

And, uh, and people are really concerned about it.

Um, he, uh, we haven't seen any doctor's examinations or reports or anything like that.

Um, it's clear that he's aging.

If you think about how he is today and how he was in the first term, he was, uh, more focused, more energetic, um, uh, more, um, uh, cunning as opposed to what we see in his mind today is almost whatever comes into his head, he's just talking to, uh...

He- he'll talk about it, um, and, and in, and in inappropriate settings.

He had children at a sports event in the Oval Office around the, uh, around h- around the, uh, Roosevelt, uh, the desk that he sits at.

Wow

Tell us what happened.

Uh, this is an annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association, which was formed in the 1920s.

Of in recent decades, it's always been held at the Washington Hilton because it's the biggest ballroom in the city and everyone, uh, wants to go.

What was making this special was that Trump accepted it.

I mean, this is the mainstream media and everybody else in the lamestream media and the fake news, the, they're all there, many of whom Trump has contempt for, but he says, "I wanna come, and I have some messages to deliver." So, uh, w- at the dinner course around 9:30 PM Saturday night, uh, Washington time, uh, f- food is being served and then suddenly there are noises coming from outside the room.

Uh, the CBS correspondent, uh, who was the chair of the session, she, uh, immediately looked like something was up, and then many people rushed to the podium, protected the president.

One agent stood in front of him, so no one, it- it...

What do you think about this moment, Bruce?

So have the Republicans given up on anything other than a, a collapse in their vote in the November midterm, uh, Congress elections?

Well, I was on the Democratic staff in Congress in 2010.

Obama was elected in 2008.

And it was clear in September, October of 2010 that the Democrats would lose upwards of 50 seats.

They ultimately lost 63 seats and control of the Congress, which is a pretty big, terrible thing to face if you're as a partisan.

Okay.

But I do remember, and there just came a moment in each congressional office when the staff would sit down with the member or the senator and go through it and just say, we're not going to win this election.

Where do the Democrats sit in all this? There's no obvious candidate emerging out of that, is there?

Can you tell us more about that?

We're coming up to the most decisive moment in the war since it was launched and you had the decapitation of the Iranian regime and the wholesale bombing of the country, which has not led to a resolution at this point.

Trump wants to end the war as soon as possible, but he can't end it on his terms.

Prognosis is this is going to be an indefinite fight and he can't take that politically.

because he's really getting killed here in America over his standing in the polls.

The rise in petrol gasoline prices has been huge over the past week.

The American people have real doubts about the strength of the economy.

You've alluded to it already, but what is the opinion on the ground in the US at the moment about this entire saga?