Washington, DC

1. Oil hits $100 a barrel
2. Trump eyes special ops
3. Doubts over regime change
4. Texas Senate waiting game
5. Trump visits House GOP
6. New voting bill threat
7. Gonzales endgame

PDB: Service member becomes seventh American to die in Iran war

Get ready: Semafor’s DC PM briefing launches this afternoon! … AFP: Putin pledges “unwavering support” to Iran’s new supreme leader … Nikkei ⬇️ 5%

Iran war sends oil to nearly $120 a barrel

The Iran war drove oil prices to nearly $120 a barrel Monday, spurring President Donald Trump to defend the rise as “a very small price to pay for… safety” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to call for tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Brent crude crashed past the symbolic $100 a barrel mark for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, driving inflation fears in the US and worldwide. Israeli strikes on Iranian oil fields and Iranian drone attacks elsewhere have hampered production, while shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed over fears of Tehran targeting vessels. The world is seeing “the most severe shock to energy markets since the 1970s,” The Wall Street Journal reported. It came as Trump told The Times of Israel Sunday the decision to end the US-Israeli war on Iran will be a “mutual” one with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump not ruling out raids on nuclear sites

As the Trump administration weighs whether to send ground troops into Iran, one option at Trump’s disposal would be to send Special Operations units into the country to seize and destroy key nuclear sites like Isfahan, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott scooped. It’s a plan that was developed by both US Central Command and Israeli forces. The US Army’s special missions unit, known as Delta Force, has long readied for this exact scenario, said Jonathan Hackett, who served as a US Marine Corps interrogator and a special operations capabilities specialist. Trump confirmed on Sunday that he isn’t ruling it out, telling ABC News: “Everything is on the table.” But the administration would have plenty of questions to answer before pulling the trigger on a mission like that, including how long such an operation might take.

EU official doubts Iran regime change

Kajsa Ollongren, the EU’s special representative for human rights, expressed doubt that the US-Israeli war in Iran will result in regime change in the country, during an interview with Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant. “There doesn’t seem to be a plan in place for a regime change, and we also know from other countries that regime changes are extremely difficult if they don’t come from within,” she said. She’s not alone in that view: Even a classified US intelligence assessment concluded that large-scale war would be unlikely to result in regime change, The Washington Post reported. Senior Iranian officials on Sunday selected Mojtaba Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son and a regime insider, as his successor. Ollongren, who held meetings with State Department officials and US lawmakers in Washington last week, also warned of the deteriorating security situation in the Middle East and the war’s adverse effects on human rights.

Trump’s Texas delay raises GOP anxiety

Republicans are still waiting on Trump’s endorsement in the Texas Senate race. And every week without him settling it means more costly spending in the GOP runoff battle between Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. When Trump said he would weigh in “soon,” Republicans hoped it meant he’d have backed Cornyn by now. That hasn’t happened, and attacks continue to fly, potentially weakening the eventual GOP nominee. “We could have tens of millions of dollars being spent in a runoff in Texas and then have the added risk of whatever gets said as fodder for the Democrat marketing department,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told Semafor. “Primaries get ugly. Runoffs get even uglier.” He and other Republicans warned a Paxton victory would require so much general election money it could deprive candidates in other battlegrounds this fall.

— Burgess Everett

Trump set to speak at Republican retreat

Trump will speak to House Republicans on Monday night at a gathering designed to set the House GOP agenda for the rest of the midterm year. With some Republican lawmakers privately concerned that the escalating conflict in Iran could overshadow the president’s domestic agenda, they’re looking to Trump for direction as they weigh another filibuster-circumventing megabill and wait for a request to Congress to pay for the war. Trump has also been pushing the GOP to pass the SAVE America Act, the voter ID and citizenship bill, which faces an uphill battle in the Senate. The Republican retreat comes as Trump is also targeting one of their own, iconoclastic Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Trump is scheduled to stop in his district on Wednesday, where he will appear with Massie’s primary challenger, Ed Gallrein, according to the Louisville Courier Journal.

— Nicholas Wu

Trump hinders own agenda over voting bill

Trump is complicating his own agenda by refusing to sign other bills until Congress passes the GOP’s federalizing ID and citizenship requirement for voting in elections. That’s a jolt to the senators in both parties working on a housing reform bill that’s now on the floor, which also includes a stab at the president’s priority of cutting down institutional investors buying up single-family homes. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s take: “So be it: There will be total gridlock in the Senate.” Of course, bills can still become law without Trump’s signature, so it’s an open question how far Trump will go to stop his own legislation while demanding Democrats use a talking filibuster if they want to stop the SAVE America Act. However, Republican leaders say that strategy does not have the party unity needed to pass the bill with 50 GOP votes.

— Burgess Everett

Why Democrats will wait on Gonzales

Democrats still want to punish Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, who admitted to an affair with an ex-staffer who later died by suicide, even though he dropped his reelection bid. But don’t expect them to force a vote on expelling him from Congress just yet, even though it would help them shrink House Speaker Mike Johnson’s razor-thin majority. Instead, keep an eye on whether Republicans move to boot indicted Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla. Democrats have brought retaliatory measures at times when Republicans move against them, and many in the party expect a similar tit-for-tat with Gonzales — that any expulsion effort would come only if the GOP strikes first against Cherfilus-McCormick. But of course, a Democratic lawmaker could still go rogue and force a Gonzales expulsion vote on their own.

— Nicholas Wu

Blindspot: Governors

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, curated with help from our partners at Ground News.

What the Left isn’t reading: Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have established a license plate honoring the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk following his murder last year. 

What the Right isn’t reading: California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom accused ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of sitting on $500 million in FEMA funding that was supposed to be directed towards Los Angeles wildfire recovery. 

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, will present possible budget cuts targeting “waste, fraud and abuse” at House Republicans’ annual retreat in Florida.

Axios: Israeli strikes on 30 Iranian fuel depots far exceeded what the US expected, triggering the first major disagreement between the allies since their war on Iran began.

Playbook: “Analysts are now expecting the price [of oil] to hit $150,” Politico’s oil and gas editor writes, “with some seeing $200 as a distinct possibility.”

WaPo: The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has yet to recover to its pre-2022 levels and even completely depleting it would not make up for a long-term disruption in the Strait of Hormuz.

Congress

• Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is retiring following California’s Democrat-friendly redistricting push.
• Fellow California Rep. Kevin Kiley, similarly affected, is now running as an independent.
• Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., wants Stephen Miller out of the Trump administration.

Outside the Beltway

• During a confrontation with anti-Islam demonstrators on Saturday in New York City, a counterprotester allegedly threw a homemade bomb outside Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s house.

Inside the Beltway

• Todd Inman, a Republican member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said he has been fired by the White House. — Reuters
• The Trump Organization filed trademark applications related to the country’s 250th birthday. — NOTUS

Polls

• Fifty-four percent of registered voters disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the situation in Iran, according to an NBC News poll.

Courts

• More than half of the 279 people that the Trump administration has accused of attacking federal immigration officers are US citizens; none of those charged with assault have been convicted. — WSJ

National Security

• Police are investigating an explosion outside the US embassy in Oslo, Norway.
• China is suspected of breaching an FBI computer network. — WSJ

Foreign Policy

• A US service member was killed during an attack in Saudi Arabia, the seventh American death since the Iran war began.
• US Tomahawk cruise missiles destroyed an Iranian girls school and killed 175 people, videos show, undercutting President Trump’s assertions that Iran itself was responsible.

• China signaled it still wants Trump’s visit to Beijing to move forward later this month despite the Iran war.

Media

• NOTUS founder Robert Allbritton is trying to poach The Washington Post’s remaining stars, Semafor’s Max Tani scooped.

Semafor DC Team

Edited by Morgan Chalfant, Washington briefing editor

With help from Elana Schor, senior Washington editor

Emily Ford, editor

Graph Massara and Marta Biino, copy editors

Contact our reporters:

Burgess Everett, Eleanor Mueller, Shelby Talcott, Nicholas Wu, David Weigel

Trump and Vice President Vance salute the remains of six soldiers killed in Kuwait. Fox News aired a clip of Trump at an earlier ceremony by mistake on Sunday, prompting an apology from the network.