In the past few months, Trump has managed to turn the White House, its grounds, and nearby areas into a giant mess. Is it possible for the damage the South lawn caused by the cage matches to be repaired by July 4–the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? And what about the reflecting pool? What a boondoggle that turned out to be! And it looks like the East Wing mess is going to be there for a long time, as Trump battles in court to build his imitation-Versailles ballroom.
Trump is obsessed with remaking Washington DC to resemble the Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower aesthetic, with gold plating and marble everywhere. And of course, every project will involve heavy duty corruption as Trump hands all the jobs to old cronies and political donors.
Of all the memes circulated about the American President, the toddler in diapers or giant baby playing with toy bombers in the Iranian LEGO videos probably comes closest to the spectacle inside the gilded bunker. But Trump thinks of himself as a Builder not a warrior. He has spent his life trying to live up to the unmet expectations of Fred Trump, a man who knew foundations and concrete and actually had put hammer to nail. Donald grew up at that man’s side, costumed in hard hat but with hands destined to remain forever soft. He learned the profane patois of New York and New Jersey contractors but farmed out the rest of it.
Trump’s second term is remarkable for more aberrances than we can track. But chief among them are the mysterious, unnecessary projects to demolish East Wing, re-coat the Reflecting Pool, affix gold decorations to the Oval Office with super glue and until stopped, tear down and re-do the Kennedy Center. An arc-de-Trump waits on the drawing board.
The only reasonable explanation for this orgy of wasteful brick and mortar is that the handlers need toys and games to keep the old man from disrupting the serious business of making war, destroying the sciences, defunding humanitarians, filling concentration camps, and wrecking alliances – matters attended to with great devotion by Vought, Miller, Kegseth, Kennedy and Wiles – and nameless administration elves whose allegiances are most definitely not to the American people.
One sure sign that the Bob the Builder projects exist to placate and distract the Old Man is the near total lack of transparency around the contracting processes. Normally, federal agencies like the National Park Service would oversee the reflecting pool, and the National Capital Planning Commission would sign off on the East Wing project. Contracts normally overseen by the federal General Services Administration (GSA) were presented directly by the Executive Residence of the White House. There is no known evidence of GSA oversight.
These baffling, expensive boondoggles seem to serve two purposes. They keep the old man occupied and open the spigot on taxpayer funds for the claque in New York, Jersey and Florida who have either done business with the old man over the years or ponied up for a Mar a Lago membership.
Susie and the Cats,, by Angela Thomson
The peeling algae-choked disaster of the $14 million Reflecting Pool improvement made news this weekend. The White House gave a no-bid $6.9 million contract to a company, Atlantic Industrial Coating….
Atlantic then brought on a subcontractor from Oklahoma, Mid-America Industrial Coatings whose truck was seen at the pool. Reporter Gabe Sanchez tweeted in May that he called Atlantic to inquire about the subcontract. The owner “became evasive and shut down the conversation,” Sanchez reported, stating “That’s none of your business.” And it wouldn’t be the Epstein class-infested administration if a former chief operating officer of the Mid-America didn’t also have multiple felony convictions for child sex abuse.
There there’s the man hired to keep the reflecting pool clear and free of algae: John J. Cafaro, a Taftian cigar chomping dandy with a Hitler haircut and ‘stache, another in a long line of individuals and events that suggest America passed through a wormhole into a Marvel Comic alternative universe around 2016.
Cafaro owns the aptly named Green Water Solutions. He bagged the no-bid $1.6 million contract despite – or because of? – a record of pleading guilty to bribing public officials. There is now more algae on the pool than there was before the project.
President Donald Trump’s makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations is not going according to plan.
Then, the new Trump-branded “American flag blue” color was short-lived as algae turned the pool green, causing the administration to send crews to dump hydrogen peroxide into the expansive pool to deal with the problem.
In recent days, NBC News spotted some blue paint chipping off the surface, with strips of it peeling away and floating atop the pool for visitors and passers-by to see as the busy summer tourist season in the nation’s capital gets underway.
On the west side of the pool Thursday, a small section of the blue painted surface appeared to be lifting away, exposing the darker unpainted layer underneath. A strip of detached paint could be seen floating beneath the water’s surface.
Algae still remain visible along the edges of the pool despite ongoing cleaning efforts. The developing deterioration drew the attention of onlookers who stopped to take a closer look.
The Trump administration is hardly the first to struggle to clean up the Reflecting Pool. But the algae-infused green color has drawn significant attention in recent days after the president slammed the pool earlier this year as “filthy” and “dirty,” promising to make it “beautiful” and blue at minimal expense.
For days, workers have been trying to rid the Reflecting Pool of algae after a more than $14 million renovation that President Donald Trump said was “done properly” and “could last for 100 years.”
But now workers have another problem to contend with: peeling paint. On Thursday, a sheet of the pool’s surface — painted in “American Flag Blue,” a color selected by the president — was seen floating in the water on the north side of the pool. It undulated in the water as curious tourists gathered, some of whom had come to see the green algae.
Pause, by Rosie Phillips
At 5:35 p.m. on Thursday, a worker came to remove the sheet of pool surface, telling a Washington Post photographer not to photograph it, despite being on public land.
The Interior Department did not immediately respond to questions about the paint and why the pool surface is separating. The agency said in a statement on Wednesday that it is treating the pool with hydrogen peroxide and “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to effectively cut off the algae’s food supply.
Steve Goodale, a swimming pool expert who viewed footage of the peeled sheet of paint, believes the pool’s surface may have been improperly prepared for the treatment.
“If there are any deficiencies with the surface prep, the surface can fail just like you see here,” he said, via email, “sheets and chunks peeling off.” Another culprit, he added, could be groundwater or pool water seeping underneath the lining.
Hydrogen peroxide can affect a pool’s surface, too, but not in the same way: “Less of a sheet peeling off and more like fading, hazing or breakdown of the material,” he said.
A bit more from the article:
On Thursday, the Interior Department press office posted on X that “the Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool — just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”
Indeed, some areas of the Reflecting Pool were looking cleaner compared with earlier in the week. Workers in chest-high waders stood in the middle of the pool and vacuumed the algae. The neon green-tinted water could be seen pouring out of tubes into nearby drainage grates. The center of the pool, though, was still neon green, and residual algae remained in the cleaned portions of the pool.
$14.6 million for this mess, and now the taxpayers will have to foot the bill for the efforts fix it. Trump has handed out another no-bid contract to another crony for the clean-up.
The federal government awarded a company owned by a Trump donor a $1.7 million contract to install a new water cleaning system for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, federal records show, as President Trump pushes to overhaul the pool — and struggles with a bout of algae and a peeling paint job.
The no-bid contract to install a “Nano Bubble” filtration system went to Green Water Solutions, an Ohio-based company whose owner is listed on federal contracting documents as “JJ Cafaro Investment Trust.” The president and CEO of that trust is identified as John J. Cafaro on Federal Election Commission filings.
Prisac Nicholai, Self portrait with my cat
Cafaro has donated to several GOP candidates and conservative causes in recent years. He has donated extensively to Mr. Trump’s campaign and to Trump-linked groups, giving $250,000 to the Trump Victory fundraising committee at one point in 2020. FEC records show he also made donations to Democrats at various points.
A businessman and real estate developer, Cafaro pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in 2010 over donations to his daughter’s congressional campaign. Nearly a decade earlier, he pleaded guiltyto conspiring to bribe Democratic Rep. James Traficant, and cooperated with prosecutors.
Cafaro and his wife own a home in Palm Beach, Florida, less than a mile from the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Green Water Solutions is also known as Greenwater Services. Inquiries to Cafaro did not yield a response, and the company referred CBS News to the National Park Service, a division of the Department of the Interior. The New York Times was first to report on Cafaro’s involvement in the Reflecting Pool project.
On its website, Green Water Solutions describes its specialty as purifying water to remove algae, bacteria and other contaminants using a system that injects ozone-infused “nano bubbles” into the water.
Lets hope it works.
Last night, Trump decided to blame his reflecting pool on “vandals.”
“It’s called ‘New Pond Syndrome,'” says Steve Goodale, a Canadian swimming pool specialist known online as “Swimming Pool Steve.” “It’s a known thing that happens when you take a natural, clear body of water like this that sits in an open air environment and you try to start it up, very often you end up with green water almost immediately.”
Goodale says the process took longer — a matter of days — to unfold in this case likely due to the sheer size of the pool, which measures 2,030 feet long and has a surface area of approximately 338,000 square feet….
Rosalina Stancheva Christova, a professor of aquatic ecology at George Mason University in Virginia, took water samples from the pool on Tuesday. She confirmed the algae belongs to the genus Desmodesmus, which she said is “growing in excessive amounts” but is not toxic or harmful.
Christova says this kind of common green algae is found all over the region, especially this time of year. The reflecting pool in particular provides “excellent conditions” for algae growth, she said: shallow, stagnant water, strong sunlight and no shade.
“It could happen every single summer,” she added. “But it seems that the disturbance of the pond during the renovations [is] accelerating this process.”
Christova said last month’s renovations may have affected the balance of nutrients in the pool, potentially accelerating the algae blooms. Goodale similarly views the resurfacing as one of several contributing factors.
“The new, darker interior surface is going to absorb more sunlight,” Goodale says. “It is going to result in water that’s warmer, and that ultimately is going to lead to more prolific algae growth.”
As National Park Service workers poured gallons of hydrogen peroxide into Donald Trump’s newly overhauled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, observers worried about the families of nonvoters that actually use the water: ducks and their ducklings.
It’s a “bad day to be a duck,” remarked a NOTUS reporter on X this week while watching the desperate bid to control blooming algae with chemicals. Some people on social media claim to have seen dead ducks in the pool….
A little girl in peasant dress, playing with a cat by Danish-Norwegian artist Peder Severin Krøyer.
A 3 percent concentration is generally considered safe. Containers of hydrogen peroxide being poured into the Reflecting Pool were marked as a “12 percent” solution, Common Dreams reported. A 12 percent solution is strong enough to “cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has detailed warnings and suggestions for “medical management” of the chemical.
Hydrogen peroxide is “not absorbed by the skin, but can cause systemic toxicity when inhaled or ingested,” notes the CDC. It’s also a “powerful” oxidizing agent; when it comes in contact with organic material, spontaneous combustion can occur,” the agency warns.
It’s not known how much of the bleaching chemical is being dumped into the Reflecting Pool that many ducks use as a pond. In addition, at this time of year several tiny ducklings are trailing their moms in the water. Their size could make them more vulnerable to toxins.
President Donald Trump on Friday claimed the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was intentionally vandalized and said law enforcement is actively investigating, as the administration has scrambled to fix the pool’s recent deterioration just days after Trump’s nearly $15 million renovation.
“We’ve had some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool,” Trump said in a late night post on Truth Social without providing evidence. “The algae is 75% gone, and the condition will soon be completely remedied, and the area that was vandalized, fortunately, is just a small area of damage, and will be fixed early next week.”
The post comes one day after blue material at the bottom of the pool began peeling off. The Reflecting Pool was painted blue and refilled in recent weeks as part of the pricey renovation ordered by Trump.
The president linked the alleged vandalism at the Reflecting Pool to the mysterious etching of “8647” into the grass on the National Mall days prior.
Johannes Albert Neuhuys, A girl playing with the cat 1877
“Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed. No different than the chemicals that were used on the National Mall, they used something similar in the Reflecting Pool to try to destroy and demean our beautiful work,” Trump claimed.
When used as slang, the number 86 can refer to getting rid of or tossing something out. Trump is currently the 47th president. The phrase has recently been used to signal opposition to Trump.
A new image shows the numbers appearing even bolder than when they were originally discovered etched in the grass on the National Mall in Washington, DC more than a week ago.
Keep telling yourself that, you demented old geezer. Don the Builder has created this tremendous mess with a relatively small project. Can you imagine how bad it could get when when he really gets going with the ballroom and his idiotic arch?
Yesterday Trump held an event to display another renovation project: his new Airforce One plane, which he somehow grifted from the government of Qatar.
President Donald Trump on Friday officially unveiled his new Air Force One jet that was contentiously given to him by the Qatari government, declaring it would be used during a ceremonial flyover in Washington on July 4 to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States.
Trump welcomed the delivery of the luxurious Boeing 747 in an appearance at Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington that began with him exiting the aircraft and walking down the steps.
Decked out in a red, white and dark-blue blue color scheme — a departure from the lighter blue on the previous model — the jet is set to be used by Trump during events marking the nation’s landmark anniversary.
“Nobody tops this one, and that’s the way we have to have it for our country. Nobody even comes close,” Trump said.
The jet will lead a flyover — “the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” Trump said — involving various other military planes on July 4.
He repeatedly praised the plane, calling it “the largest and the greatest in every aspect.” It will be a “flying White House at a level of luxury no one has ever seen before,” he added.
The plane is estimated to be worth $400 million, but the U.S. government has likely spent substantially more to make it ready for use.
Meanwhile, Americans are struggling to pay for gas, groceries and health care.
And what is going on with the Kennedy Center? Trump was ordered by a judge to remove his name from the building and cancel his plans to shut it down for 2 years. Workmen came and did something, but no one can tell if the Trump name has really been removed, because he is hiding the front of the building with huge tarps.
In the early hours of June 13, in an action that turned out to be news around the world, workers hung massive tarps from scaffolding across the front of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and under court order removed President Trump’s name from the marble facade.
Or did they?
Natalie and Persik, by Daniel Pagán
True, the center’s operations chief, Matt Floca, filed a sworn declaration with a federal court later that day saying that Mr. Trump’s name had been removed. And true, a New York Times photographer captured evidence through an opening in the tarp that the letter “A” came off. Another photographer recorded evidence of the demise of a “D.”
But in a downer denouement for Mr. Trump’s critics, a week later the tarps are still there, prompting some to wonder whether at least some of the letters are, too. As of Friday evening, there was no visual evidence that the letters splashed across the building had been restored to “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Peering behind the tarps is impossible because they now lie tight against the building’s front.
“I don’t know if they took down the sign, because I can’t see it,” said Luna Woo, a violinist visiting from Portland, Ore., as part of the National Symphony Orchestra’s Summer Music Institute. She and other young musicians in the program have been trying to see behind the tarps from a practice room overlooking them. No luck.
So when will the tarps come down?
A Kennedy Center spokeswoman, Roma Daravi, emailed a terse response:
“The scaffolding and tarp will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels. Best, Public Relations.”
I know this seems like a lightweight post, but these are the issues that our “president” is focused on. I’m not sure if the country can survive 2-1/2 more years of this chaos–not to mention the grifting and outright corruption.
Anyway, I hope you are all enjoying the weekend, despite the insanity in Washington DC.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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 reportersfound 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 adaptedsufficiently 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?
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
“Meanwhile, early this morning somewhere near Nashville…” John Buss, repeat1968,
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The headlines are yet another mash-up of feelings run amok and logic gone awry. Another week has passed, and I don’t regret getting rid of cable and most forms of TV news. It’s just all one big tabloid of rampant stupidity. Here’s a great headline from The Intercept about our nation’s FBI Director. “Kash Patel Got Arrested for Public Urination After a Night of Drinking. The FBI director was arrested twice in his youth for alcohol-related incidents that he said were “not representative of my usual conduct.”
It’s another sign of why Republicans never do any due diligence when running committee hearings to affirm Federal Office holders in the highest offices in the nation. They’re a psychiatrist’ nightmare.
Eventually, some independent news agency catches up to them, and we read about it on the internet news stream, which is a hash of conspiracy theories and the hard work of a few good reporters. This story is reported by Trevor Aaronson.
FBI Director Kash Patel was twice arrested in incidents involving alcohol, once for public intoxication and once for public urination after leaving a bar, he admitted in a 2005 letter about disclosures on his Florida Bar application.
The letter obtained by The Intercept was part of Patel’s personnel file at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, where he once worked. The document, written “per instructions of my employer,” describes incidents of alcohol-related indiscretions not uncommon for those in their teens and twenties.
Two decades later, as Patel pushes back against allegations that drinking is impairing his leadership of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, these arrests show how Patel’s alcohol use has been subjected to scrutiny before in his professional life.
One incident recounted by Patel occurred in 2005, about four months before he wrote the letter. At the time, he was a law student at Pace University in New York celebrating with friends.
“We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic drinks,” he wrote.
When they walked home, they made a bad decision.
“In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home,” Patel said in the letter. “Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.”
Patel paid a fine after the incident, he wrote in the letter.
That’s still nothing compared to the stories we heard about dead animals and RFK Jr. This is from one of last week’s editions of The Guardian. I suppose I no longer need to explain that when I write these blog posts, they are surrounded by political cartoons, not beautiful artwork or actual photos anymore. I prefer animated Scheudenfrade. “RFK Jr once cut penis off ‘road-killed raccoon’ in New York, new book reveals. Health secretary in a diary entry said his kids were in the car as he cut off animal’s genitals in 2001 to ‘study them later’.”
Don’t worry, I’ll keep this brief. Buddha bless the entire Guardian staff that had to work on this one.
Robert F Kennedy Jr once cut the penis off a road-killed raccoon in an incident that is just one of several involving dead animals that the controversial US health secretary has been involved in.
A new book called RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise was published this week and reveals a diary entry for Kennedy that describes the prominent vaccine critic and leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement stopping his car on a New York highway on 11 November 2001.
“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” Kennedy wrote in the journal.
He added: “My kids waited patiently in the car.”
Isabel Vincent, the author of the new book, told People that he took the raccoon’s genitals so he could “study them later”.
Kennedy has long had a fascination for animal bodies, especially those he finds dead which he sometimes collects and studies. Elsewhere in the book, the author notes that a journalist traveling with Kennedy in Long Island in 2001 reported that he was fascinated by dead seagull corpses.
“I’d like to pick up some of these dead seagulls for my skull collection,” the book quotes Kennedy as saying, though his schedule on the day did not allow him to pause his journey and harvest the bones.
There have been numerous stories involving Kennedy and his treatment of dead animals.
Environmental groups were outraged over a story which revealed the former presidential candidate once severed the head of a washed-up deceased whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to his car’s roof. He also once confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park, attempting to make it look like the creature was killed by a bicyclist.
Meanwhile, hardworking, competent Federal officials get the nuisance-lawsuit treatment. This is from the Associated Press. “Justice Department drops criminal probe of Fed chair Powell, likely clearing the way for Warsh.” It’s really difficult to see how normal people stay sane and hold their offices in this environment.
The Justice Department has ended its investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, clearing a major roadblock to the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as his successor.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeannine Pirro said on X on Friday that her office was ending its probe into the Fed’s extensive building renovations because the Fed’s inspector general would scrutinize them instead.
The move could lead to a swift confirmation vote by the Senate for Warsh, a former top Fed official whom President Donald Trump, a Republican, nominated in January to replace Powell. Powell’s term as chair ends May 15. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, had said he would oppose Warsh until the investigation was resolved, effectively blocking his confirmation.
Republicans praised Warsh during a Tuesday hearing even as Democrats questioned his independence from Trump, the lack of transparency around some of his financial holdings, and what they said was his flip-flopping on interest rates. Still, Trump’s previous appointment to the Fed’s board of governors, Stephen Miran, was approved by the full Senate just 13 days after his nomination.
Investigation lacked evidence, a court says
The probe was among several undertaken by the Justice Department into Trump’s perceived adversaries. For months it had failed to gain traction as prosecutors struggled to articulate a basis to suspect criminal conduct. Other efforts by the department to prosecute Trump’s adversaries, including New York state Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, and former FBI Director James Comey, have also been unsuccessful.
A prosecutor handling the Powell case conceded at a closed-door court hearing in March that the government hadn’t found any evidence of a crime, and a judge subsequently quashed subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve. The judge, James Boasberg, said prosecutors had produced “essentially zero evidence” to suspect Powell of a crime. Boasberg branded prosecutors’ justification for the subpoenas as “thin and unsubstantiated.”
Speaking of the Republican-based press, base, and politicians peddling one conspiracy theory after another, we see that Tucker Carlson may have gone one too far. I would have never thought that possible, given their depths of depravity and idiocy. This is from The Hill. The analysis and opinions are provided by Matt Lewis.”Trump lived by the conspiracy theory — now he pays the price.” This is basically a class in Karma 101.
A truism of life — right up there with “don’t read the comments” — is that what goes around comes around. Put another way, if you live by the sword, you will eventually die by the sword.
For more than a decade, these maxims didn’t seem to apply to President Trump — a man who once strongly suggested that Barack Obama had not been born in America, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats, just to name a few of his whoppers.
To be sure, Trump defenders will note that Democratic conspiracy theories (“Russia-gate,” for example) have also been aimed at Trump. Yes, but Trump legitimately invited scrutiny, and credible analyses rejected the most extreme conclusions anyway — for example, the existence of a “pee tape” or the notion that Russia somehow manipulated election results or otherwise rigged the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Regardless, we have entered a new and possibly ironic phase of the timeline: Trump is finally discovering what it’s like to be on the losing end of a conspiracy theory.
Trump’s failure to release Epstein files was probably the inflection point. But more recently, the conspiratorial thinking about Trump has metastasized.
After Trump cast himself as Jesus on a Truth Social post, some corners of his own political ecosystem began speculating that he might instead be the Antichrist.
Tucker Carlson, for example, went on his podcast and asked, “Could this [Trump] be the Antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion: Who knows?”
Others settled on demonic possession, which in internet discourse is considered the moderate position.
Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, has the Tucker story. This from her is an Op-Ed today. “The Conspiracy Theory Behind Tucker Carlson’s Apology.” Who among us ever thought the word apology and Tucker Carlson would appear in the same headline?” He must need money or something.
Tucker Carlson, you might have heard, is sorry. Early this week he posted a long conversation with his brother, Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, in which they tried to make sense of the wreckage of the second Donald Trump presidency.
“We’re implicated in this, for sure,” said Tucker. A few moments later, he added: “It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
For those of us who have spent the past 10 years horror-struck at the mass delusion that Trump is a great man rather than a singularly rapacious and volatile charlatan, Carlson’s words might seem cathartic.
Over the past decade, conservatives have been angrily insisting that our mad emperor is elegantly clothed rather than obscenely naked. Now, finally, there’s growing agreement about his obvious unfitness. Indeed, some former Trump superfans are suddenly wondering if he might be the Antichrist.
I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.
Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.
“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”
Can any of you come up with an explanation or some elucidation on WTF is going on here? My vote goes for the rats are leaving the ship. So what better mission for the insane Orange Caligula to come up with during these headlines than yet another way to fuck up yet another National Monument of the utmost historical importance?
Will the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool be his next act of cultural devastation? This is from NBC News. “Trump says he’ll renovate ‘filthy’ reflecting pool on National Mall. At an Oval Office event, the president said he’s planning to pour a new surface for the 2,000-foot reflecting pool, giving it an “American flag blue” hue.” Well, at least it isn’t piss gold. Kyla Guilfoil has the lede.
President Donald Trump touted plans Thursday to coat the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool in an “American flag blue” hue, one of his latest construction efforts to refashion government buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C.
Trump said he was inspired to oversee renovations after a friend visited from Germany and noted its decay.
“He said, ‘it’s filthy, dirty. The water is disgusting looking. It’s not representative of the country,'” Trump recalled during a White House event Thursday on drug prices.
He posted a video speaking about the renovation of the more than 2,000-foot-long pool on Truth Social, shortly before his White House event with reporters.
“Right now, it’s got no water in it because it was in terrible shape. It was filthy, dirty, and it leaked like a sieve for many years,” Trump said in the video. “So I actually went over, went with Secret Service and a group of people, and I took, took a look at it.”
The president said there were initial plans to remove the granite in the pool and replace the stone, but that process would have cost $300 million and taken more than three years to complete.
Once again, I sit at my desk and shake my head. It’s a good thing day-drinking was never my thing.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
That’s still nothing compared to the stories we heard about dead animals and RFK Jr. This is from one of last week’s editions of 
Meanwhile, hardworking, competent Federal officials get the nuisance-lawsuit treatment. This is from the 
Speaking of the Republican-based press, base, and politicians peddling one conspiracy theory after another, we see that Tucker Carlson may have gone one too far. I would have never thought that possible, given their depths of depravity and idiocy. This is from 
Michelle Goldberg, writing for the 
Can any of you come up with an explanation or some elucidation on WTF is going on here? My vote goes for the rats are leaving the ship. So what better mission for the insane Orange Caligula to come up with during these headlines than yet another way to fuck up yet another National Monument of the utmost historical importance?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
jjlolatina
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments