#trumpsballroom — Public Fediverse posts

Wild Wednesday Reads: The “President” Is Insane.

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday, Trump was at the UN, where he gave a speech that was so insane that the men in white coats should have gone onstage and put him in a straight jacket. I didn’t watch the whole thing, but the excerpts posted by Aaron Rupar and Acyn on social media were enough to let any normal person see that the “president” needs to be in an assisted living facility where he can be cared for and the rest of us can be protected from him.

Paul Krugman writes: It’s “Underwear on the Outside” Time.

In the 1971 comedy film Bananas a third-world nation’s strongman announces his new policies:

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.

Yesterday, addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, the president of the United States declared, among other things,

The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much, now here and after officially called superintelligence, changing the name. The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake … From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.

Trump’s Hitler arch

This came just two days after Trump announced that his planned gigantic Triumphal Arch overshadowing Washington DC will

house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.

Most reporting on Trump’s speech emphasized either his belligerence — his rejection of global cooperation — or the fact that almost everything he said was a lie. But isn’t the bigger story the fact that the leader of what used to be the world’s most powerful nation — I say “used to be” because America’s power is collapsing before our eyes — has clearly and undeniably lost his mind?

I’m by no means the only commentator to see parallels between Trump’s UN speech and the scene in Bananas. But comparing Trump to a fictional character is unfair — to the fictional character. After all, in Bananas the mad dictator is quickly removed from power. In America today, some Republicans are quietly distancing themselves from Trump. A few are even voicing subtle, elliptical criticisms. But will he be impeached, or face 25th Amendment proceedings? Not a chance.

Trump also threatened to “annihilate” Iran, with a description that could only refer to a nuclear strike.

Alex Nguyen at Mother Jones: Trump Threatens to “Annihilate” Iran and Its People in UN Address.

President Trump’s rambling, combative speech Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly saw him return to his most serious quagmire yet—the war in Iran—telling world leaders that he was considering completely destroying the country as a means to end the conflict he launched alongside Israel in February.

President Donald Trump addresses the opening of the United Nations General Assembly at its headquarters in New York City on September 22, 2026.Kyle Mazza, CNP, Zuma

“Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” Trump pondered aloud, claiming that Iran’s leadership had rejected multiple peace deals with the US.

He said little about the terms of those offers—and nothing about the US and Israel’s explosive role in the Middle East, from Iran and the Gulf to Gaza and beyond.

The Center for International Policy’s Matt Duss, a former Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) foreign policy adviser, said in a statement that Trump’s threats were “dangerously unhinged” and “must be unequivocally rejected.”

“Such rhetoric is not merely reckless, it is a criminal threat of genocide against an entire nation,” Duss wrote. “U.S. lawmakers and U.S. partners around the world should condemn Trump’s remarks.”

The president again framed his demand as centering on Iran’s nuclear program, despite offering up a shifting litany of goals and terms on which he’d end the war across the last seven months, and implied that scorched earth was the only alternative. But American operations in Iran have brought an uncompromising government to power, limited the Iranian president’s power to enforce any deal, and made nuclear containment on the level of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action virtually impossible for the indefinite future.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger at The New York Times (gift link): At the U.N., Trump Lays Out a Winner-Takes-All Vision of U.S. Power.

The podium of the United Nations was an unusual setting for the leader of a global superpower to threaten to “annihilate the Islamic republic” of Iran or to declare that, in another conflict, “to the victor belong the spoils.”

Yet that was exactly what President Trump did on Tuesday, in threatening Iran if it failed to make a deal to end a war that had stretched far longer than Mr. Trump anticipated, and justifying his claims on Venezuelan oil reserves after American forces deposed its leader.

Mr. Trump has long made clear that he has little use for the United Nations, one of the post-World War II institutions that he has dismissed as outdated and ineffective. But his speech at the annual opening of the General Assembly amounted to a pure American rejection of the concept behind the U.N.’s founding in 1945: to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

The global body’s charter, written largely by the United States, expressly prohibited members from threatening or using force against a country’s territorial integrity unless acting in self-defense, or with the U.N.’s authorization.

On Iran, Mr. Trump made it clear that he, and he alone, would decide whether to strike a deal with Tehran’s leaders or “annihilate the Islamic republic.”

It may have been largely a negotiating tactic. A little later in the morning, American officials quietly met with Iranians who were also in New York for the opening session, though it was unclear whether any progress was made or whether Mr. Trump himself would meet top Iranian officials.

But his threats were not limited to the war that has consumed his presidency for months since the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran. He promised that Cuba’s government would fall, one way or the other. And if his “to the victor belong the spoils” line seemed drawn from the days of American gunboat diplomacy more than a century ago, that did not seem to bother the president. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he is willing to use the power of the U.S. military not only for the benefit of securing critical resources, like Venezuela’s huge oil reserves, but also to turn a profit.

Mr. Trump’s comments came at a moment when he appeared more isolated than ever from traditional allies, and when Americans were telling pollsters they overwhelmingly disapproved of his foreign policy. But none of that seemed to lead Mr. Trump to back away from the fiery threats that he has combined with military action in his second term.

Of course the speech was also filled with blatant lies. At CNN, Daniel Dale published a detailed analysis: Fact check: Trump’s false claims to the United Nations. It’s well worth reading to see the extent of Trump’s battles with the truth.

Trump needs to be impeached or removed by means of the 25th Amendment, but neither of those things is going to happen. We just have to hope that the Democrats can win the House and Senate in the midterm elections.

More Trump insanity: his obsession with building his ballroom and triumphal arch and naming things after himself is out of control.

Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell at The Washington Post: ‘I am the code’: Trump clashed with ballroom architect over safety issues.

In the weeks leading up to his resignation last year, the first architect on the White House ballroom clashed with President Donald Trump over design features that the architect believed violated building safety codes, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions and corroborating documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

James McCrery II withdrew from the project last October after warning repeatedly that Trump was insisting on a preliminary design that did not provide adequate emergency exit routes or fire-containment measures, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

Trump brushed off McCrery’s concerns, they said, and the president countered that no building codes apply to White House construction.

“I am the code,” Trump said.

Current state of Trump’s ballroom

That episode, as described by the people familiar with the matter, offers new insight into Trump’s priorities for the ballroom at a time when he is flexing executive power to fast-track construction projects across the nation’s capital. The interviews and documents obtained by The Post — including early ballroom designs and images Trump appeared to have marked up with his trademark black-ink Sharpie — also show how deeply involved the president has been in the details of the project.

White House renovations and construction are typically handled by federal agencies required by law to comply with nationally recognized building safety standards to the “maximum extent feasible,” unless doing so would present a national security risk.

But Trump’s White House construction projects are being routed through the Executive Residence, a tiny office that is not a federal agency and is therefore exempt from rules governing agencies.

The District of Columbia government has no jurisdiction to enforce local building codes on federal property. The contractors hired to design and build the ballroom are responsible for adhering tosafety standards as they work nearly round-the-clock to meet Trump’s ambitious deadlines, according to experts.

Discussions about the safety issues in the ballroom’s design continued for months after McCrery resigned, according to White House records. It is not clear from the records reviewed by The Post whether the safety issues he identified have been resolved in more recent designs by Shalom Baranes Associates, the architecture firm that replaced McCrery’s firm late last year.

Trump started a war with Iran that has created a global financial emergency and set the Middle East on fire, yet he seems to spend most of his time obsessing on his building and naming projects and posting AI slop to Truth Social.

And get this. Brian Bennett, Laura Barrón-López and Jake Traylor write at MSNOW: Trump aides explore attaching president’s name to Ford’s Theatre.

As President Donald Trump fights to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, administration officials are circulating a list of government sites that could have his name affixed to them in some way, according to people familiar with the effort.

One landmark that has emerged in the discussions among administration officials has raised eyebrows: Ford’s Theatre, the playhouse where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

Washington D.C.

It is unclear how seriously the theater is being considered or how the administration would attach Trump’s name to it. One administration official said the idea had been discussed, but they didn’t know where it stood. The prospect sparked a flurry of discussion over the past week among people responsible for the historic site.

The discussions underscore how much of a priority honoring the president has become inside parts of the Trump administration — even as the Iran war nears its eighth month, diesel prices hit an all-time high, the midterm elections approach in six weeks and most Americans disapprove of the president’s job performance.

White House officials, advisers and allies pitch ideas such as naming buildings after Trump to get on the president’s good side, a former administration official told MS NOW, granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. The president’s view, the official said: “Why would I say no? Everybody’s trying to please me.”

“They know flattery gets them everything,” the former official said, adding that people wait to hear “How can I help you?” in return.

One person with knowledge of the broader renaming effort who requested anonymity to address a sensitive topic said officials were looking for buildings and other sites that could carry the president’s name while presenting an easier legal path than the Kennedy Center push.

And then there’s the reflecting pool, which is a complete mess at this point.

“The Swamp” at The Daily Beast: Devastating Photos Expose Horror of Trump’s Disaster Makeover.

Devastating photos taken by The Swamp reveal how D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is empty, fenced off, and looking like the world’s most expensive construction site.

In fact, it is a literal quagmire.

In recent days, President Trump’s algae-filled Reflecting Pool has generated a wave of viral memes, some of which include administration officials (AP)

Three weeks after a giant storm thwarted Trump’s already botched revamp, broken fencing, litter and other debris is still strewn around the pool, with one section of the fence even stuck together with miles of yellow police tape after nosy visitors started to get into the restricted repair zone. In recent days, The Swamp has also spotted workers removing blue sealant to fix the pool’s expansion joints, while rain (of which there will be plenty this week) continues to delay the renovation.

It’s hard to believe Trump started the project back in April, predicting it would be finished in “two weeks.”

Twenty weeks later, the White House still can’t say when it will be complete. At this rate, Christmas might be a good scenario—presumably as long as the weather doesn’t get worse.

And then there’s the awkward part: the contractor has admitted what Trump hasn’t—that problems with the renovation itself are what caused the liner to fail, not “evil, sick” vandals.

Head over to The Daily Beast to See the “devastating photos.”

Brendan Rascius has more on the reflecting pool disaster at The Independent: The internet is buzzing about Trump’s algae-struck Reflecting Pool.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has drawn nationwide attention after an algae bloom turned its waters a vivid green within days of President Donald Trump’s multi-million-dollar refurbishment, casting a shadow over a project intended to beautify the city.

Trump has attributed the discoloration and other problems at the basin to acts of vandalism, and authorities say six people have been arrested in connection to the site. Internal records, however, appear to undermine the president’s narrative.

As officials work to restore clarity, the episode has taken on a life of its own online.

The pool’s unexpected color change sparked a wave of viral memes, with social media users recasting the iconic landmark as everything from a swampy Star Wars set to a Bob Ross landscape.

Some also seized the moment to poke fun at administration officials, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his peculiar health regimen. Here is a look at some of the best floating around on social media.

Check out the memes at The Independent link.

Late last night, the DOJ filed the Trump administration’s response to the lawsuit by CNN, MSNOW, and Politico over Trump’s ban of their journalists from the White House grounds.

Eric Wemple explains the administration’s position at The New York Times (gift link): White House Says Access Is a ‘Privilege’ in Court Filing Defending Media Ban.

White House officials said in a court filing Tuesday that President Trump had determined that CNN, MS NOW and Politico had breached standards of conduct, leading to their expulsion from the White House grounds.

The alleged violations, said the filing, include “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information.”

White House press briefing room

“Access to the White House is a privilege — not a right,” reads the filing, which argues that Mr. Trump’s action against the three news outlets does not violate the First Amendment and aligns with a long history of presidents favoring some journalists over others.

The filing, furthermore, claims that the White House’s denial of access is a preliminary matter and that the outlets have until Friday to contest the decision.

The clash began last Friday, when Mr. Trump announced on Truth Social, the platform that he owns, that he would ban the three outlets, saying they “shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES.” On Saturday morning, journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were denied access to the White House grounds and had their press passes confiscated.

By Monday morning, the news organizations had sued, arguing that the president’s ban “brazenly discriminates based on editorial viewpoint,” and was an affront to their First Amendment rights. They said that the move had blindsided its targets, depriving the outlets of the warning that any such drastic action required. They “received zero advance notice that the president would ban a news organization from the White House if he dislikes its coverage,” according to the complaint.

U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who was nominated in 2017 by Mr. Trump, will hold an emergency hearing on Wednesday to consider the media outlets’ request for a temporary court order undoing the access ban.

The government filing Tuesday night included copies of letters sent earlier in the day to each banned news outlet. In addition to accusing the organizations of failing to meet standards of conduct, the letters identified specific stories that allegedly either spread falsehoods or threatened national security. The letter to CNN, for example, cited a January 2026 story that “disclosed ‘top-secret’ construction details related to the East Wing bunker,” the letter reads.

Use the gift to read more if you’re interested.

Ewan Palmer at The Daily Beast: Trump Admits Bonkers Diva Fit Reason He Banned Media.

The Trump administration has defended the president’s ban on CNN, Politico and MS NOW from covering the White House, claiming he did so over “national security” concerns.

In court filings submitted Tuesday, the Justice Department also argued that Trump should be allowed to pick and choose which media outlets get to cover the White House, and that the three outlets Trump has banned failed to live up to the levels of “professionalism and decorum expected.”

“After all, access to the White House is a privilege—not a right,” the filings state.

White House officials responded in court documents to a lawsuit filed Monday by CNN, MS NOW and Politico, which claim the president’s media ban violates their First Amendment rights. The organizations also said they received “zero advance notice” that the president would ban a news outlet over coverage he “dislikes.”

The White House argues the outlets lost their “privilege” of access after “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information.”

The DOJ also sent each outlet a letter citing the specific stories it was concerned about. These included CNN reporting on “top secret” information about the bunker being built under the White House ballroom, as well as several stories by the network about the Iran war.

Natalie Harp has been blamed for instigating the media ban. One more from The Daily Beast by Leigh Cummins: Natalie Harp, 35, Sticks Close to Trump After Media Ban Bombshell.

President Donald Trump’s devoted aide Natalie Harp isn’t shying away from the cameras after triggering an all-out war with the press.

Harp, 35, reportedly acted as the devil on her 80-year-old boss’s shoulder, feeding him negative coverage until he exploded onto Truth Social on Friday and declared that MS NOW, CNN, and Politico had been banned from the White House.

Finn Gomez, Getty Images

The fallout has been spectacular, with Trump returning to his social media profile to excoriate a reporter by name just before midnight on Tuesday. “All of the SLEAZEBAGS, like Third Rate ‘Reporter,’ Kaitlan Collins, of Fake News CNN, a truly unhappy person, said they weren’t going to be covering me. Then why were they ranting and raving like Lunatics, in the Press Area, at the why were they ranting and raving like Lunatics, in the Press Area, at the United Nations? Why was she there? She’s got a ‘TRUMP’ addiction, and so does CNN and MSDNC. They’re all sick, treasonous, and demented!” he raved in the unhinged post.

Despite the madness she reportedly helped cause, Harp has not shirked the limelight and has stuck to her boss’s side. Harp, officially Special Assistant to the President and Executive Assistant to the President, was seen marching into United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday, where Trump address fellow world leaders.

Harp, who has been in Trump’s orbit in varying roles since 2018, smiled broadly as her boss spoke. She sat with White House Communications Director Steven Cheung and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

That’s it for me today. I’ve had enough of Trump’s insanity for the time being. What other stories are you following?

Good thing #Trump and fiends bought #SCOTUS members years ago!

Secret #WhiteHouseBunker undercuts #TrumpsBallroom lawsuit, ex-officials say

Noah Robertson and Dan Diamond
Mon, August 24, 2026 at 2:50 PM EDT

"President Donald Trump has claimed that the White House needs a massive new ballroom because it would provide him and future presidents with a secure, hardened facility. But former officials say the argument fails to acknowledge that the presidential complex already has one.

"More than a decade ago, federal officials built a highly protected bunker, embedded deep underground, that can shelter the president and his top aides in a national security emergency, according to three former officials.

"The facility, which was secretly completed during the Obama administration, can house dozens of people for up to multiple weeks, two former officials said. It's buried more than 60 feet underneath the White House complex and built to withstand a nuclear blast, two of the officials said, ensuring the president and his team have a secure command center to run the country in times of extreme duress.

"The bunker's existence, the former officials said, undercuts the Trump administration's emerging legal argument in the ongoing lawsuit over the $600 million ballroom complex's construction: that the facility must be completed due to its significance for U.S. national security.

"The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss elements of the secretive facility, some of which have not been previously reported.

"The Washington Post is withholding some details of the bunker and its construction in order to not compromise sensitive White House security protocols."

Read more:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/secret-white-house-bunker-undercuts-trumps-ballroom-lawsuit-ex-officials-say-225535312.html

#USPol #WasteOfTaxpayerFunds #TrumpBallroom #UnderneathTheBunker #TrumpSucks #SCOTUSIsCompromised #ImpeachTrump #ImpeachJusticeThomas #ImpeachJusticeAlito

Lazy Caturday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

Midday, by Xi Pan

The disastrous floods in Nepal have been dominating the news for the past few days. This is a tragic story that has implications for all of us, because of what it tells us about the effects of global warming. Meanwhile, Trump promotes fossil fuels and tries to stop the development of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar.

Britt Clennett, Karson Yiu, and Ivan Pereira ABC News: ‘It stood like a serpent right there staring at us’: American who survived deadly Nepal flood tells her story.

KATHMANDU, NEPAL — Anjana Raja had long dreamed of traveling to Nepal as part of a spiritual journey to Mount Kailash ever since she was a teenager, she said.

When she and her husband finally got to make that dream a reality this month, the California mom of two told ABC News she could not have imagined that trip would force them into survival mode as they found themselves nearly swept up in the deadly landslide flood that hit the region Wednesday.

Raja recalled sitting on a bus with her husband traveling to the Chinese border on Wednesday when, all of a sudden, the driver and front passengers fled the bus and she saw the landslide coming toward their vehicle.

“It was water mixed with the mud that was a good 50 to 60 feet high. It stood like a serpent right there staring at us,” Raja told ABC News. “Like a cobra’s head staring at you.”

Raja said she didn’t hesitate and grabbed her sling bag and turned to her husband, Pattabiraman Venkatesan.

“I grabbed him by the collar, and I said, ‘Run, we need to go right now,'” she said.

“I didn’t even give time to act. I just said, ‘Leave the bus right away or we’re gonna die,'” Raja added….

Faced with the huge wall of water and mud, the couple and other bus passengers ran to a camp right next to the bus and made their way to higher ground as the water hit and completely flooded the streets, she said.

“We just blindly…climbed. We didn’t even know what direction … There was no guide for us, there was nobody, we were just frantically running. Running, literally running. It was slushy, it was muddy, we were climbing rocks, which was slippery. We just ran for our life,” she said.

“When we reached the second level … I saw the water come up to the slope and move our bus. I told my husband ‘That’s it, we’re gone. We’re going to die,'” she said.

They ultimately made their way up to the third level of the camp and they watched in shock as the wall of water rushed past them.

From their point they could see vehicles, objects and even people be taken in by the water’s power, although the water never reached their level.

“It just came like a roar, it sucked a bunch of buses, SUVs, people, the basecamp, everything — took it in, turned it, turned it all upside down and dumped it into the ground,” Raja said.

That’s a vivid and terrifying description. There’s more at the ABC link.

Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Gourav Pokharel at The Guardian: ‘Their whole village has disappeared’: frantic hunt for survivors in Kathmandu hospital.

Posters of missing people line the wall of the hospital, the glue still fresh beneath. A schoolgirl smiling in her uniform; a beaming, chubby-cheeked baby; a couple smiling on their wedding day; a young man, hands on hips, atop a mountain peak; a young girl with flowing hair, peaking out from behind a door.

These faces are just a fraction of the thousands who have not been seen since deadly flash floods coursed through the Himalayas and wiped away entire villages. By Saturday morning, the toll of the missing had risen to almost 3,000, in both Nepal and Tibet.

Woman with a cat, by Lina Rivo

So far, Nepal has recovered 669 bodies, but many remote areas have only been accessed by army helicopters on the hunt for survivors. Rescuers said it was too difficult to assess how many more people might be buried beneath the mud….

The task of identifying the dead is also gargantuan.

In the Nepalese city of Chitwan, the morgues have been overrun by the sheer number of bodies and a makeshift building has been set up to house the dead.

Some of the bodies were carried so far down the river by the force of the floods, they were recovered in neighbouring India.

At Tribhuvan University teaching hospital in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, desperate relatives gathered in the hope of news. Four days on since the disaster struck, people continued to crowd round the police desk to register the names of missing family members. Hundreds of the injured are recovering in the hospital’s wards and people were frantically checking lists of patients, desperate to find a sign that their loved ones were still alive.

In the absence of information and with affected areas almost completely cut off, many families have resorted to making posters to appeal for information. Yavraj Lama said his sister, her husband and their two children were missing after their village of Jaydada, in Rusawa district, had been entirely washed away.

His eyes filled with tears as he glued a photo of one-year-old Sijan Tawang, a baby in the arms of his mother, to the hospital wall. A picture of 12-year-old Sahil, his brother, hung next to it.

“We are numb, we don’t have words to say how sad and distraught we are,” said Lama. “Our main focus is trying to find baby Sijan. He was so sweet and innocent; it’s impossible for us to think he is not with us any more.

“But their whole village has disappeared,” he added, “so we have no hope left that any of them survived.”

What caused this terrible tragedy? Stuti Mishra & Maryam Zakir-Hussain at The Independent: What triggered Nepal flash floods? And why are experts worried a second flood is ‘imminent’?

The Himalayan flash floods that killed at least 675 people and left over 3,000 missing across Nepal and Tibet were not triggered by an earthquake, contrary to initial reports, but by a glacier collapse so violent that it produced its own seismic signal, the United States Geological Survey said.

The agency initially recorded a magnitude 4.4 earthquake along the Nepal-China border, north of Kathmandu, at about 8.37am local time on Wednesday, before revising its assessment in a statement issued that evening.

It said the seismic signal had come from “a glacial collapse and debris flow” rather than a tectonic quake, and that the collapse alone had caused the catastrophic flooding downstream. Once reclassified, the event registered at magnitude 5.2, a measure of the force of the ice and rock striking the valley floor rather than of any movement underground.

An initial study of satellite imagery from Planet Labs showed a large section of the lower end of a glacier breaking away at an altitude of about 5,200m and falling roughly 1,200m onto the valley floor, gathering rock and debris as it went.

By Bobbie Russon, British artist

The resulting avalanche struck the Lhende river in Tibet, about 20km northeast of the Rasuwagadhi border crossing with Nepal, temporarily damming the water before the barrier gave way and released a powerful flood downstream.

The surge fed into the Bhote Koshi river and crossed into Nepal at around 9am local time, then continued into the Trishuli river, where water levels rose by as much as nine metres in just half an hour.

Officials were caught off guard because there had been no rain, according to local news reports, and some residents ignored early warnings from neighbours precisely because the danger did not resemble the monsoon flooding they were used to.

On fears it could happen again:

Why are experts worried a second flood is coming?

Both Nepal and China have issued warnings about fresh flooding in the Himalayas as two lakes that have developed on either side of their border threaten to burst.

Experts were assessing whether debris from the flood had temporarily blocked Nepal’s Trishuli river at a narrow section, forming a landslide dam, the Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said.

Such a blockage can create a secondary hazard if impounded water is suddenly released.

“With a blockage still lodged upstream on the Nepal-China border, authorities warn a second flood is imminent,” Qianggong Zhang, head of climate and environmental risks at ICIMOD, said.

He added that evacuation orders were in place for Jilong Port along the border based on the risk of a second wave of flooding.

Let’s face it. We are not doing enough to deal with climate change. Nicholas Riccardi, Jennifer McDermott, and Leah Willingham at AP: The Earth is sizzling, but climate isn’t a hot topic for Democrats in this year’s campaigns.

BOSTON (AP) — Climate change has been the backdrop to Charles Hughes’ entire life, from kindergarten lessons about disappearing habitats to wildfire smoke billowing through the air he breathed while growing up in Colorado. But now that he’s a college student in Massachusetts, he said global warming is rarely a top issue.

“Honestly, it doesn’t come up as much,” said Hughes, who chairs the state’s chapter of the College Democrats.

What a difference six years makes.

Willem den Ouden (NL 1928) Ferry with cat, 1964

During President Donald Trump’s first term and especially during the Democratic primaries to determine who would run against him in 2020, Democrats spoke constantly about climate change. They used it to rally young voters such as Hughes, fueling protests and sweeping demands to remake the economy with proposals like the Green New Deal.

But there has been a national shift in the conversation that is sharp enough for some researchers to coin the term “climate hushing” to describe it. The Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank, urged the party to stop mentioning climate change because it is not a priority for voters. The Sunrise Movement, a left-wing group that pushed global warming as a top issue for young people, switched its mission last fall to a broader mandate of fighting the Republican president.

The shift is encapsulated by the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts on Tuesday as the incumbent, Ed Markey, 80, tries to fend off a challenge from U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, 47. Although Markey still talks about sponsoring the Green New Deal, his campaign is more focused on other issues to burnish his left-wing bona fides and prove to voters that he is not too old for the job.

It is the latest example of how climate change has been eclipsed by issues such as affordability, U.S. support for Israel and, above all, how to confront Trump.

“Six years ago, Green New Deal was every phrase out of Ed Markey’s mouth every chance he got. That is not the case now,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a veteran Democratic strategist in Massachusetts. “It’s about who’s best to fight. Period, full stop. Everything falls under that.”

Because we’re stuck with an insane authoritarian thug in the White House and that’s a more immediate emergency. There’s more at the link.

Our focus lately has been on Trump and the damage he is doing to democracy as well as his obsessive efforts to remake Washington DC in his own image.

Thanks to JJ for a heads up on this truly tragic story by Rick Maese at The Washington Post (gift link): Trees are coming down by the dozen as Trump’s D.C. golf makeover nears.

Across East Potomac Golf Links, amid golfers squeezing in late-summer rounds and wondering what will become of the beloved D.C. course, newly cut stumps and bare patches of dirt mark the places where dozens of trees recently stood.

The Trump administration’s promised overhaul of the course has not officially begun. The trees, however, have been coming down for weeks.

Woman and Cat Stretching, after Edouard Manet’s Woman With A Cat of 1880, Holly Frean

President Donald Trump said June 28 that work on the historical public golf facility would begin Sept. 1, but days before that date, his administration has released no final design, construction schedule or estimated cost. Officials have not said whether the course will close next week, what work might begin, or what golfers and other visitors to the national parkland should expect.

An informal count Thursday found that more than 60 trees appeared to have been removed in recent weeks. Many were around the perimeter and parking lot, but others had been removed from playing corridors on the Blue, Red and White courses.

Among the most conspicuous was a cherry tree near the 14th green of the Blue Course, one of East Potomac’s most picturesque holes, framed by cherry trees near the southern end of Hains Point. Nearby, two large sycamores had been removed around the fourth hole.

Tree removal is common in major golf course renovations, often to widen playing corridors, improve sight lines, and allow more sunlight and air to reach the turf. But the Interior Department characterized the activity as routine maintenance and did not connect it to the proposed redesign, nor did it answer questions about whether notice of the work had been provided to the federal court overseeing a legal challenge to the administration’s plans.

Naturally, Trump just ignored instructions from the judge in the case.

During a May hearing in the lawsuit, brought by preservationists seeking to block the course overhaul, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes declined to stop the government from performing necessary maintenance but warned administration lawyers against presenting the court with a fait accompli. She said she wanted advance notice before the government removed more than 10 trees or brought equipment larger than a sedan onto the property.

That direction was delivered orally and was not included in a formal written order. A person familiar with the legal proceedings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said the government has not notified the plaintiffs or the court about the recent tree work.

Use the gift link to read the rest, if you’re interested.

And then there’s Trump’s ugly ballroom construction. Naturally, he lied to the Supreme Court justices about it.

Sarah Blaskey, Jonathan O’Connell, Dan Diamond, and Jarrett Ley at The Washington Post: The White House says its ballroom is 65% complete. Its documents suggest otherwise.

The Trump administration told the Supreme Court two weeks ago that construction of a new White House East Wing was “65% finished,” part of its argument that the work was too far along for the court to halt.

But by the White House’s own standard for measuring the project’s progress, established in a confidential agreement with contractor Clark Construction that was reviewed by The Washington Post, work on the controversial project was far less complete.

Barbara Perrine Chu

The agreement, finalized before Clark began demolition last October, stipulates that payments to the contractor be proportional to the amount of work completed, and that work cannot begin until the government approves spending for it. Based on that, if 65 percent of the work has been done, then the government should already have paid 65 percent of the total cost of the project.

Publicly available appropriations data shows that as of the end of July, the White House budget office had approved $144 million in spending from an account used to pay for the East Wing and other White House projects. Even if that entire amount were spent on the East Wing, it would come to only about 24 percent of the $600 million estimated construction cost that Clark provided the White House in March. The Post has previously reported that cost estimate.

In the same mid-August court filing in which the administration claimed 65 percent of the project was done, it said that it had already spent “around $200 million.”

If the government had spent $200 million on the East Wing project, the work would be just 33 percent complete, based on the $600 million budget estimate….

The 65 percent claim was made in a sworn declarationby Joshua Fisher, the director for White House Management and Administration, who is overseeing the construction project. In the declaration, Fisher did not explain how the percentage was calculated but said, “Work has progressed too far to go back to the drawing board.”

His assertion came as the administration asked the Supreme Court to allow work on the ballroom to continue after lower courts ruled that the project was probably illegal without congressional approval and that construction must stop. The administration argued in part that stopping work while courts considered the merits of the case brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation would cause “chaos in service of nothing” because the project had already progressed “beyond the point of judicial intervention.”

Just looking at photos of the mess Trump has made at the White House, it sure doesn’t look like the project is 65 percent done. Trump lied. So what else is new?

An then there’s the Trump arch. At NOTUS, Marissa Martinez reports: National Park Service Green-Lights Trump’s Arch.

The National Park Service released a report Friday in support of President Donald Trump’s proposed arch, while acknowledging the adverse effects the new monument could have on the district’s most iconic memorials and landmarks.

The arch project is part of Trump’s push to reshape D.C. in his image by leaving a visible mark on the nation’s capital. Critics of the arch and Trump’s other beautification initiatives have argued that the renovations obstruct the district’s sightline — concerns validated throughout the agency’s report — while Democratic lawmakers say the president is bypassing necessary congressional approval to proceed with construction.

NPS’ review was mandated by the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires agencies to evaluate how proposed new construction could directly or adversely affect any nearby landmarks and provide solutions to minimize future harm.

The proposed 250-foot arch will be located at Memorial Circle, near Arlington National Cemetery, and the agency analyzed the surrounding 3.5-mile radius as part of its study. The 133-page report says its construction will likely disturb dozens of historic sites in the area, including the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall.

The monument will adversely affect six out of 31 National Historic Landmarks in the proposed area, including the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon — though the effects will mostly stem from altered sightlines and plans to light the area at night, rather than physical damage, the report noted.

While the panel acknowledged the “sensitive” nature of building an arch in the Memorial Circle landscape, the area’s significance makes it an “historically appropriate location” to build, the agency wrote.

This is all so sickening. Trump is acting like a tin-pot dictator. And here’s more proof. Normal presidents don’t kidnap a country’s leader and then strong-arm the new government into giving up the country’s natural resources.

Rebecca F. Elliott, Simon Romero, and Edward Wong at the New York Times (gift link): Trump Says U.S. Has Deal for Control of Large Share of Venezuela’s Oil.

President Trump said late Friday that the United States had struck a deal to take majority control of a huge portion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, pointing to a sweeping effort to assert U.S. dominance over energy in the Western Hemisphere.

Gertie Young, Hanging About

The agreement amounts to a highly unusual foray into another country’s oil fields through a partnership with a private company, the State Department said through a U.S. official.

That firm is affiliated with a Venezuelan businessman, Alejandro Betancourt López, according to two people familiar with the partnership.

The deal would give the United States control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, Mr. Trump said in a social media post. That is almost as much as all of the proven reserves in the United States, which is the world’s biggest oil producer.

Venezuela’s president, Delcy Rodríguez, said the “historic” agreement would involve developing 17 oil fields and have a “significant impact on our nation’s revival.”

The aim of the deal, Ms. Rodríguez said, is “putting our immense reserves at the service of national development.” It would draw more than $100 billion of investment, she said, and generate an estimated $209 billion for Venezuela’s strapped government, which has been struggling to improve living conditions after earthquakes in June left more than 6,500 people dead.

Details were sparse, however, and the text of the agreement was not immediately available. Mr. Betancourt did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the State Department did not respond to questions about Mr. Betancourt’s potential role in the arrangement.

Inside Venezuela, Mr. Betancourt is often called a “bolichico” or “Bolivarian boy” — a term used to refer to Venezuelan businessman who are favored by the government, and who have profited immensely during the country’s socialist revolution. (The government named the revolution for the country’s independence hero Simón Bolivar.)

A bit more:

Previous U.S. leaders often shied away from any suggestion that gaining sway over another country’s natural resources was a primary objective of U.S. military and foreign policy, wary of the international backlash, doubts over the legality of doing so and the potential for such moves to generate security threats against the United States.

But Mr. Trump and some of his top advisers have made it clear that oil is an important part of their foray into Venezuela.

Even before the removal of Mr. Maduro, American officials bluntly claimed that the United States had created Venezuela’s oil industry and that the country’s government had effectively stolen U.S. oil fields through nationalizations.

Trump is a gangster and a thug. We have to get rid of him.

Those are my recommended reads for today. What are your thoughts? What else is on your mind?

Wednesday Reads: Natalie Harp and Other News

Good Afternoon!!

Over the past couple of days, Trump’s close companion, Natalie Harp, has suddenly become one of the top news stories in the U.S. She is even getting news coverage in the UK and Ireland.

Although she has been extremely close to Trump since his exile to Mar-a-Lago after he lost the 2020 election, she has probably only been on the radar of politics junkies like me until now.

Natalie suddenly began getting more widely noticed after she was one of 3 aides recently chosen to ride with Trump in a catering vehicle that took them to a military plane to fly them out of Turkey after the Secret Service received warnings about a possible assassination threat against Trump from Iran. Trump’s cabinet members, top aides, and the media pool were relegated to a decoy plane. I wrote about all this in my post last Wednesday.

Now, Natalie has become front page news, thanks to a throw-away remark from Sen. Jon Ossoff and an oval office meltdown from Trump. As a side-effect, Ossoff is also getting plenty of attention.

Ossoff says that Trump doesn’t want to do his job but wants to “travel with Natalie”

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-16T22:23:50.397Z

Heather Schwedel at Slate: Natalie Harp—and Who Is She, Anyway? Unfortunately, I’ve Learned Too Much.

On Sunday, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff said something that seems to have truly pissed off Trumpworld: He gave a speech in which he dared to mention a woman in the Trump orbit named Natalie—just Natalie, no last name given.

Speaking at a campaign event—he is up for reelection in November—Ossoff said the following about Trump to a crowd: “While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks.” He went on: “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

Who is this Natalie that Trump wants to—pause for a full-body shudder—travel with? It’s not anything so obvious as an affair, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s somehow worse. Natalie is Natalie Harp, but she’s better known as Trump’s so-called “human printer.” As an executive assistant in the White House, she follows him around with a wireless printer, supplying him with a steady flow of articles and memes about him for him to take in….Harp also sometimes posts for Trump on social media; people on his team have in fact blamed her for some of his very worst, most racist posts. She makes a salary of $150,000 doing this, by the way.

Harp has been part of Trump’s staff, and been reported on in media outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, for a while now. After a stint as an anchor at One America News Network, she joined Trump’s team in 2022, when she first earned the “human printer” nickname. As that epithet might imply, she is not exactly beloved among the rest of Trump’s staff. It has been reported that those employees have tried and failed numerous times to push her out, worrying that she is a danger to herself and the president. The deal seems to be that she’s so scarily devoted to Trump that she worries her colleagues, which is saying something. But scary levels of devotion, it perhaps unsurprisingly turns out, are a register that really works for our president, and all this has paradoxically ensured her continued employment in the White House. Maybe all it takes to achieve job security in this admin is to do what Harp did and write creepy letters to Trump in which you refer to him as your “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

If all this is public knowledge and has been for some time, one wonders why members of Trumpworld were so rattled by Ossoff’s mention of Natalie. And they were rattled: White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote a post in response that began, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” Another White House staffer called Ossoff a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama.” Trump also snapped at a reporter who asked about the remarks.

The reporter was CNN’s Kristin Holmes, and Trump did more than snap at her.

Trump: "Quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet. You're very disrespectful in front of this young man, OK? Don't you find her disrespectful? He understands. Quiet. Who are you with? Reporter: "I'm with CNN." Trump: "Fake news…Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet. You're a fake reporter, and you report fake news."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-08-17T18:12:44.440Z

Scott Nover at The Washington Post: White House attacks CNN reporter after Trump clash, invoking her children.

The White House on Monday leveled a sharply personal attack against CNN reporter Kristen Holmes after she asked President Donald Trump a pointed question during a news conference, crossing a barrier rarely breached by politicians to invoke her children.

“Jon Ossoff said you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president,” Holmes said. “What is your response?”

President Donald Trump told CNN correspondent Kristen Holmes in the Oval Office, Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet. You’re a fake reporter, and you report fake news. Andrew Harnik, Getty Images

Trump answered Holmes’s question with an insult to Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia), whom he called a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike,” referring to the Paul Reubens character.

Then the White House’s “rapid response” account on X took up the altercation, posting a video clip of the exchange and assailing Holmes as a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”

In a follow-up tweet, the account dipped into a more personal line of attack: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” the White House wrote. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times (gift article): ‘With All My Heart, Natalie.’ Trump’s Most Devoted Aide Emerges.

She never takes a day off, not even on Sunday. She works out of the Oval Office and she’s got a regular seat on Marine One. She texts with world leaders on the president’s behalf. She stays up late with him drafting social media posts.

She rarely speaks on camera and yet she is never not there, ever-present with a wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president.

President Donald Trump looks on as Natalie Harp, an aide, places a computer playing a news report about the stock market during a press conference in the Oval Office at the White House May 30, 2025. Francis ChungPo

She is Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old West Wing aide who is the utmost gatekeeper to President Trump, a one-woman conduit of information operating entirely outside the usual chain of command. The public’s interest in Ms. Harp exploded after she was revealed last week to be one of the lucky few who joined the president inside an airplane catering container to be whisked out of Turkey under threat of attack by Iran….

The unique power Mr. Trump affords her says much about how he functions as president.

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.

She is a platinum blonde geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets rough. She believes, or at least vehemently claims to believe, that he totally won the 2020 election. In the book “Regime Change,” by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump is described as explaining to people that Ms. Harp is the only one who loves him as much as his wife and children. All his other staff will go off and make money, Mr. Trump would say, but Ms. Harp will never leave him….

In some ways, Ms. Harp is filling a role that Mr. Trump has always required, going back to his days as a real estate developer in Manhattan. Back then, there were always secretaries sitting outside his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, ready at a moment’s notice to hop to it. He referred to these women as “the girls.”

Ms. Harp collects a taxpayer-funded salary of $150,000. Her double-barreled title is special assistant to the president and executive assistant to the president. At work she can be a bit of a loner. Even in this West Wing, in which loyalty to the president seems to know no bounds, Ms. Harp’s displays of devotion have unnerved some of her colleagues.

Several videos shared with The Times show Ms. Harp sprinting across great distances to keep up with Mr. Trump’s golf cart as it putters across his course in Scotland. “I also am sorry if I was an embarrassment walking the course in Scotland,” she wrote in a letter to the president that was viewed by The Times.

The letter goes on to say: “I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time).”

The letter concludes: “With all my heart, Natalie.”

Use the gift link to read more, if you wish.

NYT reporter Maggie Haberman recently referred Harp as Trump’s “binky.”

One more report on Harp’s weird attachment to Trump from Kristen Holmes and Adam Cancryn at CNN: Meet Natalie Harp, the aide so close to Trump she once rode in an SUV trunk to accompany him.

Natalie Harp wouldn’t take no for an answer.

It was October 2023, and Donald Trump was due at a New York City courthouse to fight his latest set of legal troubles. But as the motorcade idled outside his Trump Tower residence, staffers confronted a more immediate problem: There wasn’t room for Harp, the hyper-loyal aide whose devotion to Trump had quickly entrenched her within his orbit.

A screaming match in the lobby ensued, with Harp insisting that Trump had personally asked her to attend the court appearance, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Denied a seat but determined not to be left behind, Harp jumped into an SUV trunk, according to the two sources and confirmed by a photo obtained by CNN.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, served as an encapsulation of the role Harp has carved out in recent years as a constant and intensely dedicated presence at Trump’s side. Her methods have irked senior aides and at times prompted efforts to box her out of the president’s inner circle, according to multiple sources who described the dynamic to CNN.

A former right-wing television host, who began working for Trump after crediting him with saving her life, Harp has become a main conduit between the president and the outside world, passing along messages from allies and setting up meetings, tapping out Truth Social posts and toting printouts of laudatory articles, all while staying in close physical proximity at all hours of the day.

“[Trump] likes the attention and the fact that she is 100% committed and loyal,” one White House adviser told CNN. “She doesn’t second guess, doesn’t question.” [….]

Harp’s rapid rise within Trump world has stood out in large part because of the intensity of her dedication to the president since joining his staff in 2022. Despite having no formal title on Trump’s reelection campaign, Harp trailed him across the country, feeding him positive stories, social media posts and other correspondence so frequently that allies dubbed her the “human printer.”

Illustrating how she’s become indispensable to Trump, one Republican lawmaker noted that while they occasionally reach out to the president directly, they always make sure Harp is aware.

“She always responds. I don’t know how she manages it all,” the source said, adding that in addition to relaying messages to Trump, Harp often personally sends lawmakers articles or notes on the president’s behalf.

There’s quite a bit more at the CNN link.

So… is this just a silly story that doesn’t deserve so much attention? I don’t think so. this women is closer to Trump than his chief of staff Susie Wiles. She is with him at all times, even on the golf course and late at night when she’s helping him post on Truth Social. She even went with him to a dignified transfer of fallen troops. It’s about time she had the spotlight on her and whatever she’s up to.

At The Cross Section, Paul Waldman writes: Yes, We Absolutely Should Talk About Natalie Harp.

Until now, Natalie Harp was known only to Washington insiders and people weird enough to read insidery books about the administration. But Harp has officially escaped containment.

She is about to be a full-fledged character in the dramedy of the Trump White House, discussed in the news and recognized by ordinary people. And while the White House and its allies are pretending to be outraged about that fact, it’s completely appropriate and long overdue. There is literally no single person who spends as much time at the side of the president of the United States as her; the idea that it should somehow be off-limits to discuss her role is bonkers….

Waldman recounts Jon Ossoff’s comments and notes the episode in Turkey when Harp accompanied Trump and two other aides in a catering truck.

Harp, whose job seems to consist of 1) following Trump around with a portable printer so she can produce paper copies of articles that praise him, tweets that praise him, and anything else that praises him, making him feel that everything is going great and everyone loves him, which has led her to be dubbed the “Human Printer”; and 2) typing up the Truth Social posts he dictates.

Harp with Trump on the golf course.

If there’s more to her job than that, it’s basically to make Trump feel good at all times; she’s his emotional support aide. Those occasional cabinet meetings in which everyone tells Trump how blessed and honored they are to be working in his service aren’t enough; he needs that validation on 24-7 IV drip, and that’s what Natalie Harp provides.

She’s with Trump whether he’s in the White House, travelling to a foreign country, or golfing at one of his clubs, a proximity that has apparently caused a good deal of unease among his other staffers. As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report in their book Regime Change, “Trump had taken to telling his staff that Natalie (or ‘Nathalie,’ as he would call her, using a French pronunciation) was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids. ‘All of you will go off and make money,’ he would say. ‘She’ll never leave me.’”

Harp is neither a Svengali nor a Rasputin, but in this White House, she’s an incredibly important figure. She is the most important channel through which he receives and distributes information, and because Trump is impulsive, mercurial, and has the emotional regulation of a toddler, the person most responsible for determining his psychological state is central to the work of the administration.

Read the rest at the link. It’s pretty scary that this obviously troubled young women has so much power in the Trump White House.

Meanwhile, Trump supposedly has a First Lady, but she seems to have disappeared. I wonder how Melania feels about Natalie?

Annabella Rosciglione at The Daily Beast: Melania Trump’s Vanishing Act Hits Stunning New Milestone.

First lady Melania Trump has not been seen in exactly one month, marking one of the longest stretches that she has been absent from the public eye in her husband’s second term.

Melania, 56, was last seen at her husband President Donald Trump’s side as they attended the FIFA World Cup Final in New Jersey on July 19, one month ago. She has not been seen in public since that outing, a Daily Beast analysis can reveal.

So far, she has been seen in public on just 38 days this year. The first lady has shown her face at an average rate of once every six days in 2026.

In the last month, there have been several high-profile events that she did not attend with her husband. She did not accompany him to the dignified transfer of U.S. soldiers killed by Iran on July 22, nor the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner on July 24. She also did not attend the funeral for Sen. Lindsey Graham on July 28.

In August, she did not appear to accompany her husband to any of his leisure activities either, including his back-to-back weekends spent golfing at his Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey.

Her absence in the last four weeks comes as the Daily Beast’s analysis has additionally found that her public appearances have shrunk significantly this summer. She appeared in public just five times in June and July, two of which were to attend sporting events, which works out to one appearance approximately every 12 days.

A few interesting non-Natalie stories:

Luke Broadwater and Ann E. Marimow at The New York Times (gift article): Trump’s Ballroom Is Rising at Breakneck Speed: 20 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week.

With the fate of his ballroom tied up in court, President Trump is racing against the clock.

He has enlisted a team of 250 workers to push ahead with construction 20 hours a day, seven days a week to complete as much work as quickly as possible. This week, there are plans to install one million pounds of rebar and pour 3,000 cubic yards of concrete for a project that is now two-thirds complete, the administration said in a court filing.

Trump’s ballroom under construction

Now, with the matter pending before the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is making a practical appeal to the justices: The ballroom is simply too far along to be stopped now.

“His strategy clearly is to change the reality on the ground so that instead of preserving the status quo, those who rightly invoke the law against what he’s doing are put in a position of having to undo something that is already a fait accompli,” said Laurence H. Tribe, an emeritus university professor of constitutional law at Harvard.

For years, Mr. Trump has argued that the White House should have its own ballroom, saying it was a matter of prestige on the world stage. A ballroom, he said, would allow officials to hold big events for special guests without needing to erect a tent on the South Lawn.

In recent months, as preservationists and other critics have tried to halt or at least slow down the project, Mr. Trump has offered a new justification: national security. Essentially, Mr. Trump is treating the ballroom and the military bunker underneath it as one and the same.

The bunker — officially known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC — was built during World War II beneath what was once the East Wing, which Mr. Trump tore down last year to make way for his ballroom.

Now, he speaks about the two projects in the same breath.

Read more using the gift link, if you’re interested.

Jeff Stein at NOTUS: Nearly Half of Trump’s Treasury Appointees Have Left.

The Treasury Department has seen a dramatic exodus of President Donald Trump’s own appointees, outpacing the turnover of any other recent administration.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, seven of 16 Treasury appointees confirmed by the Senate — or roughly 44% — have either quit or been pushed out of their positions, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan watchdog. That does not account for the turnover in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s office; he has had at least three different chiefs of staff since the beginning of the administration.

At least four of the seven top Treasury officials left after disagreements with the White House over demands to stretch, if not violate, tax law. Those disputes included Treasury resistance to a controversial push to use taxpayer data as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown, as well as the president’s push to establish a $1.8 billion fund to compensate allies as part of a deal with the IRS to drop any past or future tax audits of the president and his family. (The “anti-weaponization” fund was later dropped due to resistance from Senate Republicans.)

“They’re asking them to do stuff that is well beyond the norm, and for some things that may or may not be legal,” said Mark Mazur, who held senior positions at the IRS under both parties and was acting assistant secretary for tax policy in Biden’s Treasury Department. “A lot of these people expect to have a career after this administration, and being disbarred would be a bad thing for them.”

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Secret Police Spying on Americans? It’s Darker than We Knew.

It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict.

We just learned about the broad outlines of this domestic surveillance from newly released court papers related to the ongoing prosecution of a handful of protesters. As The New York Times reported, the papers show that DHS began surveilling left-leaning groups—including a union, a climate change group, and others—after ICE killed Alex Pretti in January. This has entailed seeking financial records and infiltrating protest meetings that are protected by the First Amendment.

But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution and are available on Pacer—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.

It’s jarring, revealing stuff. The reports show that covert agents surreptitiously attended well over a dozen protest meetings organized by groups like the Sunrise Movement and various small socialist organizations. In some cases the agents secretly recorded the gatherings.

Read more TNR.

Friday Reads: Trump Is Not a Manly Man. Manly Men are Not Obsessed With Redecorating

Good Morning!!

It’s Friday, and I’m filling in for Dakinikat. I had another one of my sleepless nights last night, so please forgive me if this post is a little weird.

I know this isn’t politically correct, but I’ve always thought that Trump was a bit effeminate–in his looks and his behavior. How many “manly men” are obsessed with interior decoration even in the middle of a war?

Not to mention that he’s in an apparently loveless marriage. His wife doesn’t sleep with him or even live with him, and reportedly has to be paid to appear in public with him. Maybe Melania is just a beard.

It seems that I’m not alone. Ashley Parker of The Atlantic agrees with me (gift article): The King of Queens. President Trump loves “handsome” men, especially the muscular ones.

President Trump delights in playing what he calls “the gay national anthem” whenever he wants to rev up a crowd. He’s obsessed with Elton John, was once friendly with Liza Minnelli, and has a Liberace-esque flair for gilded interiors. One of his favorite sports to watch—mixed martial arts—is basically sweaty, semi-naked dudes. And he is a deep and vocal admirer of the physique of fellow men, often announcing which ones he would cast in a movie: “They’re perfect specimens,” he said last year of the military pilots who had visited him in the Oval Office; “He looks like the Marlboro Man,” he cooed about a former Iowa state senator; “Young, handsome guy. It’s always nice to be young and handsome,” he complimented the president of Paraguay.

Some of Trump’s allies note that years before gay marriage was legalized, Trump had gay friends, took pro-gay stances, and allowed gay people to join his private club in Palm Beach starting in the mid-1990s. Ric Grenell became the first openly gay person to hold a Cabinet position when Trump appointed him acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, who is now the president’s envoy for special missions, once called Trump “the most pro-gay president in American history,” a title that Trump said he was honored to have.

Trump “dancing” to YMCA.

To be clear: Trump says he is attracted only to women and, in fact, has been married to three of them. He once hosted the Miss Universe pageant, was caught on tape saying that he loves to grab women “by the pussy,” and was found civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman. Loads more have accused him of sexual misconduct. (Trump has denied the accusations.) “Women—I like. Men—no, I don’t have any interest,” Trump affirmed at a Board of Peace meeting earlier this year.

But there’s also little doubt that Trump has unabashedly embraced the aesthetic—the je ne sais quoi—of a certain kind of gay man. Some who are sympathetic to the president have gone even further. Blaze Media, a conservative outlet started by the talk-radio host Glenn Beck, ran a story in 2024 headlined “Donald Trump: Our First Gay President,” much in the way people talked about Bill Clinton as having been the first Black one. The story notes, in a section titled “Queen of Queens”: “He blows kisses to Hulk Hogan, weighs in on Fashion Week (‘used to be so glamorous and exciting! No stars, no fun—just boring’), and his rivalry with lesbian Rosie O’Donnell remains a gem of the catty naughties social feuds.” Pod Save America, a liberal podcast started by former aides to President Obama, declared that Trump would be a gay icon, if only he had “liberal social values.” The president, the episode’s title observes, “DEMANDS a Ballroom at the White House, Loves Musicals, & Wears Make-up.”

James Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, told me that Trump’s personal story, a guy from Queens making it big in Manhattan, tracks with the “typical gay story” of men of his era. In another life, he continued, the 79-year-old could be a classic aging gay, “living in Wilton Manors, sitting at a bar, making bitchy comments to everyone who comes in.” (Of course, Trump’s perch from the Oval Office confers much more power than a bar stool does, and his comments have moved markets and sent allies reeling.) “It’s a gay man frozen in amber in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before AIDS,” Kirchick said, referring to the type of gay man he believes Trump would embody. “It’s a certain age and a certain era. It’s very campy.”

The comedian and podcaster Caleb Hearon deemed Trump to be of the “old-school-gay” era, “because, you know, gay guys used to be mean before media training,” he said in an interview with Ziwe Fumudoh on her YouTube comedy show. The president, Hearon continued, should have become “a red-carpet fashion adviser,” the sort who would say things like: “That dress, honey. I don’t think so!” “That would have been amazing. I would have watched every night,” he said. “Instead, he ran for office on a platform of mass deportation, so that’s where things got tricky, obviously.”

A little bit more:

Trump’s continued patter about men’s bodies has also drawn attention. As my colleague Marie-Rose Sheinerman and I dug into examples of these corporeal appraisals, we were surprised by their sheer quantity and just how much Trump seems to delight in complimenting other men. He has given the compliment of “handsome” at least 68 times so far in his second term—or 69 times, if we count the two Thanksgiving turkeys he also collectively described as such. He is unapologetic in his preference for Cabinet members and administration officials who seem to come out of “central casting”; he praised Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is gay, for his Hollywood-worthy bona fides, before appreciatively noting that “under that beautiful exterior is a killer.”

He can almost never resist commenting on the physique of brawny men: “Look at the muscles on this guy!” he said, gazing upon a young cadet while delivering the commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy last week. Two days later, he took pains to praise the New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, calling him a “beautiful guy” and waxing poetic about his “legs like tree trunks.” And speaking about the golfer Arnold Palmer in 2024, Trump managed to both reassert his preference for women while also remarking on the legend’s masculinity: “I love women, but this guy—this guy—this is a guy that was all man.” (He also noted Palmer’s powerful swing with “stiff-shafted clubs,” and his, um, alleged other assets: “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there—they said, Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.”)

I wonder if Trump would have acted on his attraction to men if he had grown up in a less repressed era? Check this out:

Paul Baker, the author of Camp!: The Story of the Attitude That Conquered the World, told me over email that when it comes to Trump, making the distinction between camp and campy is important. The latter is the more self-conscious, ironic adoption of camp. But Trump is “the original, pure form—it’s when someone’s behaviour is outrageous, excessive, subversive and unintentionally funny,” he said. “The person doesn’t realise they’re funny or that they’re camp. They’re just being themselves.”

OK, I’d better not quote any more of that article.

This piece is by Julie Sidivy at Politico, dated October 25, 2016: Donald Trump Talks Like a Woman.

In the 2016 presidential contest, there has been one thing that supporters and detractors of Donald Trump have agreed on. The chest-pounding real estate mogul from New York has emerged as the quintessentially masculine candidate. Love him or loathe him, Trump’s campaign has been defined by the ways he has asserted his maleness—mocking his opponents for their low energy, bullying his critics, sneering at perceived weakness, boasting of his sexual prowess, vowing to hit back twice as hard as he’s been hit.

But academic research has picked up something that thousands of hours of campaign punditry has missed completely: Donald Trump talks like a woman. He might be preoccupied with grading women’s looks, penis size and “locker room talk,” but the way he speaks and the actual words he uses make for a distinctly feminine style. In fact, his speaking style is more feminine by far than any other candidate in the 2016 cycle, more feminine than any other presidential candidate since 2004.

More than just a comical curiosity, this fact about Trump’s mode of communication might help explain how a candidate who has been so extensively rebuked for his mean-spirited attacks on immigrants, women, the disabled and even prisoners of war has managed to attract support from millions of voters who adore the way he says openly what they feel. To some, Trump’s ascent is evidence that society still prizes the masculine over the feminine, but what’s happening is more complex, and Trump’s style has qualities that go beyond mere blustery aggression. Research has shown that the more feminine a speaker’s style, the more likable and trustworthy he seems. For Trump, who has been derided for his multiple contradictions and outright lies, that advantage might well have persuaded his supporters to listen to him and not the chorus of media fact checkers.

It’s not just a lazy stereotype that men and women speak differently. In fact, researchers who have sifted through thousands of language samples from men and women have identified clear statistical differences. Some of these differences are exactly what you’d expect—men are more likely to swear and use words that signal aggression, while women are more likely to use tentative language (words like maybe, seems or perhaps) and emotion-laden words (beautiful, despise). But other patterns are far from obvious. For example, contrary to the common stereotype that men can’t resist talking about themselves, women are heavier users than men of the pronoun “I” whereas the reverse is true for the pronoun “we”; women produce more common verbs (are, start, went) and auxiliary verbs (am, don’t, will), while men utter more articles (a, the) and prepositions (to, with, above); women use fewer long words than men when speaking or writing across a broad range of contexts.

Jennifer Jones, a doctoral candidate of political psychology at the University of California at Irvine, has combined these statistics into an index capturing the ratio of “feminine” to “masculine” words, and applied it to the language of 35 political candidates over the past decade. Hillary Clinton’s language falls above the average on this index—more feminine than George W. Bush’s, but less so than Barack Obama’s.

But Donald Trump is a stunning outlier. His linguistic style is startlingly feminine, so much so that the chasm between Trump and the next most feminine speaker, Ben Carson, is about as great as the difference between Carson and the least feminine candidate, Jim Webb. And Trump earns his ranking not just because he talks a lot about himself or avoids big words (both of which are true); according to Jones, he also shows feminine patterns on the more subtle measures, such as his use of prepositions and articles. The key then is not what Trump talks about—making Mexico pay for the wall or bombing the hell out of ISIL—but rather how he says it.

There’s much more at the Politico link.

Here we are in the middle of a war that Trump started, and he seems much more interested in his decorating projects than what is going on in his conflict in the Middle East. Some examples:

Dan Diamond at The Washington Post: Trump fumes at Congress and courts for holding up his ballroom.

President Donald Trump has made little secret that his planned White House ballroom is a top priority, invoking the project more frequently than most other issues. And in recent weeks he has raged at anyone — including a federal judge, a Senate official and a local historian — whose actions threaten to slow construction.

On Monday, the president shared on social media a copy of a legal filing that closely resembled his own words and contended that the weekend’s shooting outside the White House campus proved the need for a ballroom.

Trump at the ballroom construction site.

“Without the construction of this great Project, the President cannot safely conduct the business of the United States,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche and two other senior Justice Department officials lawyers wrote, urging a federal judge to dissolve his order that could soon halt construction. “This is a terrible, tremendously harmful case to the United States of America, and all it stands for!”

The filing also mocked the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued to halt the project, claiming that the group had been “defunded by Congress due to a total lack of respect for them.” Trump posted all six pages of the filing on his Truth Social platform.

Trump’s ballroom project has embodied executive power and its limitations.

The president was able to rapidly bulldoze the East Wing last year, clearing space for his planned 90,000-square-foot addition.Trump has remade independent federalcommissions — firing holdovers and installing loyalists, including his executive assistant — that have swiftly approved his project.He’s raised vast sums of money that he says can be put toward the ballroom’s estimated $400 million cost.

But so far,he has been constrained — barely — by the courts and Congress.

And it’s obvious that the ballroom means much more to him than the war or the struggling US economy.

Tiago Ventura at Time: House Democrats to Introduce Bill to Block Trump’s Triumphal Arch Amid Backlash Over ‘Vanity’ Projects.

House Democrats are set to introduce legislation aimed at blocking the construction of President Donald Trump’s planned 250-ft triumphal arch nearby Arlington National Cemetery.

“Trump’s vanity project would waste taxpayer money, brazenly violate existing law, and become yet another vehicle for his corruption,” Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia said in a statement Wednesday. “The Administration has also given no consideration to potential harmful effects on the region including impacts on air safety and traffic on major roadways.”’

Trump holds up a model of his Arc de Trump.

Alongside Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada, Beyer plans to introduce what has been tentatively titled the “‘Arlington National Cemetery Viewshed Protection Act” on Friday, just days after the designs were approved by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a panel made up of Trump appointees.

The bill seeks to prohibit the construction of the arch and the use of any federal funds for the project. Additionally, it would prohibit the construction of any triumphal arch exceeding 50-feet on any National Park Service lands within the capital region “except by express authorization of Congress.”

Democrats have argued that the proposed arch, which is set to include a public viewing deck, is an unnecessary financial expenditure, especially given the ongoing affordability crisis impacting many Americans.

“As President Trump strips away the necessary safety nets from Americans who are struggling to afford their basic needs like groceries and healthcare, he builds his unauthorized, grandiose Triumphal Arch,” said Titus. “While destroying historical monuments and artefacts important to our American identity, he is erecting monuments to honor himself.”

Unfortunately, Trump couldn’t care less about the public good. He only cares about building memorials to himself.

Trump dreams up new renovation projects nearly every day. Here are the latest ones we’ve heard about:

Will Weissert and Michelle L Price at AP, via ABC News: Trump plays mayor at Cabinet meeting, showcasing his DC renovations.

He boasted of fixing city fountains and power-washing a local pool — making careful distinctions between sandblasting versus pebble-blasting — and detailing efforts to repair brick walkways in a public park.

But this wasn’t a small-town mayor assuring a few dozen community members at a town hall that municipal improvement efforts would be completed in time for Little League season.

This was President Donald Trump — channeling his decades as a high-profile real estate developer — regaling his assembled Cabinet and a nationally televised audience on Wednesday with the ins and outs of beautification projects around Washington.

“I love construction. It’s very exciting,” Trump said, maintaining that the face-lift he’s helped oversee to the nation’s capital means “D.C. is looking beautiful.”

His aside lasted 10 minutes and was far more comprehensive than anything said about the other major issues discussed during the meeting, including the war in Iran. There were also only passing references to gas prices nationwide that have spiked and fears about a weakening economy that could hurt Trump’s Republican Party in its push to retain control of Congress after November’s midterm elections….

The president also said that, under his watch, construction crews were working to improve 28 fountains, then bragged about a push to renovate the “reflecting lake” or “reflecting pond” — actually the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — which he said had been steam-cleaned, fumigated and coated with “American flag blue” paint.

“Over the years, I built hundreds of pools,” Trump said, recalling his days as a construction mogul in 1970s and ’80s New York. “I always like to build Olympic-sized swimming pools.”

The president noted that, as part of the revamp, cleaning crews had removed “more than 10 dumpsters of garbage.”

More projects described at the link.

Sarah Ewall-Wice at The Daily Beast: Trump Reveals Latest Vanity Project in Unhinged Pool Rant.

President Donald Trump wants to paint the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., blue after slapping blue paint on the Reflecting Pool.

Trump, 79, revealed the latest memorial he wants to get his hands on during a nearly 10-minute rant about renovations he’s been focused on throughout the nation’s capital at the White House while surrounded by members of his Cabinet.

Trump says he wants to paint the fountain of the WWII Memorial as seen from the top of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 2, 2026.

“Now we’re looking at the World War II fountain because that’s also in pretty bad shape,” Trump declared.

He revealed he wanted to “duplicate” the fountain’s bottom with paint in a “slightly different color.”

“Actually, we’ll go with a lighter color, but Doug and I have a lot of fun doing it,” Trump told the room, referring to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

The WWII Memorial includes a series of stone and bronze sculptures surrounding a pool of water on the National Mall just down from the Reflecting Pool.

The president’s comment came after he rambled for several minutes about his administration slapping a fresh coat of paint on the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

Trump called it the “reflecting lake” and said “nobody has ever seen anything like it” while also giving it the wrong dimensions and claiming it was longer than the tallest building in the world, which it is not.

He is insane, utterly insane.

I just heard about this project yesterday. Anna Kramer at Notus: The Trump Administration Is Spending $5 Million to Coat Horse Statues in Gold.

Four massive bronze horses positioned along the roads surrounding the Lincoln Memorial still shine in the sun from their first restoration in the 1970s. But their gold-toned coating is faded and patchy, and their heavy stone bases are cracked and dirty.

The Trump administration wants them glittering with a fresh coat of gold in time for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4. So in mid-April, the National Park Service handed a $5 million contract to a gilding studio in Maryland to repair the statues and cover them with a thick layer of 23.75-karat gold leaf.

It awarded the project without a full competition, according to NPS documents reviewed by NOTUS.

Four bronze horses surrounding the Lincoln Memorial are getting a glow-up for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4. Kainaz Amaria, NOTUS

As Trump hurries to put his stamp on a city he’s long denigrated as crumbling and ugly, his administration has doled out tens of millions of dollars for contracts with short timelines and little oversight.

In total, the Interior Department is spending at least $95 million in taxpayer funds for new D.C. beautification projects, according to a NOTUS review of government spending data. All of the projects identified by NOTUS were initiated between December 2025 and April of this year. About $20 million in contracts, including the gilding of the four horses, have not previously been reported.

“It is within the realm of reason to say: It’s the 250th anniversary that’s coming up, and instead of spending a hundred million dollars we normally spend on the District of Columbia, we want to spend $250 million. That’s perfectly normal,” said one former General Services Administration official, making up the dollar amounts to illustrate their point. “What is not normal is the lack of transparency.”

In mid-April, the National Park Service hired The Gilders’ Studio in Maryland to restore the 80,000-pound statue pairs, known as the Arts of War and Arts of Peace. According to agency documentation, the gilding company is covering the statues in an unusually thick layer of nearly pure gold — heavier and purer than even the “extra-thick” gold the same studio used to refinish the exterior of the Wyoming state capital dome seven years ago.

The $5 million contract includes more work than just the gold leafing, although the gold itself is certain to be a significant part of the cost, with the price of gold essentially doubling over the last several years.

And who is paying for all of Trump’s vanity project? Maxine Joselo and Andrea Fuller at The New York Times: National Park Entrance Fees Are Funding Trump’s D.C. Projects.

The National Park Service is using at least $67 million worth of park entrance fees to help fund President Trump’s beautification projects in Washington, according to a New York Times analysis of federal records.

Nearly $60 million in fees paid by visitors to national parks across the country is funding repairs to nine of the capital’s ornamental fountains, the analysis found. The government is putting another $7 million worth of entrance fees toward the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which costs $13.1 million overall, according to an internal Park Service document reviewed by The Times.

The National Park Service is spending millions in fees paid by visitors to parks across the country, like Yosemite National Park in California, to pay for restoration of nine ornamental fountains in Washington, D.C, AP

The analysis was based on a federal contracting database. The $7 million for the Reflecting Pool has not previously been reported.

Mr. Trump has proposed a host of initiatives to remake Washington in his own style and wants these projects completed by July 4, the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Some conservationists criticized the Trump administration for steering so much money to projects in Washington that appeared to be cosmetic fixes rather than urgent upgrades. National parks outside the capital have long maintenance backlogs, including repairs to deteriorating roads and water systems that threaten visitor safety.

“Our parks and public lands have been underfunded for decades, and there are many genuinely urgent projects in need of funding across the country,” said Aaron Weiss, the executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group. “Instead, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is determined to divert millions of dollars to projects that President Trump can see out his window.”

The spending is legal. Under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act of 2004, at least 80 percent of revenue from entrance fees must stay in the park where the fees were collected. But the other 20 percent can be used to improve sites that do not collect fees, such as the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington.

Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, which includes the Park Service, did not respond to specific questions but defended the spending in general.

“The National Park Service has not only been focused on beautifying the district but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country,” Ms. Martin said in an email, adding that “we should all be grateful” for Mr. Trump’s focus on projects in Washington.

I for one am not grateful.

That’s my post for today. I hope it isn’t too weird. I just couldn’t spend time today reading about the war and elections.

#highIQ #NoIQ 😂😂😂 #TrumpsBallRoom

#highIQ #NoIQ 😂😂😂 #TrumpsBallRoom

So...if the Trump regime actually manages to get approval for 1,000,000,000 ballroom-dollars to come out of taxpayer money...

...that means none of us are paying taxes again until he's out of office and the damn plans are scrapped, right?

We're all agreed on this, yes?

Good. Glad we got that settled.

Carry on.

#BallroomBillions
#TrumpsBallroom
#NoBallroomTax!
#NoBalltoomForRapists!
#GoldenBallroomsMeanNouveauRiche
#AllPowerNoClass
#AllPoweeNoTaste
#TrumpIsTemporary
#RESIST

Wednesday Reads

Good Day!!

I spent the last 3 days reading books and relaxing, and mostly avoiding watching or reading news social media. My RA pain had been pretty bad lately, and it has definitely improved as a result. I’ll have to see what happens after I engage with the news for this post, but at the moment I plan to go back on a news diet when I finish. I definitely think my health is improved by avoiding news about Trump.

Here’s what’s happening this morning:

Cable news Legend Ted Turner has died.

The New York Times (gift article): Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87.

Ted Turner, the media mogul who cut a brash and vivid figure on the American scene of the late 20th century by dominating the cable television industry, creating the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, and extending his restless reach into professional sports, environmentalism and philanthropy, died on Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.

Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. Mr. Turner announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

Ted Turner

Mr. Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionized television news in 1980 by presenting it all hours of the day and eventually inspiring other media operations to follow suit. But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.

As a spinoff of CNN, Mr. Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He founded the cable and satellite sports and entertainment “superstation” that became known as TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, both of which continue to reach millions of homes.

In 1985, he bought for $1.5 billion the MGM studio’s library of films and nine years later created the cable franchise Turner Classic Movies, or TCM. He made a similar purchase of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and, relying on them, created the Cartoon Network in 1992. And in 1996, he merged his conglomerate, Turner Broadcasting System, with Time Warner to create one of the world’s largest media companies.

Along the way, he found the time and energy to captain the winning yacht in the America’s Cup race in 1977 and to take an active role as owner of the Atlanta Braves, giving the team extended national exposure on Turner-owned television.

“I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he told the journalist Dale Van Atta in a Reader’s Digest article in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”

Not even his staunchest admirers placed Mr. Turner on that high a pedestal. But even a bitter rival like the media magnate Rupert Murdoch — who once had his New York Post run the headline “Is Turner Insane?” — had to concede that he was one of the most influential figures in the history of mass media.

An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Mr. Turner took astounding risks in business, often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and then roaring back to multiply his fortune.

Against the advice of colleagues and the conventional wisdom of his industry peers, he poured millions of dollars into pioneering ventures that combined cable and satellite broadcasts. He warred against the big television networks. He almost lost his shirt in Hollywood but emerged from these gambles and brawls as a billionaire astride a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.

Of course the big story is still Trump’s war with Iran. It’s difficult to know what to believe about what’s going on, since Trump and Hegseth lie constantly.

CNN reports the Trump/Hegseth line: US and Iran closing in on memorandum aimed at ending war, source says.

The United States and Iran are moving closer to an agreement on a short memorandum ⁠to end the Iran war, a regional source familiar with the negotiations said, although Trump administration officials cautioned that talks had previously fallen apart at the last minute.

The White House received positive feedback from Pakistani mediators on Tuesday that the Iranians were progressing toward a compromise, two administration officials told CNN while offering some skepticism about Pakistan’s optimism.

From CentCom: Project Freedom at Strait of Hormuz

But a renewed diplomatic push has emerged in recent days, the regional source said. President Donald Trump appears to be simplifying issues in peace negotiations so moderates in the Iranian regime can come back to the negotiating table, the source added, with the aim being to tackle thornier issues later.

A one-page plan being floated internally contains provisions that have been at the heart of negotiations to end the conflict, a person familiar with the plan told CNN. The document would declare an end to the war while triggering a 30-day negotiation period on resolving sticking points, including on nuclear issues, unfreezing Iranian assets and future security in the Strait of Hormuz, the person said.

Precise details of the plan couldn’t immediately be verified, but the source familiar said it would include discussion of a moratorium on uranium enrichment for a period of longer than 10 years. A previous US proposal had set it at 20 years.

The plan also requires Iran to ship its stockpile of highly enriched uranium out of the country, but details were still being negotiated.

News of positive movement from the Pakistanis helped spur Trump on Tuesday to announce a pause of “Project Freedom” – an operation to guide stranded ships out of the strait – citing progress in negotiations with Iran, the administration officials said. The pause came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Operation Epic Fury had ended and that the administration’s full focus was on Project Freedom.

The regional source told CNN that the harder the US pushed its agenda of Project Freedom and Operation Epic Fury, the more the hardliners in Iran stood up and had a bigger voice.

The Guardian reports on Iran’s reaction: Middle East crisis live: US proposal to end war a ‘wishlist, not a reality’, warns Iranian official.

‘American wishlist, not a reality’: Iranian officials cast doubt on US proposal to end war.

Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesperson of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, has poured cold water on the Axios report claiming the US and Iran were nearing a one-page memorandum to end the war, saying it was an “American wishlist [and] not a reality”.

Ebrahim Rezaei

In a fiery statement on X, he said: “Americans will not gain in a lost war what they failed to achieve in face-to-face negotiations. Iran has its finger on the trigger and is ready; if they do not surrender and grant the necessary concessions, or if they or their lapdogs attempt any mischief, we will respond with a harsh and regrettable response.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, also responded to the Axios report, telling the Iranian Isna news agency that the US proposal is still being reviewed by Tehran.

“Once Iran concludes its assessment, it will convey its views to the Pakistani side,” Isna reported, adding that the US demands detailed in the Axios report “included excessive and unrealistic demands that have been strongly rejected by Iranian officials in recent days”.

Isna reported that the Iranian negotiating team is solely reviewing the “termination of the war” and the nuclear issue is not currently being discussed.

That doesn’t sound like an agreement is coming soon. And Trump is issuing threats.

AP: US and Iran appear to move closer to ending their war as Trump threatens more bombing.

The United States and Iran appeared to be moving closer Wednesday to an initial agreement to end the war, as U.S. President Trump sought to pressure Tehran with threats of a new wave of bombing if a deal is not reached.

Trump posted on social media that the two-month war could soon end and that oil and natural gas shipments disrupted by the conflict could restart. But he said that depends on Iran accepting a reported agreement that the president did not detail.

“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts,” Trump wrote.

Trump made his latest comments after he suspended a short-lived U.S. effort to force open a safe passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which major oil and gas supplies, fertilizer and other petroleum products passed before the war.

Iran’s effective closure of the strait has sent fuel prices skyrocketing, rattled the global economy and put enormous economic pressure on countries, including major powers such as China.

China’s foreign minister called for a comprehensive ceasefire Wednesday after meeting in Beijing with Iran’s top envoy. Wang Yi said his country was “deeply distressed” by the conflict, which began Feb. 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran.

China’s close economic and political ties to Tehran give it a unique position of influence. The Trump administration is pressing China to use that relationship to urge the Islamic Republic to open the strait.

Meanwhile it appears that the Trump administration has been trying to conceal how much damage Iran has done to U.S. bases in the Middle East region.

The Washington Post (gift article): Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show.

Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment atU.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks,fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.

The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.

Since the start of the war on Feb. 28, seven service members have died in strikes on U.S. facilities in the region — six in Kuwait and one in Saudi Arabia — and more than 400 troops have suffered injuries as of late April, the U.S. military said. While most of the wounded returned to duty within days, at least 12 suffered injuries that military officials classified as serious, according to U.S. officials who, among others, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Satellite imagery of the Middle East is unusually difficult to acquire at present. Two of the largest commercial providers, Vantor and Planet, have complied with requests from the U.S. government — their biggest customer — to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing, making it difficult or impossible to assess Iran’s counterstrikes. Those restrictions began less than two weeks into the war.

Iranian state-affiliated news agencies, however, have from the start regularly published high-resolution satellite imagery on their social media accounts that claimed to document damage to U.S. sites.

Images of damage to Camp Buehring in Kuwait, released and annotated by Iranian state-affiliated media. Washington Post illustration.

For this examination — one of the first comprehensive public accounts of the damage to U.S. facilities in the region — The Post reviewed more than 100 high-resolution Iranian-released satellite images. The Post verified the authenticity of 109 of the those images by comparing them with lower-resolution imagery from the European Union’s satellite system, Copernicus, as well as high-resolution images from Planet where available. The Post excluded 19 Iranian images from the damage analysis because comparisons with the Copernicus imagery were inconclusive. No Iranian imagery was found to have been manipulated.

In a separate search of Planet imagery, Post reporters found 10 damaged or destroyed structures that were not documented in the imagery released by Iran. In all, The Post found 217 structures and 11 pieces of equipment that were damaged or destroyed at 15 U.S. military sites in the region.

Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the U.S. military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.

“The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel, who reviewed the Iranian images at The Post’s request. The Post previously revealed how Russia provided Iran with intelligence to target U.S. forces.

Read the rest and view more images using the gift link above. I wonder what it will take to repair the damage?

Here’s a bit of hopeful news from The Washington Post: Poll finds broad rejection of religion-related messages from Trump, Hegseth.

Americans are deeply uncomfortable with recent religion-related statements by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a striking rebuke in a closely divided country, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.

The poll finds positive ratings for Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized U.S. actions on immigration andin Iran, drawing criticism from Trump that the president repeated on Tuesday.

Eighty-seven percent of Americans have a negative view of Trump’s social media post appearing to depict himself as Jesus, according to the poll. Sixty-nine percent dislikeHegseth praying at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Both expressions drew criticism even from Republicans and Trump voters, unusual at a time of deep political tribalism. Eighty percent of 2024 Trump voters had a negative reaction to Trump’s Jesus post, as did 79 percent of Republicans. On Hegseth’s prayer, more than 40 percent of both groups reacted negatively.

“There is only one Jesus! I found the posts to be inappropriate and offensive. Humility is at the core of being Jesus,” said Kimberly Chopin, a 57-year-old Catholic who lives in suburban Baton Rouge and voted for Trump. She added that Hegseth’s prayer calling for violence made her “extremely uncomfortable. That kind of language sounds like the language of al-Qaeda.”

Interesting.

Of course Trump is much less interested in the war he started as a distraction from the Epstein files than remaking the White House and surrounding buildings and monuments in his own image. And his number one obsession is his insane ballroom.

Now Republicans in Congress are getting into the act. We were told that the ballroom project would be paid for with private money. Suddenly, we learn that taxpayers are expected to cover the growing price tag.

The New York Times: G.O.P. Proposes $1 Billion for Security Improvements in Ballroom Project.

Senate Republicans have inserted $1 billion for White House East Wing security enhancements in the immigration enforcement funding bill they hope to rush through Congress this month, setting up a political fight over a ballroom that President Trump has said would be financed with private money.

The leaders of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees on Monday released plans for the roughly $70 billion package, which would significantly bolster spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol through the end of Mr. Trump’s term using a party-line legislative process that can skirt a filibuster.

Trump’s proposed ballroom addition to the White House

A surprise addition to the measure was the $1 billion proposed by the Judiciary Committee for security work related to Mr. Trump’s East Wing renovation. The measure does not mention the president’s proposed new ballroom, which is being challenged in court, but Mr. Trump has insisted that a main reason for the project is to enhance security.

While the president has previously insisted that the renovation would be funded through private donations, a spokesman on Tuesday said the White House applauded the proposed security funding for a “long overdue” project.

Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have escalated their efforts to defend the project after the attempted assault late last month at a journalism gala in Washington attended by the president.

The bill says the public money would be directed to “security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House compound to support enhancements by the Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.” It also bars any of the funding being spent on “non-security elements.”

WTF?!

“Republicans are on a different planet than American families,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said in a post on social media. “Republicans looked at families drowning in bills and decided what they really needed was more raids and a Trump ballroom.”

Top Democrats also noted that consideration of the bill would put all senators on the record on a White House construction project that polls have shown to be unpopular.

“Just flagging that now everyone gets an up or down vote on the ballroom,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said on social media.

Should the provision survive and be enacted into law, it could clear away legal obstacles to construction of the ballroom, which a federal judge has ruled requires congressional approval.

Republicans are advancing the legislation outside of normal congressional spending channels because Senate Democrats had blocked money for ICE and the border control in a dispute over the tactics and conduct of federal immigration officers. That fight shut down parts of the Department of Homeland Security for almost 80 days.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”

Trump is destroying our country and our Capitol. He has to be stopped. One more on this from NPR: The many ways Trump wants to change D.C., from buildings to statues to parks.

President Trump is looking to make his mark on the White House and Washington, D.C., and not just politically.

The longtime real estate developer has either announced or embarked on a number of construction and renovation projects across the nation’s capital.

“I have two jobs,” Trump said in late 2025, the presidency being just one of them. “I have a construction job, which is really like relaxation for me because I have been doing it my entire life.”

The White House ballroom, reflecting pool resurfacing, Kennedy Center renovations and a triumphal arch are among the many changes Trump wants to make in D.C.

Some of those changes are seemingly temporary, like the huge banners of Trump’s face hanging from the Justice Department, Department of Agriculture and other federal buildings. Several concern the decor and aesthetics of the White House, like the paved-over Rose Garden and gilded Oval Office. Others are matters of nomenclature, like the addition of Trump’s name to the signs on the Kennedy Center and U.S. Institute of Peace buildings.

But many of the efforts in progress could reshape D.C.’s architectural landscape for decades to come.

Neil Flanagan, an architect and public historian in D.C., says while Trump had aesthetic ambitions during his first term, his “insistence on making it so much about his own style and his own brand and wearing this glory of America’s past is distinct to this term.” Many of his initiatives are connected to the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary in July.

“They all sort of declare the glory of America rather than actually building any kind of growth or future for America,” Flanagan says. “If you’re trying to slash the science budget … at the same [as you’re] building these grand monuments, you’re not building a creative America, you’re wearing a great American past as a costume.”

The latest change was to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.

Trump is resurfacing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, coating its gray bottom with a shade he described to reporters as “American flag blue.”

The 2,030-foot-long reflecting pool has been the backdrop of marches, speeches and inaugurations for a century.

It last underwent a major renovation from 2010 to 2012, both for structural fixes (to address decades of leaking and sinking) and aesthetic improvements (it was intentionally made shallower). But the Department of Interior says the wrong-size pipes were installed, resulting in the continued need for expensive refills (71 million additional gallons, exceeding $1 million, in 2019 alone).

Trump has been talking publicly about fixing the pool since at least November 2025, but ramped up his efforts in April after what he described as complaints about the state of the landmark. He told reporters that he is working with one of his best “pool builders” from his real estate days, who talked him out of a turquoise shade “like in the Bahamas.”

Flanagan says Trump is treating the pool, and the city itself, “like it’s his personal country club.”

“You get some pool guys and then they refinish it in a way that is more suitable to, basically, a swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago,” he adds.

That’s all I have for today. I can’t take anymore. \

Have a peaceful Wednesday.

He started at $250M and “I’ll pay,” then “it’s free,” then “no taxpayer cost,” and now it’s a $1B taxpayer-funded fortified bunker. Only in this timeline does being president include requesting a public-funded villain origin lair. #TrumpsBallroom

Yoooo!!!!

Why is #trump spending money on the ballroom when the wall hasn't been built? 🤷‍♀️🤦‍♀️

#uspol #trumpsballroom #donaldtrump #gop #djt

The only person in danger is the paid shooter. Ridiculous stunt 🍊🤡 within minutes talking about his ballroom. Is his security this incompetent then? Wow!

#TrumpsBallroom #EpsteinFiles #USpol #TrumpIsAWarCriminal #TrumpIsARapist

Hey, America - this sound familiar?
Feeling Great yet?

#trump #usa #whitehouse #trumpsballroom #kennedycenter

Hitler’s Edifice Complex

https://flip.it/vPYJ4A

Just a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles #TrumpNetanyahuWar #Economy #GasPrices #TrumpsBallroom

Lazy Caturday Reads: “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

This morning, Steven Beschloss posted the following discussion question for his readers at his Substack “America America”: Is Love More Powerful Than Hate?

I had in mind to write about villainy. It’s a fact of our public life that the Trump regime is thick with this dark force and overloaded with people who revel in it. The villains come easily to mind: Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Russel Vought, Greg Bovino (to name a few) and of course their ringleader, Donald Trump. They have motivated countless others to join their hateful cause to reject the Constitution and demolish democracy in America.

But on this day—Valentine’s Day—I want to turn this over and look at the flip side. Because behind this discussion of villains and villainy is my belief that their dark force can be defeated with the force of light and love. I don’t mean the biblical advice to “love your enemies,” although that may be a mindset that others more merciful than I can conjure.

I’m thinking more about the guidance found in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the topic of love. Let me share four shining examples:

• “Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos.”
• “Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.”
• “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”
• “I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems.”

There are days that these insights—these deeply held convictions—may seem inadequate to confront the horrors we witness committed by men and women who have lost their moral compass, assuming that they once possessed one. But I’d like to suggest that the more powerful our revulsion toward the regime’s acts of villainy, the more we are influenced by the inverse.

I returned to yesterday’s essay, “Pam Bondi’s Utter Contempt for Justice,” to test this notion. If you read it and thought that I am horrified by her villainous behavior this week, you would be right. But let’s look at the basis for my horror in three sentences from the first several paragraphs: “It’s hard to imagine someone more overtly hostile to justice and more utterly incapable of basic human compassion…This person is responsible for serving the people…But when asked for the most basic show of humanity, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.” Behind the obvious criticism of her hateful action is love: For justice, for basic human compassion, for serving the people, for humanity.

My point is that in our articulation of the horrors, we can find the light that can inspire us to stay in the fight and overcome this dark chapter. “Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos,” King wrote. In other words, love is more powerful than hate and, as King also insisted, “the only answer to mankind’s problems.”

Bad Bunny sent a similar message with his Super Bowl performance. Is it true? Can love conquer hate? Food for thought on Valentine’s Day.

Now for the news, which is again filled with hate and fear.

Trump appears to be planning some sort of attack on Iran.

Reuthers: Exclusive: US military preparing for potentially weeks-long Iran.

The U.S. military is preparing for the possibility of sustained, weeks-long operations against Iran if President Donald Trump orders an attack, two U.S. officials told Reuters, in what could become a far more serious conflict than previously seen between the countries.

The disclosure by the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the planning, raises the stakes for the diplomacy underway between the United States and Iran.

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will hold negotiations with Iran on Tuesday in Geneva, with representatives from Oman acting as mediators. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio cautioned on Saturday that while Trump’s preference was to reach a deal with Tehran, “that’s very hard to do.”

Meanwhile, Trump has amassed military forces in the region, raising fears of new military action. U.S. officials said on Friday the Pentagon was sending an additional aircraft carrier to the Middle East, adding thousands more troops along with fighter aircraft, guided-missile destroyers and other firepower capable of waging attacks and defending against them.

Trump, speaking to U.S. troops on Friday at a base in North Carolina, openly floated the possibility of regime change in Iran, saying it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.” He declined to share who he wanted to take over Iran, but said “there are people.”

“For 47 years, they’ve been talking and talking and talking,” Trump said.

Trump has long voiced skepticism about sending ground troops into Iran, saying last year “the last thing you want to do is ground forces,” and the kinds of U.S. firepower arrayed in the Middle East so far suggest options for strikes primarily by air and naval forces.

The New York Times: Trump Says Regime Change Would Be the ‘Best Thing’ for Iran.

President Trump said on Friday that regime change in Iran “would be the best thing that could happen,” as he continued to threaten military action against the country.

“For 47 years, they’ve been talking and talking and talking,” he told reporters after visiting troops at Fort Bragg. “In the meantime, we’ve lost a lot of lives while they talk.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has called for new leadership in Iran, and The New York Times reported in January that he was mulling whether regime change would be a viable military option.

But his latest comments are, perhaps, Mr. Trump’s most overt endorsement of regime change, even as U.S. officials concede that ousting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be much more complex than the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro, then the leader of Venezuela.

Still, officials have said that Mr. Trump had not made a final decision and was considering a range of military options.

The Trump administration has been steadily building up its military capabilities in the Middle East as Mr. Trump considers whether to strike the country again. Mr. Trump threatened last month to attack Iran if its government did not agree to a deal to curb its nuclear program….

But senior U.S. officials remain skeptical that the Iranians will agree to a deal that satisfies Mr. Trump, who has shown a growing impatience with the negotiations. This month, Omani officials mediated talks between Iran and a U.S. delegation that included Steve Witkoff,

A bit more on possible attack plans:

Mr. Trump has been weighing a range of military actions, including targeting Iran’s nuclear program and its ability to launch ballistic missiles. He is also considering sending American commandos to go after Iranian military targets, among other moves, the officials said.

To prepare, the Pentagon has been building up an “armada,” as Mr. Trump calls it, in the region. It includes the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, eight guided missile destroyers that can shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles, land-based ballistic missile defense systems and submarines that can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets in Iran.

And on Thursday, the crew of a second aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, was told it would leave the Caribbean, where the ship joined the U.S. operation last month to seize Mr. Maduro, and deploy to the Middle East as part of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign.

Yesterday, Trump posted a photo of a U.S. aircraft carrier on Truth Social, perhaps as a foreshadowing of his plans for Iran.

The Caribbean boat strikes are back.

NBC News: U.S. strikes alleged drug boat in Caribbean, killing three.

The U.S. Southern Command said it struck a vessel allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean on Friday, killing three people.

“Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” Southern Command said in a post on X, adding that “intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”

“Three narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No U.S. military forces were harmed,” the post said.

The U.S. has not provided evidence supporting its allegations about the boat, passengers, cargo or the number of people killed.

This latest strike comes after the U.S. on Monday struck a vessel also alleged to be transporting drugs in the eastern Pacific, killing two people and leaving one survivor.

A few days ago, there was a disturbing incident in Texas in which DHS used a powerful laser weapon with out notifying other parts of the government. It caused the FAA to close the air space over El Paso, Texas for a time. I have been curious about how this happened.

The New York Times, Feb. 11: Border Officials Are Said to Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser.

The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.

The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House.

Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that “the threat has been neutralized.”

But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.’s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said….

The military has been developing high-energy laser technology to intercept and destroy drones, which the Trump administration has said are being used by Mexican cartels to track Border Patrol agents and smuggle drugs into the United States.

The airspace closure provoked a significant backlash from local officials and sharp questions by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including some Republicans, who expressed skepticism about the administration’s version of the events.

This country is being run by morons.

NBC News: CBP shot down party balloons with anti-drone tech before FAA closed El Paso airspace, sources say.

The sudden closure of El Paso’s airspace Wednesday came sometime after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials used an anti-drone laser that was provided by the military to shoot down objects that were later identified as party balloons, four people familiar with the matter said.

The testing of U.S. military-owned laser technology was taking place in the proximity of the airport. The FAA responded by issuing a “temporary flight restriction notice,” which was to shut down the airspace for 10 days. It prevented flights, including helicopters used for medical transport, below 18,000 feet. The airport is a major hub for the region, with more than 50 flights scheduled every day.

The airspace was reopened several hours later Wednesday morning. The decision prompted confusion and finger-pointing inside the Trump administration over who was to blame….

One of the people familiar with the testing said the Defense Department has a working relationship with Homeland Security, where CBP is headquartered, that allows its personnel to use certain military equipment for its objectives, testing, evaluation and use along the southern border.

Recently, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the use of the weapon for CBP, the people said. Spokespeople for CBP referred questions to the White House, which did not elaborate beyond initial statements.

It figures Hegseth would be involved in this mess.

From military expert Mark Hertling at The Bulwark: The El Paso Balloon Incident Could Have Been a Disaster.

AFTER PROLONGED CONFUSION, we may have some clarity on what caused the emergency restriction on the airspace around El Paso International Airport: Someone used a sophisticated anti-air laser against what they thought was a drone launched from Mexico, but turned out to be a party balloon. Understandably, the first suspects were the Army units at Fort Bliss, which abuts El Paso and the airport. But it wasn’t the Army that fired the weapon.

According to the New York Times, Customs and Border Protection personnel fired an experimental anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense at what they thought was a cartel drone—without sufficient coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration. That prompted the FAA to shut down the airspace around the airport up to 18,000 feet in an extraordinary emergency move.

But focusing on the harmlessness of the target obscures the deeper issue: Why was this weapon employed without the discipline that governs every legitimate use of force in the military?

Fort Bliss sits on the edge of El Paso. While it’s a large post, and it has a very isolated desert training area, it borders a large city with hospitals, businesses, highways, civilian neighborhoods, and a relatively large international airport.

The post is home to the 1st Armored Division, an organization I once commanded. Like every major installation in the Army, Fort Bliss operates under detailed standing operating procedures governing weapons employment—whether on a live-fire range, during air-defense exercises, or in any activity that could affect surrounding airspace or population centers.

Those procedures are not bureaucratic red tape. They are necessary safety barriers. They exist precisely because military commanders understand various immutable facts: weapons are dangerous, coordination for any training event is critical, citizens live nearby, and mistakes do not stay contained.

It’s therefore unsurprising—though deeply concerning—that reports indicate the Fort Bliss commander and the command and staff of Northern Command were as alarmed as the FAA by the balloon shoot-down. That’s because they know any uncoordinated weapons use is not merely unsafe; it is unacceptable.

Please go read the rest at The Bulwark, if you’re interested. Personally, I find this incident deeply disturbing. There are simply too many incompetent–even stupid–people running our government. Eventually there is going to be a serious disaster.

More disturbing Trump Administration/DHS news–this time involving the Social Security Administration:

Wired: Social Security Workers Are Being Told to Hand Over Appointment Details to ICE.

Workers at the Social Security Administration have been told to share information about in-person appointments with agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, WIRED has learned.

“If ICE comes in and asks if someone has an upcoming appointment, we will let them know the date and time,” an employee with direct knowledge of the directive says. They spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

While the majority of appointments with SSA take place over the phone, some appointments still happen in person. This applies to people who are deaf or hard of hearing and need a sign language interpreter, or if someone needs to change their direct deposit information. Noncitizens are also required to appear in person to review continued eligibility of benefits.

Social Security numbers are issued to US citizens but also to foreign students and people legally allowed to live and work in the country. In some cases, when a child or dependent is a citizen and the family member responsible for them is not, that person might need to accompany the child or dependent to an office visit.

The order to share information, which was recently communicated verbally to workers at certain SSA offices, marks a new era of collaboration between SSA and the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency….

The SSA has been sharing data with ICE for much of President Donald Trump’s second term. In April, WIRED reported that the Trump administration had been pooling sensitive data from across the government, including from the the SSA, DHS, and the Internal Revenue Service. By November, WIRED learned that the SSA had made the arrangements official and had updated a public notice that said the agency was sharing “citizenship and immigration information” with DHS. “It was shockingly clear that there was interest in getting access to immigration data by [the] Trump administration,” a former SSA official tells WIRED. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.

This is from the Professional Development Academy: ‘Suicide is only one option’: Social Security staff newly assigned to phone duties raise concerns over training.

The Social Security Administration has instructed employees newly assigned to answering phones to tell callers expressing suicidal thoughts that suicide is “one option,” raising concerns from employees and experts in the field who called the approach unorthodox.

SSA recently began shifting new swaths of its workforce to phone answering duty, including those who normally receive and process retirement and disability claims, manage the agency’s technology and work in the agency’s finances unit. Those employees received brief, three-hour training before they began answering calls.

As part of that training, they were warned some callers may express suicidal ideation and presented with examples using a theoretical employee named Fiona.

“It’s important for Fiona to keep the caller engaged and to remind her that suicide is only one option,” the animated trainer told employees in the video, a copy of which was obtained by Government Executive, “and that there is no urgency to make any decisions.”

Employees at the training, which occurred on Jan. 26 for benefits authorizers and post-entitlement technical experts, were taken aback by the comment and asked their supervisors for clarity. One employee at the training said there was “disbelief that it was just said” among those in the room.

Caitlin Thompson, a clinical psychologist who spent eight years at the Veterans Affairs Department as a clinical care coordinator on the Veterans Crisis Line and later as the department’s national director of suicide prevention, said SSA’s approach did not follow commonly accepted best practices.

“It’s not a normal thing to say,” Thompson said. “No. That’s not the thing you say to somebody who might be suicidal.”

Instead, SSA would be better suited telling employees to ask callers if they feel safe in the immediate term and if they say no, to tell the caller that they will work with their supervisor to get them in touch with a crisis line.

Read more at the link.

I’ll end with this update on Trump’s ballroom obsession.

The Washington Post (gift link): New images of White House ballroom show clearest look yet at Trump project.

New renderings shared Friday offer the clearest look yet at President Donald Trump’s proposed White House ballroom addition — a project advancing even as it is challenged in court and questioned on Capitol Hill.

Shalom Baranes Associates, the firm handling the project, shared the renderings with the National Capital Planning Commission, a committee charged by Congress with overseeing major federal construction projects in the region. The renderings include various angles of the ballroom building, an approximately 90,000-square-foot addition that would also include offices for White House staff. The White House has dubbed the project its “East Wing Modernization.”

The images reveal at least one significant change from earlier designs: the removal of a large triangular pediment above the ballroom’s southern portico. Rodney Cook Jr. — a Trump appointee who chairs the Commission of Fine Arts, another federal panel reviewing the project — had warned in January that the pediment was “immense” and pressed the architects about whether it could be reduced.

Despite the revisions, the proposed addition would remain the same height as the White House at its highest point — a priority for Trump and a major concern for outside architects and historical preservationists. Critics have warned the project could overshadow the iconic main mansion and alter long-protected sightliness around the complex. The new renderings indicate the building could block views of the White House residence from certain viewpoints, such as locations on 15th Street NW, according to the designs shared Friday.

Bruce Redman Becker, an architect who was appointed to the Commission of Fine Arts by former president Joe Biden and removed by Trump last year, said the renderings show “a poorly proportioned pseudo-neoclassical structure that is completely out of scale with the White House.” He also said that the images shown in the renderings did not comply with decades-old guidelines developed by the National Park Service for construction projects at the White House and its neighboring park, which call for new additions to be compatible with the historic structure.

“The design team clearly ignored these guidelines, and should be asked to revise and resubmit plans that follow the guidelines,” Becker said.

You can use the gift link to read more and see the renderings.

That’s it for me today. What are your thoughts on all this? What else is on your mind?

A federal judge while denying for now an emergency injunction to stop the further below ground construction for #Trump'sBallroom monstrosity in place of the beloved #EastWing, raised the specter that he would have no qualms about ordering the building torn down or STOPPED youtu.be/_z55_6UOHw8?...

Trump Ballroom Suit gets MAJOR...

“Jamie #Dimon, the #CEO of #JPMorgan, recently said that he was refusing to make a contribution to #Trump’sballroom monstrosity because he was concerned how a post-Trump #JusticeDepartment might view it.” open.substack.com/pub/deanbake...

Trump Crazy #54,278 and Glimme...

“Jamie #Dimon, the #CEO of #JPMorgan, recently said that he was refusing to make a contribution to #Trump’sballroom monstrosity because he was concerned how a post-Trump #JusticeDepartment might view it.” open.substack.com/pub/deanbake...

Trump Crazy #54,278 and Glimme...

Wednesday Reads: ICE in Massachusetts, Trump’s Aging, and His Decorating Fetish

Good Afternoon!!

I’m really struggling with watching/read the national news these days. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. I have been trying to follow local reports of federal immigration/deportation activities. Trump hasn’t sent troops to Massachusetts yet, but ICE has still been very busy here. A few recent stories:

Marcela Rodrigues and Scooty Nickerson of The Boston Globe write that the feds are acting quickly to get detainees out of New England (and away from friendly judges) to red states where it will be easier to keep them imprisoned: ‘Treated like an animal’: ICE is moving detained immigrants quickly to conservative states, raising due process concerns.

Last week, João Marciano do Carmo returned to his family in Milford, embraced his crying mother, and fell into the comfort of his living room couch. The 19-year-old had finally made the journey home from a jail in Mississippi, one of the detention facilities where he had been held since September on an immigration-related violation that, lawyers say, never warranted his detention in the first place.

He’s not alone, according to a Globe analysis of arrest and detention data and interviews with immigration attorneys and experts. Immigrants in New England targeted for deportation are being whisked away quicker and to farther locations than ever before. They are increasingly brought to remote areas of the country where they face more conservative judges who are less likely to grant them freedom, according to the interviews and the data analysis.

Kelly Lamphere, the mother-in-law of João Marciano do Carmo’s sister, embraced João as he arrived at his family’s home in Milford, Nov. 18. Erin Clark, Globe Staff

As agents carry out that agenda, advocates and legal analysts say, immigrants have lost essential due process rights. Detainees legally eligible for bond are moved quickly, and at times in violation of court orders. It can take days for them to be able to call their families. Often, not even their lawyers know where they are.

Legal experts warn the rapid rise in transfers to far-flung states is likely to accelerate as billions of dollars allocated by Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer begin to flow to detention centers.

“To be super clear, this is the beginning,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney and policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “They are ramping up, but they have plans to go so much bigger.” [….]

ICE arrests in the Boston area more than tripled in the first seven months of this year compared to last, while the number of people sent to facilities outside New England spiked sixfold, according to the Globe analysis.

At the same time, the median period before someone was moved to an out-of-region facility was cut in half. Last year, it took around 20 days to move someone out of New England, while this year it took around 10 days.

What happened to João:

In Carmo’s case, the teenager, who moved to Milford from Brazil at age 11, was arrested on the way to work at a nearby farm with a friend from Milford High School. Immigration agents shattered his car window to apprehend them. The two teenagers, who have no criminal record, were put in a van with their hands and feet shackled.

For the first six days, they weren’t allowed to make a phone call. None of their family members or their lawyer could locate them. For days, their mothers in Milford wondered if they were alive.

In the seven weeks that followed, Carmo and Marcos Oliveira Martins were transferred from detention facility to detention facility, with stops in Massachusetts, New York, and Mississippi. They slept on concrete, the floor of a gymnasium, and in traditional jail cells.

“I was being really treated like an animal … I didn’t matter,” Carmo said at his home. His journey from New York to Mississippi lasted 16 hours between buses and a plane, and he was shackled the entire time.

Another heartbreaking story by Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio at The Boston Globe: A Babson College student wanted to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. She was deported instead.

Immigration authorities detained and swiftly deported a freshman at Babson College to Honduras last week while she was at Logan Airport on her way to surprise her family in Texas for Thanksgiving, according to attorneys and a family friend.

The young woman, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, came to the United States from Honduras with her family when she was a young child and was at Logan Thursday to catch a flight to Texas, where her parents live, according to her attorney, Todd Pomerleau.

Lopez Belloza made it through security but was stopped as she was about to board the plane, Pomerleau said. “They wouldn’t tell her why she was being detained. She didn’t understand it at all,” Pomerleau said. She was then taken to the Burlington ICE field office, then flown to Texas, Pomerleau said.

abson college student, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, at her high school graduation.Family Photo

After a frantic 48-hour search, her family received a call from her on Saturday from Honduras, a country she had not lived in since she was a child. The federal government had quickly deported her, the lawyers said, and Lopez Belloza had found her way to her grandparents’ house and called her father.

“It really didn’t feel like it was real life because nothing made sense,” said Ricky Soto, a close friend of the family who was desperately trying to contact attorneys to help the family. “I can only imagine how terrifying that was for her.”

Soto, 41, had bought Lopez Belloza plane tickets and helped organize the surprise for her family — he considers them family, too, and works with her father at a tailor shop in Texas.

The student’s parents and her two youngest siblings are also in Texas, and it would have been her first Thanksgiving break during college. “She was so excited, because she wasn’t expecting to come home,” Soto told the Globe.

Why did this happen?

Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, has also been assisting the family with the case, quickly scrambling to find local lawyers and contact representatives on Thursday evening after hearing of the case. Lopez Belloza apparently had a removal order from around 2017 that neither she nor her family was aware of, Gupta said.

“They didn’t know to show up somewhere, and she certainly had no idea of any of this,” Gupta said.

Before Trump, people  in this category weren’t targeted; now that has changed. Now Lopez Belloza may not be able to continue her education.

Soto, the family friend, remembers Lopez Belloza‘s father learning of his daughter’s college acceptance last year, bursting into their shop with such enthusiasm to share the news.

“Based on what I know about her father and his family, and what they went through, and how he’s been able to grow and persevere, and have a family — and then his oldest daughter is achieving this,” Soto said, “everybody was just really proud.”

Pomerleau, Lopez Belloza‘s attorney based in Massachusetts, said that she is a business student who received a scholarship to attend Babson. Now, Lopez Belloza isn’t sure if she’ll be able to finish her finals, Pomerleau said. He was able to speak with Lopez Belloza for the first time on Monday.

“She was really sad,” Pomerleau said. “I told her, ‘We’re going to fight like hell until we bring you back.’”

There must be terrible stories like this all over the country. It makes me sick at heart.

One more Massachusetts immigration story by Tara Prindiville and Dennis Romero at NBC News: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s relative detained by ICE.

Officials have detained the mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew amid the Trump administration’s ramped-up immigration enforcement efforts, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took the woman into custody in Revere, Massachusetts, this month, the source said.

Bruna Ferreira has an 11-year-old son with Michael Leavitt, who is the press secretary’s brother.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Bruna Caroline Ferreira is a “criminal illegal alien from Brazil” who overstayed her tourist visa, which expired in June 1999.

The woman has an arrest on suspicion of battery, the spokesperson said. It’s not clear how the case was resolved.

Ferreira, who the source familiar with the situation said has never lived with Leavitt’s nephew, is at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center amid proceedings to have her removed, the DHS spokesperson said….

The source said Leavitt’s nephew has lived full time in New Hampshire with his father since he was born, has never resided with his mother and has not spoken with her in many years….

Ferreira’s family said in a GoFundMe campaign that she was brought to the United States as a child in 1998 and that she has done “everything in her power to build a stable, honest life here.”

It says she “maintained her legal status” in the United States by receiving protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which seeks to allow immigrants brought to the United States as children, albeit illegally, to enjoy protection from removal.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that DACA recipients have been among those detained in immigration sweeps.

The New York Times has finally noticed that Trump is really old.

Katie Rogers and Dylan Freedman at The New York Times (gift link): Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office.

With headline-grabbing posts on social media, combative interactions with reporters and speeches full of partisan red meat, Mr. Trump can project round-the-clock energy, virility and physical stamina. Now at the end of his eighth decade, Mr. Trump and the people around him still talk about him as if he is the Energizer Bunny of presidential politics.

The reality is more complicated: Mr. Trump, 79, is the oldest person to be elected to the presidency, and he is aging. To pre-empt any criticism about his age, he often compares himself to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who at 82 was the oldest person to hold the office, and whose aides took measures to shield his growing frailty from the public, including by tightly managing his appearances….

Mr. Trump remains almost omnipresent in American life. He appears before the news media and takes questions far more often than Mr. Biden did. Foreign leaders, chief executives, donors and others have regular access to Mr. Trump and see him in action.

Still, nearly a year into his second term, Americans see Mr. Trump less than they used to, according to a New York Times analysis of his schedule. Mr. Trump has fewer public events on his schedule and is traveling domestically much less than he did by this point during his first year in office, in 2017, although he is taking more foreign trips.

He also keeps a shorter public schedule than he used to. Most of his public appearances fall between noon and 5 p.m., on average.

And when he is in public, occasionally, his battery shows signs of wear. During an Oval Office event that began around noon on Nov. 6, Mr. Trump sat behind his desk for about 20 minutes as executives standing around him talked about weight-loss drugs.

At one point, Mr. Trump’s eyelids drooped until his eyes were almost closed, and he appeared to doze on and off for several seconds. At another point, he opened his eyes and looked toward a line of journalists watching him. He stood up only after a guest who was standing near him fainted and collapsed.

A bit more:

Mr. Trump has prompted additional questions about his health by sharing news about medical procedures he has had, but not details about them. While in Asia, Mr. Trump revealed that he had undergone magnetic resonance imaging at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in early October.

“I gave you the full results,” Mr. Trump told reporters, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician, which did not say that Mr. Trump had an M.R.I. scan and contained few other details….

Trump dozing in an Oval Office meeting

Mr. Trump also applies makeup to a bruise on the back of his right hand, adding speculation about a medical condition that his physician and aides say is caused by taking aspirin and shaking so many hands. In September, the bruising on his hand, coupled with swollen ankles, caused observers on the internet to speculate wildly about his health….

According to a Times analysis of the official presidential schedules in a database maintained by Roll Call, Mr. Trump’s first official event starts later in the day. In 2017, the first year of his first term, Mr. Trump’s scheduled events started at 10:31 a.m. on average. By contrast, Mr. Trump in his second term has started scheduled events in the afternoon on average, at 12:08 p.m. His events end on average at around the same time as they did during the first year of his first term, shortly after 5 p.m.

The number of Mr. Trump’s total official appearances has decreased by 39 percent. In 2017, Mr. Trump held 1,688 official events between Jan. 20 and Nov. 25 of that year. For that same time period this year, Mr. Trump has appeared in 1,029 official events.

Mr. Trump still regularly comes down to the Oval Office after 11 a.m., according to a person familiar with his schedule. This routine is a holdover from his first term: After he complained about being overscheduled in the mornings, Mr. Trump kept so-called executive time hours in the White House residence before he headed downstairs for work.

It’s nothing we don’t know about, but at least the Times admits Trump is declining with age.

Predictably, Trump was unhappy with the story. Tom Boggiani at Raw Story: Trump flips out at New York Times ‘creeps’ in furious rant over ‘hit piece’ about his naps.

The New York Times appears to have touched a nerve with Donald Trump after reporting that observers are noting his lack of energy and increasing fatigue as his age catches up with him during his second year.

In the report, the Times noted, “… when he is in public, occasionally, his battery shows signs of wear. During an Oval Office event that began around noon on Nov. 6, Mr. Trump sat behind his desk for about 20 minutes as executives standing around him talked about weight-loss drugs,” before reporting that the 79-year-old president appeared to all observers to have dozed off as those around him spoke.

Clearly stung, Trump took to Truth Social on Wednesday morning to lash out, while also boasting about his last election win for some curious reason.

“The Creeps at the Failing New York Times are at it again. I won the 2024 Presidential Election in a Landslide, winning all Seven Swing States, the Popular Vote, and the Electoral College by a lot. I one our Nation’s Districts by 2750 to 550, a complete wipeout. I settled 8 Wars, have 48 New Stock Market Highs, our Economy is Great, and our Country is RESPECTED AGAIN all over the World, respected like never before. The last Administration had the Highest Inflation in history – I have already brought that down to normal, and prices, including groceries, are coming down,” he wrote.

He continued, “To do this requires a lot of Work and Energy, and I have never worked so hard in my life. Yet despite all of this the Radical Left Lunatics in the soon to fold New York Times did a hit piece on me that I am perhaps losing my Energy, despite facts that show the exact opposite.”

“They know this is wrong, as is almost every thing that they write about me, including election results, ALL PURPOSELY NEGATIVE. This cheap ‘RAG’ is truly an ‘ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.’ The writer of the story, Katie Rogers, who is assigned to write only bad things about me, is a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out,” he complained, once again insulting a female reporter’s physical appearance.

“Despite all of this, I have my highest Poll Numbers, ever, and with record setting investment being made in America, they should only go up,” he insisted before claiming, “There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone, but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAM AND A COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (‘That was aced’) JUST RECENTLY TAKEN, it certainly is not now! GOD BLESS AMERICA & MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

He’s not just old; he’s certifiably insane.

Based on what is reported in the news, Trump spends much of his time on his redecorating obsessions.

Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond at The Washington Post (gift link): Trump wants a bigger White House ballroom. His architect disagrees.

President Donald Trump has argued with the architect he handpicked to design a White House ballroom over the size of the project, reflecting a conflict between architectural norms and Trump’s grandiose aesthetic, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

Trump with ballroom architect James McCrery

Trump’s desire to go big with the project has put him at odds with architect James McCrery II, the people said, who has counseled restraint over concerns the planned 90,000-square-foot addition could dwarf the 55,000-square-foot mansion in violation of a general architectural rule: don’t build an addition that overshadows the main building.

A White House official acknowledged the two have disagreed but would not say why or elaborate on the tensions, characterizing Trump and McCrery’s conversations about the ballroom as “constructive dialogue.” [….]

Trump’s intense focus on the project and insistence on realizing his vision over the objections of his own hire, historic preservationists and others concerned by a lack of public input in the project reflect his singular belief in himself as a tastemaker and obsessive attention to details. In the first 10 months of his second term, Trump has waged a campaign to remake the White House in his gilded aesthetic and done so unilaterally — using a who’s-going-to-stop-me ethos he honed for decades as a developer.

Multiple administration officials have acknowledged that Trump has at times veered into micromanagement of the ballroom project, holding frequent meetings about its design and materials. A model of the ballroom has also become a regular fixture in the Oval Office.

The renovation represents one of the largest changes to the White House in its 233-year history, and has yet to undergo any formal public review. The administration has not publicly provided key details about the building, such as its planned height. The 90,000-square-foot structure also is expected to host a suite of offices previously located in the East Wing. The White House has also declined to specify its plans for an emergency bunker that was located below the East Wing, citing matters of national security.

You can read the rest using the gift link.

Trump also plans to redesign some golf courses. Sarah Fortinsky at The Hill: Trump says Jack Nicklaus will lead golf course overhaul at Joint Base Andrews.

President Trump said Jack Nicklaus, the retired professional golfer, will oversee an overhaul of the golf courses at Joint Base Andrews.

Trump told reporters he was tapping Nicklaus as the architect of the project on Saturday before boarding Marine One to head to Andrews, where he later took an aerial tour of the landscape.

85 year old Jack Nichlaus

“We’re doing some fix-up of the base, which it needs. We’re going to try and reinstitute the golf courses. I’m meeting with the greatest Jack Nicklaus,” Trump said.

“He’s involved in trying to bring their recreational facility back,” he added, calling it a “great place that has been destroyed over the years through lack of maintenance, so we’ll fix that up, and Jack will be the architect and he’ll design it.”

Trump said the project would address “two existing courses that are in very bad shape” and said, “We can, for very little money, fix it up.”

Trump has time for all this because he doesn’t really care about serious issues and leaves those to his staff, his pal Putin, and apparently Jared Kushner. I haven’t really gotten into politics and foreign policy in this post, but here are some headlines if you’re interested.

Jacqueline Cole, Mariana Lastovyria, and Tim Mak at The Counteroffensive: NEWSFLASH: Witkoff was secretly giving Russians advice.

Shaun Walker at The Guardian: Who leaked Witkoff’s call advising Kremlin on how to get Trump on side?

Betsy Klein at CNN: Trump brushes off concerns about Witkoff’s interactions with Russians as leaked transcript roils Washington.

Apoorva Mandavilli at The New York Times: Doctor Critical of Vaccines Quietly Appointed as C.D.C.’s Second in Command.

David Cole at The New York Times: Mark Kelly Is Being Investigated for Telling the Truth.

Politico: Trump opens the door to Obamacare subsidy extension.

The Independent: Trump denies he pushed two-year healthcare subsidies extension, calls Obamacare a ‘disaster.’

The Daily Beast: Why Trump Aide Is Thinking 25th Amendment: Wolff.

That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?

#anyLuciaLopezBelloza #brunaCarolineFerreira #donaldTrump #ice #immigration #jackNichlaus #jamesMccreary #joaoMarcianoDoCarmo #jointBaseAndrewsGolfCourses #karolineLeavitt #trumpAging #trumpDozingOff #trumpsBallroom

Michelle Obama on East Wing demolition: ‘I felt a loss for us as a nation’ – The Washington Post

The former first lady said her feelings stemmed from the country and its shared traditions, rather than a personal attachment to the building Trump knocked down to build a ballroom.

November 25, 2025 at 1:47 p.m. EST, Today at 1:47 p.m. EST, 2 min

Michelle Obama on East Wing demolition: ‘I felt a loss for us as a nation’

By Brianna Tucker

Former first lady Michelle Obama said she felt “a loss for us as a nation” when asked about President Donald Trump’s demolition of the East Wing for a massive new ballroom.

Obama, who was first lady during President Barack Obama’s two terms from 2009 to 2017, shared her response to the removal of the century-old annex in an episode of Jamie Kern Lima’s podcast Tuesday, saying her feelings stemmed from the country and its shared traditions, rather than a personal attachment to the space.

“I think in my body, I felt confusion because I’m like, who are we? What do we value? And who decides that?” Obama said. “That’s the thing that’s going through my head a lot lately. Who are we? What are the rules? Because I’m confused by what are our norms and our mores — not the laws — but how do we live together? That’s the part of it that hurts.”

“I think I felt a loss for us as a nation, but personally, you know … that’s not our house. That’s the people’s house,” she added.

Video 0:54 seconds…

The East Wing has typically housed the first lady’s office and staff, and served as a hub for her public initiatives.

In October, Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House to make room for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom building he estimates will cost $300 million.

The project is one of several transformations the Trump administration has pursued within the White House complex. Since returning to office, he has paved the Rose Garden, erected a pair of 88-foot-tall flagpoles on the North and South lawns, covered the Lincoln Bathroom in marble and mused about potentially painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building — saying the 137-year-old federal property “was always considered an ugly building.”

In podcast interviews and appearances this year, Obama has grown more vocal about her concerns over Trump’s second term, explaining her decision to skip Trump’s second inauguration in January, and warning that his immigration policies and approach to governing threaten the nation’s values and identity.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Michelle Obama on East Wing demolition: ‘I felt a loss for us as a nation’ – The Washington Post

#ballroom #barackObama #destructionEastWing #eastWing #formerFirstLady #michelleObama #notTrumpsHouse #trumpsBallroom #whiteHouse

America’s $38 Trillion Debt: Experts Warn the U.S. Is Running Out of Time
Source: Fort Worth LLC
America’s $38 Trillion Debt: Experts Warn the U.S. Is Running Out of Time
Source: Fort Worth LLC
#MadKingDonald #DementiaDon #DerangedDon
#NationalDebt
#TariffsareTaxes #TrumpsTariffs
#TrumpsBallroom
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https://share.newsbreak.com/fyfb8085

Johnson refuses to promise House vote on extending ObamaCare subsidies
Source: The Hill
#TrumpsShutdown #RepublicanShutdown #Healthcare #SNAP #FlightCancelations #WaronAmericans
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https://share.newsbreak.com/ft3ixpev

WOW!! Click on image link to see 96-second video #TrumpsBallroom

https://bsky.app/profile/amysiskind.com/post/3m3ygmeou7k2u

#Bigtech is helping to pay for #Trumpsballroom that we all definitely want

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/big-tech-is-helping-to-pay-for-trumps-ballroom-that-we-all-definitely-want-162545434.html?src=rss

A demolition – The Washington Post

A demolition

The East Wing, the entrance to the White House for millions of Americans on official tours, the site of offices for every first lady for nearly half a century and the home of calligraphers who prepared thousands of invitations for White House state dinners, disappeared into a pile of rubble yesterday. It had stood for 123 years.

Built during the Theodore Roosevelt administration as an entryway for guests arriving in carriages, and rebuilt during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the East Wing met its end under orders from Trump. He dismissed it this week as “a very small building” that was in the way of his planned 90,000-square-foot, $300 million ballroom. With it went the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and the East Colonnade, which connected the East Wing to the White House and included the president’s theater. “It’s not just a building,” said Laura Schwartz, the White House director of events in the Clinton administration. “It’s the living history.”

Meeting a need

Tearing down the East Wing to make space for the ballroom was an unfortunate necessity, said Gahl Hodges Burt, who was social secretary for three years under President Ronald Reagan. Since the largest spaces in the building have room for 200 seated guests at most, recent administrations have erected enormous tents on the South Lawn for ever larger state dinners.

“Putting up a tent does nothing but make people upset that they’ve come to a state dinner but they never get inside the White House,” Burt said. “The only bathroom facilities for a tent are porta-potties. Setting up a kitchen out there is hugely expensive. When the tent is up, the helicopter can’t land. And the grass dies.” (Ms. Burt was referring to the presidential helicopter, Marine One.)

Michael LaRosa, the press secretary to Jill Biden, lamented the loss but agreed that a ballroom was needed: “The French have the Élysée Palace, and here we are having a lawn party.”

A rich history

During its 123 years, two modern East Wing incidents stand out.

In 2009, in what passed as a scandal at the time, two uninvited guests and aspiring television reality stars, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, slipped into the first state dinner of the Obama administration. They rubbed shoulders with Vice President Joe Biden.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Secret Service agents grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney from his West Wing office and rushed him into a bunker below the East Wing, which had been built as a shelter for Roosevelt during World War II. Cheney headed underground the moment that American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

The East Wing never had the political importance or cachet of the West Wing, which houses the Oval Office. But it became prominent, and controversial, when Republicans denounced the expensive new construction, built partly to cover Roosevelt’s new underground shelter, as wasteful.

The first lady’s spot

The personality of the East Wing was always calmer and less intense than that of the testosterone-filled West Wing. Until Thursday, the ground floor housed the White House visitors’ office and the Office of Legislative Affairs, while the second floor was home to the White House Military Office and the offices of the first lady.

Presidents watched the Super Bowl and showed movies before their release in the theater in the colonnade, which was used as a coat check for big events. During holiday parties, a band would often play Christmas carols just outside the East Wing entrance as guests arrived.

Melania Trump visited the East Wing so infrequently during her husband’s first term that her empty office there was converted into a gift-wrapping room. It is unclear how many times she has been there in the second term, or if she had offered any feedback on her husband’s plans.

For more…

• The White House released a list of donors who are helping Trump pay for the $300 million ballroom he wants to build at the White House.
• “The Daily” podcast today is about the demolition.
• On late night, Stephen Colbert talked about the demolition.

Editor’s Note: This post was edited and posted from the email from The Washington Post.

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Donors #EastWing #EastWingDestroyed #Education #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSBallroom #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse #WhiteHouseHistory

Trump takes a wrecking ball to the White House in on-the-nose metaphor – US news – The Guardian

Editor’s Note: Featured image by WP AI.

Trump takes a wrecking ball to the White House in on-the-nose metaphor

The start of construction on the president’s $250m ballroom marks a regression to his property wheeler-dealer days

• This story was originally published in our This Week in Trumpland newsletter; sign up to get it in your inbox every Wednesday

David Smith in Washington, Wed 22 Oct 2025 15.42 EDT

The press corps crowded into the East Room – crystal chandeliers, moulded ceilings, portraits of past presidents – on Monday for an event celebrating student baseball champions from Louisiana. But first Donald Trump had something else on his mind.

“Right behind us we are building a ballroom,” he said, gesturing towards a gold curtain. “I didn’t know I’d be standing here right now ’cos right on the other side you have a lot of construction going on, which you might hear periodically.”

Beyond the Oz-like curtain demolition crews were tearing down part of the White House’s East Wing so they could start building Trump’s ballroom, a $250m project he says will be paid for by himself and unnamed donors. The spectacle of a mechanical excavator ripping through the facade, leaving a tangle of broken masonry, rubble and steel wires, was hard for some to take.

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, was quoted by WTOP News as saying: “Maybe it’s just the dislike of change on my part, but it seemed painful, almost like slashing a Rembrandt painting. Or defacing a Michelangelo sculpture.”

The US president has never been one to shy away from glaringly obvious metaphors. For the past decade, as one norm and institution after another has collapsed, critics have called him a human wrecking ball. So what better than literally wrecking a wing of the 225-year-old White House?

David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, tweeted: “Something profoundly symbolic about Trump taking a wrecking ball to the White House … paying for the demolition with money from cronies and insiders seeking government favors … and the Republicans in Congress acquiescing as Trump treats public assets as private property.”

Apparently stung by the criticism and feeling defensive, the White House blasted out a press release on Tuesday. It complained: “In the latest instance of manufactured outrage, unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House – a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and renovations from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence.”

The release listed past examples that included Teddy Roosevelt building the West Wing, Harry Truman overseeing a “total reconstruction” of the White House’s interior, Richard Nixon converting the swimming pool into the press briefing room and Barack Obama resurfacing the south grounds tennis court into a basketball court, complete with construction photos.

The administration does have a point: the White House has constantly evolved and, before First Lady Jackie Kennedy intervened, it was a dingy, unglamorous place. Its appeal is that it is grand but not too grand: bigger and plusher than Britain’s 10 Downing Street, to be sure, yet modest compared with some of the baroque palaces of despots around the world.

But there are a few things going on here. First, Trump seems bored by domestic policy. He would rather not talk about an economy that is stalling. The government shutdown, which would have consumed any of his predecessors, seems to induce only a yawn and AI videos depicting Democrats in sombreros.

He is following in the tradition of past presidents who in their second terms pivoted to foreign policy, where it can seem easier to build a legacy (and maybe even win a Nobel peace prize). Last week his in-tray included Gaza, Argentina, Venezuela, Russia and Ukraine; on Monday he met the prime minister of Australia; on Friday he heads to Asia.

Trump’s ennui has also turned him into an unlikely Benjamin Button: he is regressing from commander-in-chief to his youthful career as a builder and property wheeler-dealer. Like everything else about his second term, his makeover of the White House is far more ambitious than first time around.

He planted two giant flagpoles that fly the Stars and Stripes, drowned the Oval Office in gold decor (the New York Times called it a “gilded rococo nightmare”) and installed a “presidential walk of fame” with gold-framed portraits of every president except Joe Biden, who is supplanted by an autopen.

It’s all beginning to feel like Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida, an opulent orgy of gold-plated fixtures and gold leafing. I heard Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? floating over the West Wing on Monday and imagined Trump playing DJ on his new Rose Garden patio.

At a Rose Garden lunch on Tuesday, the president told Republican senators: “You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back here. You hear that sound? That’s music to my ears. I love that sound. When I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. In this case, it reminds me of lack of money because I’m paying for it.”

Trump has plans for Washington too. Last week he unveiled plans for a triumphal arch across from the Lincoln Memorial that was quickly dubbed the “Arc de Trump” topped by a state of Lady Liberty – in gold, naturally. He showed off three 3D models – small, medium and large – and quipped: “I happen to like the large one. Why are you shocked?”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump takes a wrecking ball to the White House in on-the-nose metaphor | US news | The Guardian

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #EastWingDestroyed #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalTrustForHistoricPreservation #Opinion #Preservation #Resistance #Science #TheGuardian #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSBallroom #UnitedStates

Can anyone stop Trump’s teardown of the East Wing? – The Washington Post

Can anyone stop Trump’s teardown of the East Wing?

Many preservationists fear the answer is no. A pro-Trump review board is expected to approve the president’s planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom, too.

Editor’s Note: The featured image is by WP AI.

October 22, 2025 at 2:49 p.m. EDT, Yesterday at 2:49 p.m. EDT, 12 min

Demolition crews continue dismantling parts of the East Wing of the White House on Wednesday. The work is part of preparations for the construction of a new ballroom, ordered by President Donald Trump. (Peter W. Stevenson/The Washington Post)

By Dan Diamond, Paul Schwartzman and Jonathan Edwards

President Donald Trump’s plan to build a White House ballroom has underscored an oft-overlooked aspect of presidential power: No one could stop the president from tearing down much of the East Wing this week.

The next stage of the project is also likely to proceed withfew restraints: The key panel slated to review the president’s construction plans is now stocked with Trump allies ready to approve them.

White House demolition continues, see the ballroom design — Demolition crews continued tearing down part of the White House East Wing on Oct. 22 to make way for President Donald Trump’s long-planned ballroom. (Video: Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)

Photos of construction teams knocking down portions of the East Wing, first revealed by The Washington Post on Monday, have rattled city residents, historians and politicians, many of whom contended that Trump was wrongly tearing apart “The People’s House” to build his long-desired ballroom.

“It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it,” Hillary Clinton, who battled Trump for the presidency in 2016, wrote on social media.

Others contend that Trump’s shifting projections and promises — such as pledging in July that the ballroom wouldn’t “interfere” with the White House, and increasing his estimate of cost and how many people will fit in the building — illustrate the need for more transparency. Conservative commentator Byron York said Trump “needs to tell the public now what he is doing with the East Wing of the White House. And then tell the public why he didn’t tell them before he started doing it.”

It’s not his house.

It’s your house.

And he’s destroying it. pic.twitter.com/YchFF5U1nO

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 21, 2025

Rebecca Miller, executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting historic sites in Washington, said dozens of concerned citizens from the city and around the country have called and emailed her to express outrage.

Miller said she has had to explain that the White House, because of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, is exempt from the required reviews that other federal agencies must undergo when seeking to alter government property.

“Our hands are tied,” Miller said, adding that normally government officials discuss major projects with preservationists — but not this time. “It’s very frustrating that there’s nothing that the organization can do from a legal or advocacy perspective.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit created by Congress to help preserve historic buildings, urged the administration “to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review processes,” including a pair of commissions that have reviewed past White House construction.

Polls have shown many Americans are concerned. YouGov polling conducted Tuesday found that 53 percent opposed demolishing part of the East Wing, 23 percent supported it and the remainder were unsure. YouGov also found that 23 percent believed the ballroom will have a positive effect on the White House, 35 percent believed it will have a negative effect, and the remainder were neutral or unsure.

But the project is moving forward. White House officials said Tuesday to expect a full-scale teardown of the East Wing, defending it as a “modernization” of the building. They also touted past renovations, circulating a fact sheet that argued Trump was continuing a “proud presidential legacy” of changing the White House grounds — although the swimming pool, tennis pavilion and other past projects they highlighted pale next to the president’s planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom, which would be nearly twice the footprint of the 55,000-square-foot main sectionof the White House next door. Trump said this week that the ballroom will seat nearly 1,000 people, up from an earlier estimate of about 650.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Can anyone stop Trump’s teardown of the East Wing? – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #Destruction #DonaldTrump #EastWing #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NotTrumpSHouse #Opinion #OurHouse #Politics #Preservation #Resistance #Science #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSBallroom #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse #WhiteHouseHistory

If The West Wing should get a spin-off series, well, "The East Wing" is probably out of the window now and "The Ball Room" doesn't really cut it either.

#uspol #politics #TheWestWing #WhiteHouseBallroom #TrumpsBallroom #WhiteHouseEastWingDemolition #Trump #DonaldTrump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpAdministration2025 #SecondTrumpAdministration

Can anyone stop Trump’s teardown of the East Wing? – The Washington Post

Can anyone stop Trump’s teardown of the East Wing?

Many preservationists fear the answer is no. A pro-Trump review board is expected to approve the president’s planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom, too.

October 22, 2025 at 2:49 p.m. EDTToday at 2:49 p.m. EDT, 12 min

By Dan Diamond, Paul Schwartzman and Jonathan Edwards

President Donald Trump’s plan to build a White House ballroom has underscored an oft-overlooked aspect of presidential power: No one could stop the president from tearing down much of the East Wing this week.

Photos of construction teams knocking down portions of the East Wing, first revealed by The Washington Post on Monday, have rattled city residents, historians and politicians, many of whom contended that Trump was wrongly tearing apart “The People’s House” to build his long-desired ballroom.

“It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it,” Hillary Clinton, who battled Trump for the presidency in 2016, wrote on social media.

Others contend that Trump’s shifting projections and promises — such as pledging in July that the ballroom wouldn’t “interfere” with the White House, and increasing his estimate of cost and how many people will fit in the building — illustrate the need for more transparency. Conservative commentator Byron York said Trump “needs to tell the public now what he is doing with the East Wing of the White House. And then tell the public why he didn’t tell them before he started doing it.”

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1980609785666879553

Rebecca Miller, executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting historic sites in Washington, said dozens of concerned citizens from the city and around the country have called and emailed her to express outrage.

Miller said she has had to explain that the White House, because of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, is exempt from the required reviews that other federal agencies must undergo when seeking to alter government property.

“Our hands are tied,” Miller said, adding that normally government officials discuss major projects with preservationists — but not this time. “It’s very frustrating that there’s nothing that the organization can do from a legal or advocacy perspective.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit created by Congress to help preserve historic buildings, urged the administration “to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review processes,” including a pair of commissions that have reviewed past White House construction.

Polls have shown many Americans are concerned. YouGov polling conducted Tuesday found that 53 percent opposed demolishing part of the East Wing, 23 percent supported it and the remainder were unsure. YouGov also found that 23 percent believed the ballroom will have a positive effect on the White House, 35 percent believed it will have a negative effect, and the remainder were neutral or unsure.

But the project is moving forward. White House officials said Tuesday to expect a full-scale teardown of the East Wing, defending it as a “modernization” of the building. They also touted past renovations, circulating a fact sheet that argued Trump was continuing a “proud presidential legacy” of changing the White House grounds — although the swimming pool, tennis pavilion and other past projects they highlighted pale next to the president’s planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom, which would be nearly twice the footprint of the 55,000-square-foot main sectionof the White House next door. Trump said this week that the ballroom will seat nearly 1,000 people, up from an earlier estimate of about 650.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Can anyone stop Trump’s teardown of the East Wing? – The Washington Post

#2025 #90000SquareFeet #America #Destruction #DonaldTrump #EastWing #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NotHisHouse #Opinion #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpSBallroom #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse

#TheGremlinZoo #TrumpsBallRoom

Sorry East Wing, it was good knowing you…