Peak Trumpism
After President Donald Trump’s boastful, $16 million-plus makeover of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial was spoiled by rapidly blooming algae and peeling paint, he flew into one of his trademark weekend Truth Social rages against “Radical Left Lunatics.” He baselessly blamed “terrible Vandals,” and called for the arrest and “Years in jail” for people who had, in his words, committed “a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”
The entire debacle has all the hallmarks of a flailing dictator story. First, Trump’s supposed “makeovers” of Washington, D.C. landmarks and monuments are nothing more than vanity projects, as he fancies himself the sole definer of our national history, and importantly, our national aesthetics. Second, his administration doled out no-bid, taxpayer-funded contracts, one to a Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor who was once embroiled in a bribery scandal. (Yes, that scandal involves vintage TPM character Jim Traficant). Now, Trump is apoplectic that his vaunted “American flag blue” paint has peeled away as if it had been installed with a glue stick — a disastrous symbolism even Trump recognizes.
His response is to lash out, and claim, with no evidence, that curious residents and tourists had sabotaged his handiwork and even desecrated the monuments he claims to be restoring to a glory only he can achieve. As icing on the cake, his handpicked prosecutor, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, went on the state news network, aka Fox News, on Sunday to promise “serious charges” against anyone who puts their hand in the pool’s water, or touches a clump of peeling paint floating in it. She did not rule out prosecuting ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, who reported from the site last week.
Trump is baselessly accusing “vandals” of pouring “corrosive” substances into the pool to trigger the algae, and for a nonexistent 250-foot “gash into the beautiful facade.” The administration has already begun charging people, including David Hearn, a former Olympian who stopped to take a look at the reflecting pool while out for a bike ride on Friday, and spent five hours in detention at a Park Police facility before being released.
The entire episode is peak Trumpism: both preposterous and dangerous at the same time. As far as the likelihood that D.C. juries would convict anyone in the Reflecting Pool saga, just remember Sandwich Guy.
Hillbilly Elegy Elegy
“There is something deeply the matter here with JD Vance, and with this book,” is not exactly a sentence a writer wants to see in the second paragraph of a review of their newly published memoir, but that’s how Colin Dickey opens his appraisal of Communion, JD Vance’s 2028 presidential campaign salvo masquerading as a personal account of his faith journey. Dickey, writing in The New Republic, takes aim at Vance’s disingenuous efforts to pretend he’s a different kind of politician — and a different kind of religious thinker — than Trump and his evangelical loyalists. Vance’s tale of rejecting evangelicalism, and then atheism, in favor of Catholicism will baffle evangelicals and Catholics alike. For evangelicals, he left their faith for atheism, but when he returned to religion he chose Catholicism, with some disdain for his childhood religion. Catholics reading this book will be similarly mystified by how he writes about their religion, which he very recently joined but about which he nonetheless feels entitled to lecture the Pope.
“If nothing else, ‘Communion’ confirms what was already obvious: Vance is not the theologian he thinks he is, and indeed, he knows very little about the Catholic faith,” writes religious studies scholar Anthea Butler at MS NOW. Instead, Vance seems to have invented his own version of Catholicism, which he can use both as a political calling card for Republican voters and a bludgeon against the left. Remarkably, though, as Jessica Winter observes at the New Yorker, “the strongest emotion Vance seems able to express in ‘Communion’ is his distaste for the tenets and rituals of the faith he has elected to join.” This book, she writes, far more than Vance’s first, career-catapulting memoir Hillbilly Elegy, “is the work of an inveterate opportunist, one who appears torn between the urge to camouflage his careerism—Vance’s true religion—and an equally strong desire to be admired for how well and how profitably he plays the game.”
DOJ Civil Rights Division Aims to Christianize Major League Baseball
The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether the civil rights of Christian players for the San Francisco Giants were violated by the team’s special caps for Pride Night earlier this month. Four players who objected to the caps — three who had altered the cap with Bible verses, and one who refused to wear one at all — received warnings from Major League Baseball for violating its uniform policy. But in the eyes of Trump’s DOJ, MLB is woke, and, according to Harmeet Dhillon, head of Trump’s DOJ Civil Rights Division, the four players were being discriminated against for expressing “their opposition to MLB’s pro-Pride orthodoxy.” Dhillon griped to the New York Post, “It doesn’t really matter how gay San Francisco is — these workers have rights.” This is just the latest example of how far the Trump DOJ will go to completely remake the Civil Rights Division as a lawless enforcer of Christian nationalist persecution complexes.
Is the Trump Administration Now… Anti-Israel?
The Wall Street Journal editorial board goes there, accusing Trump of making Israel a “scapegoat” in his still-shaky Iran Memorandum of Understanding to end the senseless war he started in Iran. “Mr. Trump now finds himself in the position of attacking the best U.S. ally in the region for defending itself,” the board wrote. “Like Barack Obama, he risks becoming an apologist for Iran. This may win him support among Mr. Vance’s friends in MAGA’s anti-Israel wing. But it risks giving away the gains of his military campaign.” Is there something more enraging the Journal could write about Trump than to liken him to Obama?
No one in the conservative world, though, wants to ask this question: isn’t criticizing Israel, as both Trump and Vance have now done, grounds for being investigated for antisemitism by the Trump administration?
Tulsi Gabbard Was Not Acting Alone
The Washington Post’s Jon Swaine has a shocking, meticulously reported story about former Congresswoman and now former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her lifelong relationship with the Hare Krishna breakaway group, the Science of Identity Foundation. Swaine’s investigation makes the case that Chris Butler, the group’s guru, directed many of Gabbard’s legislative and media actions throughout her tenure in Congress — if not longer.
Bill Pulte Bulldozes His Way Into Gabbard’s Former Role
After Trump blew up the prospect of quick confirmation hearings for Jay Clayton, his actual nominee to replace Gabbard as DNI in order to install Bill Pulte, his interim pick, Pulte showed up a day early at HQ and proceeded to make noises about firing hundreds of employees and demanding to know whether a private plane was one of the position’s perks. Pulte, as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is best known for ginning up ultimately unsuccessful, evidence-free criminal investigations of Trump nemeses former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud; for encouraging Trump to post the AI-generated photo of himself as Jesus; and for triggering Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to threaten to “punch you in your fucking face.”
RFK, Jr. Holding Up Crucial Social Services Funding
The Department of Health and Human Services, now under a directive that all funding be approved by the White House and Department Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to states and social services organizations that provide suicide prevention, opioid addiction, disease outbreak, and other crucial public health interventions, NOTUS reports. The first step in this new review system requires all funding Congress has already appropriated to “first clear an AI screening which flags certain keywords that the administration finds unacceptable, such as culture, harm reduction, gender and transgender.”
Happy Summer!
National Parks, a summer holiday destination made more attractive this year by rising costs of flying, are plagued by staffing shortages, gridlock, and delays at entry gates, the New York Times reports.
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