SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We turn now to NPR's Ron Elving. Ron, thanks so much for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: President Trump this week cited what he called a substantial chance of negotiations with Iran when he announced that two-week time frame, but we just heard - as we just heard, missiles continue to fly. Are there any kind of talks going on?
ELVING: This sounds a lot like Trump's deadlines for trade negotiations, doesn't it? They start out firm but sometimes change. Of course, with trade, we do have the sense that there is some kind of back-and-forth going on with various countries, and it's understood that all parties want it to continue. With Iran and Israel, there isn't the same basic understanding. So everyone hopes the two are talking and the U.S. is helping it along.
As for the two weeks, it seems to be a time period Trump likes. He has set out a two-week deadline for different things in the past, and in this specific instance, two weeks would bring us to the Fourth of July weekend. So maybe that's part of his thinking here. That's one of the holidays he likes.
SIMON: So far, the most outspoken opposition to the idea of U.S. forces striking the Iranian nuclear program are within the president's own political movement. How does he respond to people who have been in his corner?
ELVING: Sometimes he responds very quickly to negative feedback on, say, Fox News or on social media or on podcasts. There's been a lot of talk this week about civil war in the MAGA nation, stories about Trump at odds with this podcaster or that. Other times, Trump just digs in. In this instance, he does seem sensitive to comparisons with the Iraq War that George W. Bush began in 2003 with a green light from Congress at that time. That was supposed to be about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And Trump said yesterday he personally never thought there were any such weapons in Iraq. At that time - but at that time, Trump was pretty savvy about what was going on, or at least he remembers himself that way.
In this Iran situation, it's entirely different, according to Trump, because we are talking about nuclear facilities no one doubts are quite real, and Iran has been working on uranium enrichment, and Trump thinks they are close to having a bomb. Although this is not a universal view, even within his own administration, as we know. Trump also does not like being reminded of those long troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has called them forever wars in the past. So today, he said he was not talking about sending troops.
SIMON: To domestic concerns, Senate Majority Leader John Thune wants to take up the president's - I'll call it the mega-spending tax-cut bill sometime next week. But there are deep divisions among Republicans, especially over Medicaid cuts. What are the chances that this could pass by the July 4 deadline that the president has set?
ELVING: You never want to say there is no chance, and it's still pretty likely they will get the bill to Trump's desk sooner or later, just not necessarily by the Fourth of July. And that's another two-week time clock ticking down. Without being cynical, a lot of this talk about the bill has a kind of Kabuki theater aspect about it - some very familiar characters in familiar roles, saying familiar things, and the kind of things that are often said at about this point in the process.
But that's not to say the senators you mentioned don't mean it. They do. They think the bill deepens the deficit and the national debt too much and that it has to change. And some other senators are very sincerely opposed to the kind of Medicaid cuts you mentioned that will make people and health care providers unhappy - back in their home states, especially. Meanwhile, you've got the House saying any big changes the Senate makes will not fly in their chamber. Yet the real crunch is still coming, and will these holdouts really vote against it in the end?
SIMON: Mahmoud Khalil spent more than three months in federal detention and yesterday evening was released on bail. He is the pro-Palestinian student protester in the U.S. on a green card who went to Columbia University. Does this represent a turning point in the Trump administration's crackdown on student protesters?
ELVING: It could be at least one turning point, depending on how this case plays out in the courts and whether the administration continues to go after campus protesters who have not committed any acts of violence. The court said that peaceful protests should not be a cause for deportation if someone is in the U.S. legally. It certainly would be a chilling effect on foreign students in general if the ruling had gone the other way. And in a related development, a federal court in Massachusetts said Friday that Harvard can go on enrolling students from other countries and Trump can't refuse to process their visas just because they're headed for Harvard.
SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving. Thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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