[Program Note: Once again, we must apologize for an incomplete Friday Talking Points column. Real-life events forced me to spend most of the day dealing with something other than politics, but at least I was able to successfully conclude one of the bugaboos that have been eating up my weekday time so much (that's the good news). I didn't even begin writing this until late in the day, so I was only able to complete the first section, a truncated look back at the news this week. Lots of stuff got left out, and there won't be awards section this week or actual talking points, just to warn everyone in advance. Hopefully next week we'll be back to normal Friday columns here, and in the meantime I apologize for the interruption in regular service. Mea culpa.]

Maybe we should call Donald Trump's war of choice against Iran the "On-Again/Off-Again War"? That's what it feels like, at any rate, as Trump and Iran both stumble along, taking potshots at each other, with absolutely no end in sight. Trump in particular seems to have no idea what he's doing, no plans whatsoever to bring the conflict to an end, and an unclear understanding of what that end should look like. Which doesn't exactly build confidence, obviously.

Meanwhile, we keep burning through our stocks of advanced high-tech interceptor missiles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (a military-oriented think tank) just put out a new estimate this week for how deeply into our stockpiles we now are. Their new numbers deal with the two major land-based platforms America has for intercepting ballistic missiles: Patriot missiles and THAAD missiles (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, formerly Theater High Altitude Area Defense). And the new numbers are pretty alarming.

Before Trump started his war of choice, C.S.I.S. estimates that the Pentagon had 2,330 Patriot missiles and 452 THAAD missiles. As of July 27th, those numbers are down to between 750 and 827 Patriots and 234-278 THAAD missiles. That is a reduction of between 65-68 percent of pre-war Patriot stocks and 39-48 percent of THAAD stocks. This war, which has just entered its sixth month, has wiped out a whopping two-thirds of our Patriot misses and somewhere between two-fifths and half of our THAAD missiles. This is just fighting Iran and their various regional proxies, mind you -- who are not exactly what you'd call a world superpower, in military terms.

The article draws three conclusions. Here are two of them:

Diminished stockpiles may force the United States and its coalition partners to take more risks with interceptions. There are no good alternatives to Patriot and THAAD for ballistic missile defense. Navy ships, with Standard Missiles that can intercept such threats, generally are too far away.

Expended munitions create a near- to medium-term risk for U.S. readiness to fight a war against China in the western Pacific.

This is just one major reason why Trump is so desperate to make some sort of ceasefire deal with the Iranians. He denies this -- he keeps saying that no, no, it's the Iranians who are desperate -- but it's pretty obvious what the people at the Pentagon who truly do worry about such things as armaments readiness must be telling Trump these days.

This was likely the reason why Trump instituted a "pause" of a few days, after bombing Iran for nearly two straight weeks. This pause didn't last long -- only a couple of days -- but when the attacks resumed, they were at a much lower level on both sides.

The second and third big reasons Trump is desperate to find some sort of way to declare victory and go home are that gas prices are once again well above the psychological barrier of "four bucks a gallon" and that Trump's poll numbers have taken an absolute nose-dive as a direct result. With no visible end in sight and the war widening even further (with Houthis now attacking Saudi Arabian oil refineries and tankers), prices are going back up on both the world oil market and here at home at the gas pump. Oh, and by the way, oil companies are now reporting sky-high profits for the last quarter (what a surprise!).

We are just over three months away from the midterm elections, and the issue of affordability was already the number-one political issue in the country, even before the recent setbacks. Inflation has hit hard, gross domestic product growth was sharply down in the second quarter of the year (1.5 percent, versus 2.1 in the first quarter), and the numbers at the gas station are headed back up again. Republican voters are feeling demoralized and unenthusiastic, while Democrats are wishing the midterm election would hurry up and get here so they can go vote their disapproval. Three recent polls put Trump in the low 30s for job approval (32, 33, and 34 percent), and one of them had him perfectly at a 2-to-1 disapproval-over-approval rating (66 percent disapproval to only 33 percent approval). And the Trump administration just chose this week to announce that it would cut subsidies for Medicare Part D, so seniors are going to be paying more for prescription drug coverage a lot faster than was originally planned. It's almost as if Trump wants to lose the midterms.

Trump's answer to all of this is to just flat-out lie about it. According to him, the American economy is rosy and booming and the best ever, and anything that doesn't fit that fantasy is Joe Biden's fault. No, really -- more than 18 months into his term, he's still trying to blame his predecessor. Don't believe me?

President Trump told a crowd of supporters in Michigan on Monday that the affordability problems they were experiencing were vestiges of the Biden administration, and spent the better part of an hourlong speech painting a dystopian picture of what the United States could look like if Democrats won competitive elections this fall.

"We had the single greatest year we've ever had as a country," Mr. Trump said. "We're not going to let these people destroy it." The president added that "in 18 months, we've turned this country completely around."

Or he's just downright incomprehensible on the subject:

Trump explained away high fuel prices, saying that they "didn’t behave" but that he would find a way to bring them down again. "It's like playing a banjo," he said, without further explanation.

[Feel free to make your own "Dueling Banjos" joke, here... or perhaps a riff on "Sure, Grandpa, sure..."?]

Republicans -- well, some of them at any rate -- are feeling bolder about defying Trump. The Senate held another vote on stopping the war, and once again it was close. The final vote was 49-50, meaning the measure failed, but enough Republicans voted for it that it would have passed if John Fetterman hadn't voted against it.

Even more astonishing, two Republicans in the Senate took a major stand against Trump this week, which tanked the confirmation process for Trump's nominee to be attorney general. Thom Tillis and John Cornyn both have a very good reason to thumb their noses at Trump, since he was instrumental in the fact that neither one of them will be returning to the Senate next year. However, they say that they're just the public face of the resistance to Trump on the nomination -- that other Republican senators are equally as disgusted with the situation as they are.

The sticking point boils down to whether Trump (and his cabinet members) can be believed or not. The clear answer to that is: "No way -- are you kidding me?!?" So far, it has been hard for Republicans to admit that. But this time is different.

Trump's nominee, Todd Blanche, has repeatedly said while testifying before Congress that the woefully-inadequate documents that spelled out the "settlement" Trump essentially reached with himself are no longer accurate. Initially, Trump's multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the I.R.S. was going to be dropped when the Justice Department decided to knuckle under to Trump's demands that he (1) be given a $1.776 billion slush fund to reward people who were the "victims" (according to Trump) of a "weaponized" Justice Department -- including the January 6th insurrectionists who were all convicted in court for committing violent crimes against federal police, and (2) be given a "Get out of jail free" card for any and all tax law crimes that Trump and his family had ever committed -- including future ones, by the way.

The outcry this grossly self-dealing "settlement" spurred was bipartisan and ferocious on Capitol Hill. The Justice Department quickly backed down on the slush fund part of it and said that such a fund was "not moving forward" any more. But they insisted the tax-cheating free pass would indeed continue.

But -- and this is the crucial detail -- while Blanche said that the idea for the slush fund is dead and will not be revived, he refused to put that statement in writing and sign it. To review: Blanche has been nominated for the top legal job in the entire federal government, and any lawyer worth his salt -- heck, any first-year law student -- will tell you that anyone who refuses to write down something they agreed to and sign it should be taken with a grain of salt, because they are obviously planning on breaking any oral agreement later on.

Trump, being Trump, absolutely torpedoed Blanche's credibility on the matter today:

But on Friday, Trump twice undermined Blanche's sworn testimony, first suggesting the fund -- established to resolve his lawsuit against the IRS -- was very much alive, and later conceding that it was dead but that he very much wished it were alive.

According to Senator Cornyn, on the eve of the scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee vote on the nomination, he and Blanche had actually reached an agreement on the wording of a document Blanch was willing to sign -- until Trump got wind of it. Here is how Cornyn put it:

I thought we had solved it last night.... I think as far as Blanche and the Department of Justice, we were pretty much on the same page. But then when the president got wind of it, he wasn't.

Both Cornyn and Tillis sit on the Judiciary Committee, and if they both vote against confirming Blanche's nomination, then it will die and not even make it to the Senate floor. Trump is now (in a fit of pique) threatening to yank the nomination and send it back to the Senate next year. This makes little sense, since by then Democrats could well be in control of the chamber.

The entire episode was notable, though, because the two GOP senators stood so strongly against Trump and refused to take his lies at face value. That is a healthy development indeed, and it might actually be a harbinger for other Republicans breaking with Trump while out on the campaign trail. Trump's approval ratings are dragging Republicans' chances for re-election down in a big way, so showing some independence from him right about now could improve their chances. It's something to watch for in the next month or so, at any rate.

We apologize again because we don't have time for much else, but we thought we'd at least close with something amusing (and embarrassing) Trump's State Department just did. Here's the whole sad story of an incredibly-wrong map of certain countries in Africa (with not a single country identified or drawn accurately) displayed at an international conference this week (emphasis in original, to show quoted passage):

The cartographic catastrophe occurred during a pre-conference ahead of the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro this week and was described in detail by Emily Bass, an expert consultant for Physicians for Human Rights, who saw it firsthand.

Bass ran through the litany of errors in a post on "To End A Plague ... Again," her Substack about the Trump administration's global health agenda:

The map mis-identified the locations of Cote d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria by enormous margins--making Nigeria landlocked, Mozambique an east African nation and Cote d'Ivoire a southern African state. The map put Uganda and Malawi in the right vicinity, but with the wrong borders. And it nope'd out altogether for Cameroon, which doesn't have a line connecting the name to a country at all. (There is also a country without a name. Alas, they are not a match.)

At least this time it wasn't Trump himself who ruined the map with a Sharpie....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant