In the year 1076, Pope Gregory VII, excommunicated King Henry the Fourth, the Holy Roman Emperor, who would challenge the authority of the church to appoint bishops.

Excommunication for Henry meant that his subjects would no longer be required to pledge their loyalty to him.

This put the emperor in a bit of a pickle, and he wound up standing in the snow barefoot for 3 days at Kenosha begging the Pope to forgive him.

I tell this story as a reminder that challenging the authority of popes has on occasion not worked out so well for temporal political leaders.

This doesn't mean that we're going to see Donald Trump barefoot in the Vatican anytime soon, but I am suggesting that fighting popes comes with special political risks.

Donald Trump has achieved what he's achieved to date by being more rhetorically reckless, blunter, and more insulting than any president in history, but are there limits?

I'll discuss this question and other questions with my panel tonight.

Leanne Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent for Puck.

Stephen Hayes is the editor of the Dispatch.

Jonathan Lemire is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a co-host of Morning Joe on MS Now.

And Michael Shearer is a staff writer and a White House correspondent at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me.

Um, before we talk about people politics and Persian politics.

I want to uh bring up a story that we just published at The Atlantic.

FBI politics, I guess you could say.

John, you worked on this story with our colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick, just posted a story about Kash Patel's many problems as FBI Director.

Can you give us a quick overview of what Sarah is the byline on this and did a terrific job.

It opens with an anecdote in early April where Kash Patel was locked out of the internal FBI systems and believed he had been fired and panically called for allies and friends to say just that.

Turned out that was not the case.

It was a technical error, but it underscores a couple of things here.

First of all, his jobs security security preps not all that strong, but also it highlights to many his sort of erratic behavior in the post where he had people inside and outside of the bureau have not looked too fondly about his performance, but also his behavior and the story gets into remark well sourced, multiple sources, a number of times where he has been seen as drunken, drinking too much, uh, in excess, both in Los Angel Las Vegas and in Washington, including at a Las Vegas club called The Poodle Room.

Uh, in this case, what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas, as we have learned about it, um, but most tellingly, perhaps on multiple occasions and most seriously, his security detail could not reach him.

And once they even requested what is known as broaching equipment, i.e., what you, a SWAT team would use or hostage rescue team would use in order to gain access to his room to wake him up.

They were worried about where, where is he or is he OK?

Yeah, well, we'll, we can talk about, uh, and we probably will be talking about Kash Patel in coming weeks.

Uh, it's obviously tumultuous time generally at the Justice Department.

It's a tumultuous time everywhere.

Um, uh, and we will get to papal politics.

I never thought I would say that on this show, but here we are.

Um, but I want to turn to the Strait of Hormuz.

Uh, Steve, the markets reacted well to the news that the strait seems to be open, but the Iranian shipping is still being blocked by the US Navy, give us a state of, of play and and what you expect to to see unfold in the coming days.

Well, I'm not going to make any prediction because as you said in your open, it's pointless to make a I was laying a trap knew actually.

Look, I mean, it's it's really hard.

I think it's a hard time to do what we do for a living right now, particularly reporting on Iran and the Trump administration.

I don't know if there's there are two other actors who have more of a recent history of saying things that just aren't true again and again and again and again and just tonight before we came on, our main interlocutor in Iran accused Donald Trump of 7 lies, I think you said 7 lies in his most recent post, uh, about the, the back and forth with Iran.

We don't know exactly what's going on.

Donald Trump has been very clear that he wants to keep the blockade.

He thinks the blockade is working.

I think there are reasons to to surmise that the blockade is having some effect.

It seems to be putting pressure on the Iranians in power right now.

The Iranians have said that they are not opening the strait or they're they're dialing back and are open to changes if the US blockade continues.

I expect that we're likely to see this back and forth happen.

Now, for as long as the ceasefi lasts, um, or maybe we'll end up cutting the ceasefire.

There is, there is no point in trying to predict, uh, something interesting that so Israel and Hezbollah have agreed to a ceasefire.

Israeli leaders and Lebanese leaders are actually speaking, which is unusual.

Um, but I think we got an indication that Trump is becoming bored or frustrated by the length and duration of this war.

He, he tweeted or put on Truth Social, just, just uh earlier, a bit earlier, said Israel is quote prohibited from striking Hezbollah from now on.

I've never seen an American president say to the Israelis or to an ally, you are prohibited using that language from doing something.

It it struck me in a week in which Democrats in the Senate showed a a a kind of remarkable coldness to the Netanyahu government in Israel.

I have to imagine that this, this Tru social post for Netanyahu was quite a rude awakening, Michael.

Yes, I mean Netanyahu needs President Trump to back him later this year because he's going to be facing voters again, and right now he's not very popular and if the war ends with the way it's ending now, I mean, his, his opposition in the country is going on the attack, saying this Iran adventure effectively failed.

I think there's a parallel political peril in the United States.

Trump is losing leverage.

He has great military leverage in the, in the, in the, in the Gulf right now, but he's losing political leverage.

I mean, he's, he's saying to the American people right now this is over, and it's not over.

He's on a campaign trip in Nevada and Arizona, you know, talking about no tax on tips and and how they, you know, your your affordability issues are going to get better, but it doesn't look like that's the timeline the Iranians are working on, right, Leanne, generally speaking though, Donald Trump has had great success over the past 10 years of telling people Oh, that problem that you think is a problem is no longer a problem, and then moving on to another subject.

Sometimes by creating another crisis to supplant a crisis.

Is this going to be the same thing over and over again, or is this issue a little bit too big just to kind of distort out of the public eye.

Yeah, well, if past is precedent, then you know, it's probably going to happen over and over again, but with that said, I keep thinking about Greenland.

Remember the deal that was a beautiful framework for a future deal that no one has ever talked about or seen since then.

Um he's also the president is also very good.

at making it seem like he got a win, when in fact nothing has changed.

So that is the question, but I think it's actually more complicated this time because you have all the regional factors in the Middle East who are very much wanting something specific to happen and very concerned about where this could go.

So there's more players involved than just the president and the Iranians.

There's a lot of other people that could.

They're not going to go with his spin just because he says this has been a great success will not accept that, you know, there was a great moment in the first term after the House of Representatives passed the repeal and replace of Obamacare.

There was a huge ceremony at the White House.

The Marine Corps band played.

President Trump called all the Republican leaders up.

They were very nervous about doing this, and he had a victory celebration.

He said this is the end of Obamacare, the end of Obamacare is here.

You had a couple of remarks from Paul Ryan and others.

It was a victory celebration, and then Obamacare didn't go away and it didn't pass the Senate and it was a total dis a ster but he does this to distract.

I don't think he's going to be able to do this this time because gas prices aren't going to change.

If he tries to shape reality, you know, I think he, he thinks if he can create the perception, he can create the reality.

It won't work if you're still Two things people know grocery prices, gasoline prices.

You can't fool people about those.

You see them every day.

The gas prices are literally advertised on billboards, on the side of most major American roads.

Uh, Ron Klain, Joe Biden's first chief of staff has told me that when he would wake up each and every morning, the first thing he would do, even before seeing that the president called, we would check the price of gas.

He knew how important that is for the American psyche, how they feel about the economy.

And look, Trump is really good about asserting his own reality.

He clearly was trying to do with that barrage of true social posts today saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and more or less saying the war is won, but Americans aren't going to buy it if things don't change and change soon.

And even if they do improve, the higher prices are going to remain for a while.

It's not just that they have to change to something before the Iran Iran war.

Before the Iran war, it was unacceptable to the American people.

So he's been losing this argument for more than a year.

They said after the off year elections last year that they were going to pivot to affordability, and they still haven't been able to do it