Donald Trump's Challenging Summer: Facing a Crucial Test Without a Key Ally

DONALD TRUMP is having a terrible summer.

The President’s “six-week” is now entering its sixth month and the Iranians are playing the once-famed dealmaker like a cat with a big ball of orange yarn.

Talks have ground to a halt, just as they did with over .

The mad mullahs are openly mocking the President one day and trying to whack him the next.

No nuclear deal has emerged, and the remains a daily tinder box with knock-on costs reverberating far beyond the region.

Western missile stocks are depleted to a dangerous degree, and while petrol prices have stabilised a bit, was sold off at a 25-year high on Thursday.

And voters are feeling the pain, with hitting 6.69 per cent this week, the highest since was in office.

Promises of a “springtime boom for the US economy” have drained away quicker than Trump’s botched attempt to “beautify” DC’s by hiring some pool guys he knew.

I won’t be the first, or last, to see the obvious metaphor in the leader of the free world having to dodge a potential rocket attack by hiding in a catering truck as he was s. But it sums up how the President got himself into this mess.

Relying on Israeli intelligence of a perceived threat, trapped, literally, in a situation of his own making, while a hostile media screech and mock.

And just when he probably needed her the most, — the pint-sized pugilist who has become the second most famous blonde in the White House with her combative outings at the press podium — threw in the towel.

Pals insist it had nothing to do with the fact the mum-of-two was left on the Air Force One in Turkey, when the , leaving the rest as potential sitting ducks.

But the timing of her announcement — in the same week as the Ankara airport farce rocked Washington — has certainly been the source of much chitchat over here.

Leavitt was at the President’s side for arguably the most glittering portion of his now decade-long foray into .

Pushing the lawfare narrative outside yet another courtroom as Trump’s enemies on the Left tried to jail him rather than fight him at the ballot box proved to be political catnip.

And she sacked off her first maternity leave in the aftermath of Trump dodging death in July 2024.

Even diehard -haters have given up trying to argue she is anything but a commanding presence in the briefing room, and an ace in his pack.

But now he’s staring down a make-or-break electoral test without one of his best players.

With the countdown to November’s midterms now weeks rather than months, by now White House strategists wanted to be talking up domestic wins, not bogged down in what is looking like the latest “forever war”.

And it could get much, much worse in the coming weeks.

The usually suave Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent looks like he hasn’t slept for days, after he raided billions from America’s foreign currency reserves to help prop up the flailing Japanese yen.

A casualty of the global instability that Trump’s war in is reaping on the world, the Japanese have the US by the short and curlies again.

Holding more than a trillion dollars of US debt, threats to start a fire sale of bonds unless the US Treasury helped Tokyo stabilise their currency by buying lots of it saw Bessent forced into action.

It’s not immediately clear it will work for very long, however, with a massive risk of huge interest-rate rises in an election year if it does not.

The irony is, if it were not for Iran, Trump might be looking at some good ground to fight the midterms due to the US Left taking a look at what did to Labour in Britain, and saying, “We will have some of that.”

Hard-left candidates have been selected in key Senate races, only for it to emerge they fathered children with their second cousin, like the odd chap in Maine, or the candidate who believes God is trans and barbecue is dangerous — in Texas, of all places.

Or take Abdul El-Sayed in , who says is “toxic”, wants to ban fireworks on the 4th of July and cancel .

But some of Trump’s supporters seem more interested in tearing strips off each other, perhaps with some sympathy for the increasingly prominent Democratic Socialists of America due to a shared passion for hating Israel.

While Trump’s been quick to scream about communism and socialism, it is far from clear voters will heed his warnings.

It appears , the Vice President seeking to get his own rocky few months back on track and who has long warned the administration should focus on the “home front”, does not believe so yet.

He told Fox News: “My warning to my fellow Republicans is you don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market. You stop socialism by making people’s lives better.”

Ouch. Especially with just 12 weeks to polling day.

IT’S Passport to Piddington!

The leafy Oxfordshire hamlet of just 370 has voted to leave the over Andy Burnham’s punish-the-posh strategy of tipping 1,250 boat migrants in their backyard.

As council leader Tim McNally explained to The Sun: “We are going down to the US Embassy and will bring our declaration to them.

“ loves old, quaint English villages, but he’s not so keen on migrants,” chimed in his colleague Joe Marshall.

Given that their referendum faces some fairly steep legal issues, I fear the patriots of Piddington may have to up their game.

In 1822, the fine folk of Hastings, East Sussex, in a tax dispute with the Crown, declared an 8.5-acre patch of the town the 24th state of the newly created United States of America.

They raised the Stars and Stripes and held out for a whopping 12 years before the government sent in the heavies.