Megan Messerly

Megan Messerly, and I am a White House reporter at Politico.

We are now three months, more than three months into the Iran war, and this is just not going anywhere anytime soon.

We have seen the president over the last week, week and a half now say that, you know, he's close on a deal to extend this ceasefire with Iran that still has not come through.

There was this two-hour situation room meeting on Friday.

Nothing came out of that after two hours.

And so the White House really can't figure out its path forward here, right?

Talking to folks in and around the White House, they just want to find a sort of face-saving way out of this war, right?

But they have been unable to do that.

They've been unable to get

you know, Iran to agree to something that would open the Strait of Hormuz and get us out.

And in the meantime, everyone's just very over it.

And according to my reporting, that's including staff inside the White House, who one of my sources described to me and said, you know, pretty much everyone is in a funk.

Use that word, funk, which is always, always fun.

And described it as sort of the White House being sort of stuck in this quicksand of Iran.

Yeah, and that was one of the big things that I was talking to folks about for this story is this idea that, you know, Iran has really taken up so much of the president's time that it is in some ways distracting from some of these other priorities, and that includes the president's legislative agenda.

Of course, some allies I spoke with also blamed that squarely on Senate Majority Leader John Thune and said, you know, Thune is being too much of an institutionalist, protecting the filibuster.

You know, the president has called for firing the Senate parliamentarian.

That has not happened yet either.

And so you have a very frustrated Trump, but a frustrated Trump who has, you know, rhetorically turned the screws a bit on Thune, but really hasn't, you know, put the full force of pressure on Thune to get his legislative agenda through.

And we should say that includes things like the president has talked a lot about the Save America Act, right, an elections-focused piece of legislation.