President Donald Trump is dragging down his fellow Republicans and heightening their risk of losing control of the Senate, the House of Representatives and/or both in the upcoming midterm elections.

Despite the president claiming on Wednesday that his poll numbers “are the highest they have ever been,” data journalist G. Elliott Morris wrote that same day that the actual survey numbers paint a very different picture.

“Turning to the midterms, the Democrats lead Republicans on the House congressional ballot by a margin of 7 points, 50 percent to 43 percent among registered voters,” Morris explained. “That is within the margin of error of our poll’s reading of an 8-point margin for the party in May. Among all U.S. adults, the lead is D+6 (48 percent to 42 percent). 7 percent of registered voters say they don’t know who they would vote for.”

He added, “Democrats have led the generic ballot in every single Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll since we began fielding in May 2025. Across 13 monthly polls (we skipped December 2025), Democrats have never trailed, with margins ranging from +5 to +10 points among registered voters.”

Morris noted some good news for Trump, namely that his poll numbers regarding rising prices have stopped falling. Yet that does not compensate for other issues.

“Our poll finds Donald Trump’s overall approval rating among U.S. adults stable at 37 percent this month, with 60 percent of Americans disapproving of how he’s handling his job as president,” Morris explained. Despite the fact that he is no longer falling, he is still struggling overall because “in raw percentage terms, just 25 percent of Americans approve of how he’s handling prices, while 71 percent disapprove and 54 percent disapprove strongly. That is a tough number to post on the issue people say is the most important to them.”

Other issues do not help the president, who has been struggling with falling poll numbers for months.

“He is underwater on 11 of the 12 issues we tested,” Morris said. “His health care rating fell to -32 (from -28 in May), and on government funding and social programs, he has slipped to -25. He’s stuck in the low-to-mid 20s nearly everywhere else — including -25 on jobs and the economy, -23 on trade, -22 on foreign policy, -21 on elections and democracy, and -20 on education.”

Trump is still in positive territory on border security at a net rating of +2 (48 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove),” Morris explained. “Yet he is still negative on related issues, including immigration at -12, crime and public safety (-10), and deportations (-10). It is a simple truth but worth repeating: this is not the political environment the president entered office with a short 15 months ago.”

Trump’s floundering approval ratings, when combined with Democrats’ growing anger toward the president, points to an enthusiasm gap that could have profound ramifications for Trump during the midterms.

“[D]emocrats are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about voting for non-Republican candidates this November and we have seen this not once, not twice, not in an outlier way, but in a consistent way,” Puck News' John Heilemann told MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace on Wednesday. “Democrats are showing up and they're showing up in large numbers by the standards of off-year elections and the standards of special elections, and they're not just exceeding [Trump’s margins from 2024] but blowing them out of the water.”

A conservative commentator says President Donald Trump’s algae-green renovations of the Reflecting Pool offer a slew of metaphors to define his entire presidency.

“The reflecting pool is a microcosm of nearly everything that vexes people about the second Trump term,” wrote The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg on Wednesday. “We can start with the decision to ignore the usual rules and procedures to give a no-bid job to a contractor for the repair and paintwork. Trump said it would cost $1.8 million. The costs have grown nearly tenfold. To deal with the insurrectionist algae, he gave another no-bid job to a Mar-a-Lago crony, campaign donor, and convicted felon who looks like a villain from the old Dick Tracy comic strip.”

Goldberg added that “The man who vowed to ‘drain the swamp’ of D.C.’s corrupt cronyism used figurative swampy means to deliver literal swampy ends.”

Yet in addition to symbolically manifesting Trump’s failure to drain the swamp as he promised to do, Goldberg said that the “pool fiasco” also demonstrates Trump’s inability to deliver on what he promises.

“A project Trump touted as proof of his genius and expertise becomes proof of unpatriotic enemies undermining him when it flounders,” Goldberg wrote. “Without any evidence, Trump claimed that the only reason the reflecting pool’s paint is peeling and algae blooming is because anti-American ‘vandals’ sabotaged it with a ‘300-foot long gash.’”

Additionally, Goldberg noted that Trump’s baseless excuse for the Reflecting Pool’s problems — namely, that vandals sabotaged his renovations (a charge which ignores internal documents proving that the administration had a number of logistical issues during the construction project) — are as absurd as so many other things he has said during his administration.

“How vandals evaded National Park Police, security cameras, and his own National Guard deployment remains unknown,” Goldberg said. “Never mind how they put a 300-foot gash in a paint job Trump described as, ‘So very strong. You couldn't, if you had a knife—I don't want to give anybody ideas—if you had a knife, you can't even cut it. So strong, so powerful.’”

Goldberg also pointed to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s absurd attempt to defend Trump’s renovations.

“If you look at Washington and Lincoln, these are two men that faced monumental tasks and stood up in historic fashion and delivered for the American people,” Hegseth said. “And, when you step back and look at 47 years of what Iran waged … there’s only one man, over the course of both presidencies, who has stood up and said they will never get a nuclear weapon.”

Goldberg is not the only right-wing commentator to blast Trump’s Reflecting Pool controversy as emblematic of his presidency. Political commentator David Rothkopf said something similar earlier this month.

“It’s turned into a tourist attraction in downtown D.C. for people to hate on Trump, right? They come down, and they reflect on what a bad president they’ve got,” Rothkopf told The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles. “And then he’s like, ‘Holy mackerel, this is a mess. What are we going to do?’”

He compared this issue to other Trump failed renovations.

“Who defaced the Oval Office?” Rothkopf said. “Who destroyed the East Wing? Who put a giant claw on the South Lawn of the White House? Who is building a gilded ballroom for billionaires to dance in while Americans starve? Who is building an arch to honor himself? Who’s covering all the horse statues in Washington in gold leaf?”

A Republican congressional candidate in Florida who openly embraces President Donald Trump’s agenda is calling for a Democratic ex-president to be deported.

In a 30-second video, Belinda Kesier promoted her candidacy for Florida's 22nd congressional district by arguing that she would not only deport undocumented immigrants, but also aim to deport the Democrat she blames for America’s supposed immigration problem, former President Joe Biden.

"I'm Belinda Keiser, and I approve this message because we should deport Joe Biden for what he did,” Keiser proclaimed at the end of the ad, one of many she has run in her bid to claim that seat. Earlier in the same video a narrator vowed that Keiser would “stand with President Trump” and that her goal would be “to deport illegals, to protect American families and American jobs.”

Keiser has been endorsed by a number of Florida politicians who are also leading figures in MAGA world. These include Reps. Aaron Bean, Jimmy Patronis, Neal Dunn and Randy Fine.

Dunn, who is leaving office after his current term, said that Keiser “has served our state well leading her private sector work, which has helped propel many young professionals into the workforce. She knows what Florida needs and has demonstrated that with her support of Republican ideals and principles. Belinda would be an excellent addition to the caucus and the effort to continue to Make America Great.”

Similarly, Fine described Keiser as a staunch supporter of Trump’s MAGA movement.

“Belinda has been a friend since I first entered politics, and I have seen firsthand what she has done to fight for Florida,” Fine told Florida Politics about his endorsement of Keiser. “She has been a champion for our nation-leading higher education system and the future of every Florida student. Belinda has done so much for this state, and I could not be more excited for her to join me in the fight in Washington to Make America Great Again!”

In pre-Trump America Keiser’s statement might have been shocking, but Trump and his supporters have openly advocated for persecuting the president’s political opponents — and sometimes done more than that. Trump has pursued charges against former FBI Director James Comey, arguing that his posting of a picture spelling '8647' with seashells was a threat against the president. He has also pursued indictments that experts agree are tenuous and likely politically-motivated against Democrats including New York Attorney General Letitia James, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, California Sen. Adam Schiff, Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado and Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania.

Trump has also indicted his own former national security adviser, John Bolton, another of his critics.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a statement from the White House.

A conservative commentator blasted President Donald Trump on Wednesday, alleging that he did not remember the name of Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA), a swing state House member running in a highly competitive race against Democratic nominee Bob Brooks.

“In the meantime, Donald Trump is utterly deranged,” Schmidt said about the leader of the Republican Party of which Schmidt himself (who advised President George W. Bush) was once a prominent member. “In Pennsylvania, he cannot remember the name of the congressman he has come to campaign for, but he does know the name of the manager of the facility — and watch these people cheer for their economic annihilation.”

Schmidt was referring to Trump’s speech on Tuesday at the Mack Trucks facility in Lower Macungie, PA. Packed with hundreds of Trump supporters in a spacious campus, yet filled with the odor of industrial machinery, Trump first delivered a tribute to outgoing Mack Trucks president Stephen Roy. After that, he promoted Mackenzie’s candidacy without mentioning him by name.

"We got to get a certain — we got to get a certain very talented congressman reelected,” Trump said in his speech. “You know that. We got to get him. Where are you? Where are you, Mr. Congressman? We got to get you back in. Thank you, and thank you, Steven."

Schmidt described Trump as “crazy Donald,” deriding him for “[talking] to this crowd in Pennsylvania after forgetting the name of the congressman he was there to campaign for.” He proceeded to criticize Trump for baselessly claiming a Republican candidate for Los Angeles mayor, his fellow ex-reality TV star Spencer Pratt, lost the election due to voter fraud. After that, he returned to alleging that Trump is corrupt and unfit to be president.

Trump is guilty of “corruption like has never been imagined in the history of the United States, and a reflecting pool connecting the Lincoln and Washington monuments that has become a fetid, scum-filled pond with dead floating ducks, guarded by the Army and fenced off by the National Park Service to keep tourists away from documenting Trump's vandalism,” Schmidt said. Make America Great Again, indeed.”

He concluded, “The American people have survived two years of Trump, and he's about to have a big check put on him. He is falling apart — obese and elderly, sleepy and incontinent. Donald Trump is the worst president in American history.”

Speaking exclusively to AlterNet about Schmidt’s accusation, Mackenzie campaign manager Andres Weller claimed Schmidt was mistaken.

"Apparently, Mr. Schmidt missed President Trump repeatedly highlighting Congressman Mackenzie’s great work for the Lehigh Valley and Poconos and directly saying 'We got to get Ryan Mackenzie elected,'” Weller told AlterNet. "Made up storylines by Democrats like Steve Schmidt are only meant to try and divert attention from the major wins Congressman Mackenzie has achieved for the district, like the $47 million he recently secured that will support good-paying, union manufacturing jobs at Mack Defense."

White House Press Secretary Anna Kelly added that, “No serious person considers the nutjob founder of the Lincoln Project a ‘conservative’ or cares what he thinks."

"While this loser spends his time directing staff to pose as neo-Nazis, President Trump was proud to visit thousands of great patriots in Pennsylvania, who are benefitting (sic) from historic tax cuts and job creating under this administration," said Kelly — while misspelling the word "benefiting" in an email.

Mackenzie is a first-term incumbent seeking to fend off Brooks, a former firefighter widely believed to be capable of waging a competitive race against the Republican. When AlterNet attended the rally on Tuesday, this reporter noted that the attendees backed the president even in his policies that are controversial outside of the MAGA base.

A new study reveals that supporters of President Donald Trump, and of conservative politics more generally, tend to interpret the act of smiling differently than people who are not right-leaning.

A recent study in the journal Animal Behavioral Scientist surveyed 1,385 American adults shortly before the 2024 presidential election. The study covered a diverse range of individuals based on different ethnicities, income levels and age brackets, asking them to assess 15 different reasons why a person might smile according to a seven-point scale.

“When the researchers analyzed the survey responses, they grouped the data to find underlying patterns,” wrote PsyPost’s Eric W. Dolan on Wednesday. “They found that participant answers generally fell into two broad categories. One category favored social bonding as the main reason for smiling, while the other category favored managing social hierarchies as the primary motivation.”

Dolan added, “The authors found that identifying with the Republican Party was the strongest and most consistent predictor of how a person viewed smiles. Participants who identified as Republicans had substantially higher odds of endorsing hierarchy management as a reason for smiling compared to non-Republicans. This relationship remained consistent even after the researchers accounted for different demographic factors like age, gender, and income.”

The lead author of the study, University of Arkansas political scientist Patrick Stewart, argued that these results shed light on how people interpret the political process.

“In the real world of politics you want to know who your leaders really are, and the best way of accomplishing that is by closely watching what they do and not just what they say,” Stewart said. “But perhaps most important is understanding followers and just what they want out of their leaders. After all, there are no leaders without followers.”

He added, “If you grew up and live in a small community where everyone knows everybody else and everyone has a ‘place’ in the power structure, you don’t need to smile to signal that you are friendly and cooperative, you just have to show that you know who has power and who doesn’t. And this perspective of the world affects how an individual approaches the public good, in other words, politics.”

Dr. David Reiss — a psychiatrist who contributed to the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” which argued Trump is mentally unfit to be president and challenged the Goldwater Rule barring mental health professionals from commenting on figures they have not personally diagnosed — told AlterNet he was intrigued by the study’s findings.

“I think in general it makes sense,” Reiss told AlterNet. “ ... Anyone who's following a person blindly is going to interpret things to fit what they want it to say, rather than being objective.”

By contrast psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham, formerly of Tufts University, offered a mixed assessment of the study. Abraham was one of the signatories of a letter to Congress earlier this year that urged lawmakers to invoke the 25th Amendment or take other measures to rein in Trump based on his perceived cognitive decline.

“It sounds like an interesting study,” Abraham said. “It has a number of features that are particularly attractive,” including “the fact that they looked to explain their findings through multiple variables and not just one. The study really requires a careful assessment in terms of its validity and reliability. There are certain positive features I can identify right off the top of my head — it's an admirable sample size, and they took pains to try to rule out confounding variables. That's really important.”

Yet he added that these positive characteristics don’t “necessarily mean that you should take this one to the bank, for a couple of reasons. One is that the results are so partisan that you have to explore the methodology to see if the researchers took adequate pains to protect the process from their own bias — to what extent the researchers were biased, either consciously or unconsciously. A very simple question is: who paid for the study? That makes sense.”

He added, “Secondly, how did they assemble a sample of more than a thousand?”

President Donald Trump is struggling to keep even his own supporters on board with his war despite his flailing, according to a political scientist.

“The American public doesn’t like losing a war, doesn’t like backing a loser in a war, doesn’t want to throw good money after bad,” international relations professor Nicholas Grossman from the University of Illinois told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on Wednesday. “So if there were perhaps some sort of actual threat to the United States, or there were some sort of national interest that he was achieving in the process of the war, then maybe there would be an argument for the American people to sacrifice in some manner. But there isn’t at all.”

Prior to discussing that with Sargent, Grossman explained that Trump’s claim that Iran has agreed to high-level international inspectors is suspicious, both due to Iran denying this and Trump’s own track record of unreliable statements about the conflict.

“I think it’s pretty simple, in that Trump is lying, or at minimum heavily exaggerating and bull—— ,” Grossman said.

But Trump's lies aren't getting him far with voters — including his base.

"[S]elling it to the American people as some sort of positive thing — that’s not going to work at all. People can see the economic effects, and those are likely to get worse rather than better as the effects really reverberate out. And they never supported the war in the first place," said Grossman.

"So you’re really looking at a triple whammy for Trump," said Sargent. "As you say, the public opposed the war at the outset, which is itself unusual. And then the public had a direct glimpse of the economic effects of the war when the Strait of Hormuz closed. With unusual clarity, Trump was directly tied to skyrocketing prices. And then on top of that, Trump is now asking for another $80 billion. That’s a triple whammy of sorts."

But Grossman said it's actually worse than even that.

"You can add on top of that that the American public doesn’t like losing a war, doesn’t like backing a loser in a war, doesn’t want to throw good money after bad. So if there were perhaps some sort of actual threat to the United States, or there were some sort of national interest that he was achieving in the process of the war, then maybe there would be an argument for the American people to sacrifice in some manner. But there isn’t at all."

Trump’s beleaguered base is splitting over the war. Earlier this week right-wing commentator Tucker Carslon said he was leaving the Republican Party because he believes Trump started the Iran war to help Israel rather than to pursue America’s own best interests.

“I would not support the Republican party, there's no chance I would support the Republican party,” Carlson said in a recent podcast episode. “How could I support a political party that is not loyal to the United States. I voted Republican my entire life, I have been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican party, but there is no defending this. I'm out.”

By contrast, this reporter spoke with a Trump supporter at a Mack Trucks facility in Lower Macungie, PA on Tuesday who lambasted Carlson for his betrayal of Trump.

“He's not a Republican anymore," said the voter. "He doesn't back Trump. I don't like him anymore."

President Donald Trump is contemplating an economic relief package to farmers that could equal as much as $17.3 billion — and experts are calling him out for his so-called “welfare.”

“Yet again Trump's moronic policies screwed over farmers and now he wants to take our money and give it to them as welfare,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller posted on X on Wednesday. “Maybe Trump should pay them himself out of his crypto company instead.”

The “welfare” in question is an economic aid bill supported by Republican lawmakers to provide assistance to farmers struggling in the current economy. The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), through its president Zippy Duvall, described it in a statement as a move in the right direction toward helping the agricultural community. The AFBF said any relief package should prioritize "economic aid to help farmers struggling with historic inflation, protecting interstate commerce from a patchwork of state laws and approving the sale of E15 blended fuel year-round."

Speaking with AlterNet, economist Ed Gresser — Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute — agreed with Miller’s statement that Trump’s tariffs have been bad for farmers, but pushed back on the characterization of potential financial support as “welfare.”

“Tariffs have been quite bad for farmers in two ways,” Gresser explained. “One is that they have led to reactions against American products overseas, sometimes by governments and sometimes by public opinion. In a typical year, American agriculture exports about $180 billion worth of stuff that typically makes up about one-fifth of US farm income. So it's quite a lot: half the exports go to, or at least historically went to, China, Canada, and Mexico.”

Yet Trump’s tariffs have hurt American farmers in all three of those markets, Gresser added.

“The exports to China have shriveled up because the Chinese retaliated very hard and hit back again directly against American farmers,” Gresser said. “Mexico has kind of held up. Canada is off, not so much because the government of Canada has taken any particular steps but because Canadians have looked for American goods so as not to buy them.”

“The tariff program has badly screwed over American farmers,” Gresser added, while also pointing out that "farmers are definitely in trouble."

"I mean, they've lost a lot of income. There's been a big increase in farm bankruptcies. The idea that the US government would respond to that in the abstract is not a terrible one in my opinion.”

Democratic strategist Max Burns pointed out that same month that “the suicide rate in rural communities is now 3.5 times the national average and climbing ... [as] farmers buckle under the financial strain of crippling agricultural tariffs, rising input costs and a president who didn’t bother to mention them once in his most recent State of the Union address."

However regular taxpayers take it, Trump’s relief to farmers will shore up his support among that constituency. An Economist/YouGov poll in April found overwhelming majorities of American farmers continue to support Trump staunchly, even though many also connect their current struggles to his tariffs.

“Twenty-seven percent of rural respondents said it would be ‘impossible’ to cover an unexpected $1,000 bill. It would be easy to blame Mr Trump for the downturn,” The Economist explained. “After all, he campaigned on promises to bring down prices and revive the heartland. But rural America does not.”

President Donald Trump claims that his Reflecting Pool renovations failed because third-parties vandalized the institution — but a new story based on internal documents provides a different version of events.

“President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are the fault of vandals working with ‘knives’ in the ‘dark of night,’” in a story broken by The New York Times’ Maxine Joselow and David A. Fahrenthold on Tuesday. “But government documents obtained by Times show that while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to the ‘American flag blue’ coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that has turned the pool a bright shade of green.”

They added that the documents show workers struggling to deal with problems in their renovations even as officials in the Trump administration insisted the pool was in excellent condition.

“The pool had been drained, resealed and then refilled by June 5,” the Times reported. “Four days later, Park Service workers discovered holes, cracks and peeling caulking in parts of the pool, along with cuts in sections of the foam, according to the documents.”

Yet there is no evidence the cuts were put there by saboteurs. Instead their provenance is “unclear.”

“While a June 9 report by the U.S. Park Police described the cuts as ‘razor blade slashes’ made along a 20-foot-long stretch of the foam, the administration has yet to present evidence supporting that assertion,” the Times reported. “The documents reviewed by The Times described them as two 171-foot blade cuts but did not address how they were made.”

He added, “By June 16, workers had noticed that chunks of blue sealant that covered the pool’s bottom were peeling and floating to the surface, the documents show. That sealant was separate from the foam in the pool’s expansion joints, which allow its concrete slabs to expand and contract.”

Additionally, the workers found that they could not succeed in killing the algae that was blooming in the pool, and turning it swamp green instead of clear blue, despite installing devices for that purpose.

It was also recently reported by Politico/E&E reporters Kinnia Cheuk and Heather Richards that the Reflecting Pool will not be ready by the 4th of July celebrations as Trump promised.

"President Donald Trump's beloved Reflecting Pool liner — now peeling and cracked — won't be fixed before Independence Day celebrations, according to the California company that supplied the waterproof coating,” Cheuk and Richards reported. “That news will sink Trump's wish to have the pool looking pristine for celebrations of the nation's 250th birthday."

One of President Donald Trump’s top economic advisers, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, recently compared the Republican leader to an American founding father — and experts cannot stop laughing at the comparison.

“Economic security begins with national capacity,” Bessent wrote for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “We have rediscovered at great cost what Alexander Hamilton taught us: that every nation ‘ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.’ Our strength is derived from what we can build, for the nation that can’t produce what it needs isn’t truly secure. The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs isn’t truly sovereign. And the nation that reduces its economics to consumption isn’t truly prosperous.”

Bessent added, “As Hamilton put it, we must enlarge ‘the sphere of our domestic commerce.’ Economic security begins with the capacity to build, invent, finance and scale the industries that will define the next century, among them semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals and pharmaceuticals. More than economic sectors, these are sources of national power. The U.S. must lead in all of them.”

Hamilton is best known for co-authoring The Federalist Papers, which helped convince the American states to ratify the Constitution, and for serving as America’s first Secretary of Treasury under President George Washington. Under Washington, Hamilton laid the foundations for America’s capitalist economic system, and is widely regarded as one of the seminal thinkers in economics and political science in modern history.

Scholars have noticed the discrepancy between Bessent’s glowing praise of Trump and the reality of a Trump-Hamilton analogy.

“The most glaring historical issue is that while Hamilton’s goal as a statesman was to build a new national marketplace and a federal government to govern that market and the nation,” Gautham Rao, a historian at American University and Editor-in-Chief of Law & History Review, told AlterNet. “Trump’s central goal is to enrich himself by extracting wealth from the nation—the people—while using privileged access to the state to leverage the market for further self-enrichment.”

And Rao was not the only expert who scoffed at the analogy.

“I can't think of a favorable comparison between Trump and Hamilton,” Karl Widerquist, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University-Qatar who specializes in economics, told AlterNet. “Hamilton was an intellectual who co-wrote the Federalist Papers, who really thought about how to design good institutions. Whether you agree with them or not, he was a thoughtful person who was thinking about, ‘How do we make these institutions work for a republic?’” Even though Hamilton had his bias toward “a republic of upper-class white men,” he still wanted to create a working republic. Just as importantly, Widerquist asserted, Hamilton was an expert on finance and banking systems, while “Trump is just a bully who's trying to get money out of people.”

Widerquist conceded that Bessent has a case in terms of Trump’s "argument for self-sufficiency," but qualified that concession by pointing out a glaring difference between Trump’s approach and Hamilton’s philosophy.

“It's framed wrong,” Widerquist said about Bessent. “He says the United States must lead in all of these things. That's not how cooperation among nations works. No one can lead in everything. And being prepared against getting cut off from another country doesn't require you to lead in everything — it just requires you to have a decent amount of everything.”

He concluded, “I do think we should have some shipbuilding, and we should have some semiconductor manufacturing here, and other things. But the kind of ad hoc tariffs that Trump has been putting on and taking off and putting on and taking off are not likely to lead to this.”

In general scholars tend to scoff at the notion that Trump is anything like America’s founding fathers. Speaking to The New York Times in May, University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Prakash said they would have been deeply disturbed by Trump’s expansion of executive power.

"I think they'd be astonished, not merely by Trump, but by the breadth of the executive power in the modern era…. They expected that impeachment would deal with scoundrels,” Prakash said.

He added, regarding Congress, "They have a lot of authority. It's just that, in the modern era, it’s very hard for them to flex it, because half the Congress is in the president's pocket and the president has a veto."

One of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lawmakers, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), is accused of lying about donating money to veterans’ charities.

“Tommy Tuberville promised Alabama voters he would donate ‘every dime’ he made in Washington, D.C., to Alabama veterans — and even present checks on a monthly basis,” reported Lagniappe Daily's Scott Johnson on Tuesday. The news outlet serves Mobile, AL and Baldwin County. “Six years later, tax records and his own nonprofit show no evidence that ever happened.”

Instead Johnson reported that Tuberville’s tax returns in the seven years since taking office do not “show in-kind charitable gifts. The returns list $35,672 in what appears to be interest paid or charitable gifts in 2021, no listed amount in 2022, $2,500 in 2023 and no listed amount in 2024.” If all of that money went to causes that support veterans, “the total is only $38,172 over four tax years. Tuberville’s wages reported in Alabama were $529,419 over that same span. He reported income of more than $2.9 million when factoring in real estate and investment earnings.”

If Tuberville did not donate his salary to veterans, it could hurt him as he campaigns to be Alabama governor. In February 2020, during his first Senate campaign, Tuberville told Talk 99.5 in Birmingham that “I’m going to come on your show once every few months, and I’m going to give my salary, a check, to a veteran or a wife that has lost her husband, or their kids to go to school. I’m not taking one dime, and I’m giving it to the veterans. I stand and put up when I talk.”

He later reiterated that pledge, saying in March 2020 that “I stand with our veterans and I’m going to donate every dime I make when I’m in Washington, D.C., to the veterans of the state of Alabama. Folks, they deserve it. They deserve it a lot more than most of us.”

This is not Tuberville’s only major controversy as he seeks to replace Gov. Kay Ivey in the Alabama governor’s mansion. Earlier this month it was revealed that a lawsuit from "Brooke Lynn Dorgan and Justin Jude Le Blanc, as Realtors" alleged that Tuberville is not even a legal resident of the state he wishes to lead as governor. As broken by MS NOW legal analyst Joyce Vance, a former Alabama prosecutor, the litigation blatantly claims that Tuberville has admitted he is not an “everyday resident” of the state.

“At a meeting of the Shoals Republican Club on August 3, 2019, Tuberville candidly conceded that he ‘has property’ in Alabama but is not an ‘everyday resident of Alabama,’ describing himself as a ‘carpetbagger,’” the suit alleged.

President Donald Trump’s own base is ruining one of his biggest plans, according to a conservative commentator — namely, his potential desire to anoint Secretary of State Marco Rubio as his successor instead of Vice President JD Vance.

“We begin with two quotes. They won’t seem related, but they are,” wrote Nick Catoggio of The Dispatch on Tuesday. “The first: ‘I would not support the Republican Party. There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party…. How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States, that puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens?... I’ve voted Republican my entire life … [but] I’m out. And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.’”

The first quote came from conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, Catoggio said, and the second quote — “Cubans love gold.” — came from Trump. He added that the context, as gleaned from a recent book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, was Trump refusing to remove the gilded updates to the Oval Office decor in case he is succeeded as president by Rubio.

“Tucker’s quote speaks for itself and will be received warmly on both ends of the American right,” Catoggio added. “To postliberals, isolationists, Israel obsessives, and other creatures who inhabit the GOP’s chud wing, it’s a righteous cri de coeur against the White House’s foolish war in Iran. To classical liberals, hawks, Israel supporters, and the rest of what remains of the party’s negligible conservative faction, it’s a long-overdue matter of ‘good riddance.’”

Yet despite Trump seemingly wanting Rubio to succeed him, Catoggio doubts that this will manifest as easily as he wants. Carlson’s recent defection from the Republican Party over his war against Iran speaks to a possible future in which the party base does not automatically do the president’s bidding.

“A right-wing base that trends toward Tuckerism in the aftermath of our national embarrassment will come to appreciate Vance as an avatar of peace,” Catoggio opined. “He doesn’t start silly, self-defeating wars. He gets America out of them.”

He added, “That's what a winning wager looks like for the veep. Whereas a losing wager looks like this: Republican voters decide that the fatal mistake with Iran was failing to ‘finish the job’ by using military force to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Doves like Vance are schmucks twice over, they come to believe, having first discouraged Trump from prosecuting the war to an honorable end and later selling him on a deal that will shower billions of dollars on a terrorist regime.”

Catoggio continued, “The vice president isn’t an avatar of peace in this view; he’s an avatar of American humiliation. The United States needs a leader who isn’t afraid to use military power and who’ll prioritize victory once he chooses to do so: If that’s where GOP opinion lands when the Iran smoke clears—and given the right’s faith in ‘toughness’ and ‘strength,’ it’s more likely than not—then Rubio will be the obvious beneficiary.”

Breaking down prevailing sentiments within the Republican Party, however, Catoggio concluded that Vance’s bet is the better one.

“Vance is more likely to unite the right than Rubio is,” Catoggio wrote. “It will be easier for the vice president to persuade skeptical right-wing hawks to turn out for him in a general election, I think, than it will be for the secretary of state to persuade skeptical Lindberghians to do so.”

He added, “The sort of rank-and-file Republican partisan who defaults toward hawkishness and who might resent Vance for the Iran deal will nonetheless faithfully prioritize tribal victory over Democrats in 2028. No amount of Trump blather in 2024 about ‘warmongering’ by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will disabuse the American right of its atavistic fear that a foreign policy led by leftists will be dangerously weak relative to whatever’s on offer from the GOP.”

Ultimately, though, Catoggio doubted whether Rubio’s proximity to Trump will be an asset in a general election.

“I still wouldn’t bet on a Cuban American in the Oval Office in 2029, though,” Catoggio wrote. “The inevitable trajectory of the president’s final two and a half years in office will leave the electorate hungry for change, and ‘Donald Trump’s secretary of state’ isn’t very change-y. But if you’re trying to envision a Rubio administration, I’ve given you the path. All it’ll take is deep, lasting disillusionment with postliberalism in government and right-wing infotainment by a party rank-and-file that’s spent 10 years being indoctrinated into an authoritarian cult. Good luck, Marco.”

President Donald Trump’s supporters in Washington are applying a massive double standard when defending the Republican leader’s mismanagement of the Reflecting Pool renovations, at least according to one prominent conservative commentator.

“The pool now must be drained again for repairs, meaning even more taxpayer funds must be spent on it,” wrote The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone on Tuesday. “So I spoke to some of the fiscal fauxhawks on Capitol Hill about this becoming a money pit. After all, isn’t this a good example of just the sort of willy-nilly government spending they ought to address?”

Perticone then went through a list of Republican lawmakers with whom he spoke on the subject.

“This is our nation’s capital,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Perticone. “Everything should look pristine.” The Alabama Republican also repeated Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that the Reflecting Pool has turned green with algae due to vandals.

“The people, they need to be arrested and jailed and throw the key away,” Tuberville argued, later responding to Perticone’s observation that there is no evidence of either arrests or sabotage of the pool that “they’ve arrested people.” For this reason, Tuberville said there must be some sound basis for Trump’s claim that the pool was vandalized, saying that “I don’t think they’d arrest people just to be arrested.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) made a few concessions about the poor state of the Reflecting Pool but refused to blame Trump himself.

“Well, I think getting the reflecting pool looking beautiful again is a good thing,” Daines told Perticone, although he admitted when pressed about its current state that “no, it doesn’t look very beautiful. We gotta find out what went wrong with it; [it] needs to be corrected. It’s a great part of the experience coming down to the Mall.”

Meanwhile Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) refused to answer questions about the Reflecting Pool at all.

“I have no way to be able to answer that,” Lankford told Perticone about the renovation. “But we do need to fix it, but I have no way to answer that. I’ve not been tracking that.”

As Bruce Wolpe from The Conversation wrote earlier this month, Trump has made a number of attempts to renovate Washington DC monuments with mixed reception. When he unilaterally destroyed the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom, former First Lady Hillary Clinton said, “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”

Wolpe then put the controversy over the Reflecting Pool renovations into that context.

“The pool has been troubled for decades with plumbing and drainage issues, algae, trash, and discoloration,” Wolpe said. “Trump wanted it fixed in time for America’s 250th on July 4 this year. No-bid contracts with friendly associates were signed. There was cleaning, waterproofing, sealant and its now-famous ‘American Flag Blue’ color.”

He added, “The repairs failed within days. The algae were back, the drainage was clogged, the color was anything but blue. Trump blames vandals for trashing the pool and shredding the sealant. A former Olympian was arrested for putting his hand in the water to feel the torn strip of the blue paint.”

Overall, Wolpe characterized this as part of Trump’s larger failure to gain control of events during his second term.

“The Reflecting Pool is for the people to gather, to remember, to reflect, to honour, to celebrate, to breathe,” Wolpe wrote. “Now, like so much in this second Trump term, it has fallen into scandal and disrepair.”

A recent mystery involving President Donald Trump and the Kennedy Center has seemingly been solved — and the explanation is both petty and absurd.

“They somehow obtained this great photograph behind the tarp, behind the curtain,” reported podcaster Jim Acosta on Tuesday. Acosta was referring to the tarp and scaffolding that was constructed in front of the Kennedy Center after Trump’s name was removed pursuant to a recent court order. Observers were left in the dark as to why the building’s front was being concealed.

“If you guys haven't seen this, take a look,” Acosta said. “This shows you how Trump's name has been taken off of the Kennedy Center. Remember, it was a couple weeks ago — or almost a couple weeks ago — we were there live for like 15 hours. We thought we were all going to pass out. And they put up this very elaborate scaffolding. And we thought at the very end of it, they were going to use that scaffolding to take the name off of the Kennedy Center.”

Yet the obstructions remained present long after Trump’s name was removed, and it took a peek behind the curtain to figure out why.

“They did it to hide the fact that they're taking his name off of the Kennedy Center,” Acosta said. “But it just goes to show you the lengths that they will go to in this administration to spare Donald Trump and his feelings from getting hurt.”

He added that creating ambiguity about whether Trump’s name had been removed was about more than protecting the president’s ego, but also reinforcing his sense of power even in the face of a legal setback.

“For a week or so, people were saying, ‘Is his name really off the Kennedy Center? I don't know. Maybe it's still up there,’” Acosta said. “I mean, this — it just tells me how we're really stuck in this sort of Kim Jong-un-like parallel universe.”

American history and civics podcaster Sharon McMahon argued that the decision to drape over the name was clearly done to ameliorate Trump.

“There's no reason to have scaffolding covering up something that isn't there — that makes no sense, right?” McMahon said. “It makes no sense to cover something that doesn't exist, except to prevent him from having to look at it and except to prevent people from taking pictures in front of it and posting all the selfies to social media and the news orgs.”

Despite being ordered by a court to remove Trump’s name, the Kennedy Center board (which is dominated by Trump appointees) initiated an attempt earlier this month to get his name restored in different ways.

CBS News reported last week that the Kennedy Center will create a new endowment fund named for Trump and known as the "Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” It is specifically described as "a landmark commitment to securing the future of the nation's preeminent performing arts institution and its enduring legacy of artistic excellence."

The report added, "A source with knowledge of the plans for the endowment suggested it will focus on the 'physical disrepair' of the building, an element the current board feels has been neglected in the past.”

President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the BBC for claiming he incited violence during his Jan. 6th coup attempt — but that gambit may backfire on him.

“Trump filed the $10 billion lawsuit over ‘Trump: A Second Chance,’ a Panorama documentary, after the BBC admitted it ‘gave the mistaken impression that [he] had made a direct call for violent action’ on Jan. 6 by editing together ‘excerpts from different points’ of Trump's speech from the Ellipse out of sequence,” LawandCrime’s Matt Naham reported on Tuesday. Yet the BBC also issued 47 subpoenas to various third parties to discover whether the “Stop the Steal” rally and Jan. 6th attacks were in some manner violent in their conception or execution.

“A hearing on these issues was pushed back to July 21” by U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee, according to Naham. “Ahead of that, Trump has lodged his complaints about the BBC's ‘impermissibly broad’ discovery aims and how it will add to the expense of his litigation against the broadcaster.” If Judge Altman accepts the BBC’s filings, the Trump administration could be forced to divulge information they consider sensitive about the events leading up to the 2020-2021 coup attempt.

"Defendants have engaged in excessive and impermissibly broad discovery efforts in such a manner that it distracts from the core issues in dispute in this case," the Trump administration replied in its filings, alleging that the BBC is "attempting to distort the allegations in the Complaint in order to unnecessarily expand the scope of discovery into a sweeping inquiry into January 6th, post-election challenges, government investigations, congressional productions, call logs, calendars, and unrelated litigation, thereby needlessly increasing the cost of litigation."

But the BBC argues that having launched his lawsuit Trump "cannot now prevent Defendants from seeking records that would shed light on his true knowledge, intent, and state of mind in delivering his speech at the Ellipse."

Indeed, far from describing the insurrection as violent, Trump told CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins earlier this month that the Jan. 6ers acted “with love.” He said this to justify creating a $1.8 billion slush fund (which he has since then said is dead) for payouts to individuals who participated in the attempt to overthrow a legitimate election.

“As far as I'm concerned, it was a beautiful thing,” Trump told Collins. “It was something I was — I didn't make it, but I was — I heard that — I thought that was the greatest thing, because people like you have abused our people so badly. The fake news, like CNN, like the New York Times, and like others, have abused our people.”

After telling the other journalists speaking to him to be quiet, Trump said that they “have abused our people so badly, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Then, speaking to Collins, he said: “You. You used to be a conservative. She was a conservative from Alabama — can you believe it? But CNN in particular — CNN does such false reporting. But now they have new ownership, so maybe it'll straighten it out. I doubt it, but it's hard to straighten garbage out.”

The “new ownership” in questions are David and Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle founder and his son, who have reportedly promised to Trump that they will fire CNN journalists he dislikes much as they fired CBS News journalists who Trump opposes. Trump is also reported to have used his power as president to aid the Ellisons in purchasing CNN, despite viable competition from Netflix, in order to help them take over the network and presumably make it into a pro-Trump station.

President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser is in charge of a MAGA non-profit staffed with Trump loyalists — but apparently they are secretly at each other’s throats.

“Since taking over the storied conservative group America’s Future in 2021, retired general Michael Flynn has turned it into a real rogue’s gallery,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer wrote on Monday. “For one, Flynn, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser in the first administration, put Lara Logan—the former CBS News reporter turned conspiracy theorist—on the nonprofit’s board. Flynn also launched an anti-child trafficking initiative within America’s Future called ‘Project Defend & Protect Our Children,’ which he stocked with fringe activists, including Pizzagate true believer Liz Crokin, who now serves as a Project board member.”

Yet this “kook heaven” proved to be “hardly paradise,” Sommer observed, as a rash of unexplained resignations began depleting the organization’s staff.

“The cause of these resignations remains unclear,” Sommer said. “But, as a whole, they strongly suggest that Flynn’s organization, a pillar of the conspiratorial right, may be in serious trouble. America’s Future didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did anyone who resigned.”

He added, “Rest assured, I’m working to get to the bottom of all this. Unfortunately, my skeptical approach to QAnon and other conspiracy theories appears to have alienated some of the key people involved in this story. When I asked Moore, who was tweeting over the weekend about how Barack Obama would soon be arrested for treason, why he had resigned, he declined to tell me.”

Sommer then quoted a statement by Ben Moore, “a lawyer on the “Project Defend” advisory board” who when resigning earlier this month resigned used “QAnon-style language as a ‘digital soldier.’”

“Will, you shit on so many of us for so long,” Moore said in his statement. “You want a story to try to destroy General Flynn.”

Another QAnon booster who is sticking by Flynn, Sommer pointed out, has tried to downplay the resignations, but has used language which raises more questions. Sommer described it as “drunk night between grown adults,” adding that “there’s no side. People are upset over personal shit. Drunk night between grown adults. This s——— has NOTHING to do with General Flynn or his organization.”

The details have been left “blank,” Sommer concluded.

Flynn has been criticized before for his cozyness with Trump, which has also seemed to personally benefit him financially. In March a former Justice Department prosecutor accused Flynn of committing theft by accepting a $1.25 million settlement after pleading guilty under oath to intentionally making false statements to the FBI in 2017.

"I really do not understand how you justify this as anything but theft," Andrew Weissmann told "The Illegal News" at the time. "To make this a legitimate settlement, there would have to be a good faith belief that he has a meritorious argument and that there might be some downside in litigating this."

President Donald Trump has touted his Trump Accounts as a great investment vehicle to help young people build up savings, but one financial reporter argues that they are not living up to his promise.

“My 1-year-old son qualifies for a Trump Account, and I’ve opened it to claim the $1,000 government deposit,” reported The Wall Street Journal's Adam Michel on Monday. “But I won’t be putting any of my personal after-tax wages in it, and neither should most parents. That is a shame. Trump Accounts are a good idea, poorly executed. A simple reform could make them worthwhile.”

Michel argued that Trump Accounts are flawed because they tax the money going into them and tax the money coming out of them.

“The accounts accept after-tax dollars from parents and other authorized individuals, but when the child turns 18, they convert to traditional IRAs for retirement,” Michel wrote. “That means the gains (along with the original $1,000) are taxed at withdrawal as ordinary income rather than at the lower capital-gains tax rate, which would have applied if the investment weren’t in a Trump Account. You pay taxes on the front end and the high rate on the back end. No deduction, no capital-gains rate, no flexibility.”

Describing a 529 as a better investment in terms of education savings than Trump Accounts, Michel concluded that Trump could easily fix this, and if he does not the Trump Accounts will amount to little more than a one-time gift to their recipients.

“The fix is easy: Lawmakers should pick a lane,” Michel said. “Make contributions tax-free and then tax the withdrawals. That is how a traditional IRA works. Alternatively, keep the after-tax contributions and make the withdrawals tax-free, like a Roth. Either path would give parents an incentive to add their own money. While they are at it, lawmakers should drop the lock-up rules and penalties, and instead let the savings roll into a more flexible account at age 18.”

Michel concluded that without those changes, "the $1,000 handout is where it stops. The rest I’ll save elsewhere."

In May, a financial journalist for TheStreet pointed out a different problem with Trump Accounts.

“The federal government is less than two months away from opening Trump Accounts for private contributions on July 4, 2026, and a debate over what should go in them has begun,” TheStreet's Damilola Esebame wrote at the time. “White House and Treasury officials have discussed allowing wealthy donors to contribute shares of stock directly into the children's savings accounts, a shift that could reshape the program.”

Yet as Esebame observed, Trump Accounts upon being launched only accepted cash and invested it into low-cost S&P 500 index funds that cap the expense ratios at 0.1 percent. Even at the time, the White House and Department of Treasury began discussing altering the rules about how the accounts were managed so that stock shares could go directly into children’s savings accounts.

“If the rules change, millions of children already enrolled may end up with a completely different type of account,” Esebame said. “What you need to understand is how this fight over stock donations could affect the money designated for your child.”

When President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, much of the political world was shocked — but a new study reveals one forecasting framework that anticipated that outcome.

“Many voters rely on prospective voting, a process of evaluating candidates based on anticipated future performance,” wrote PsyPost's Karina Petrova on Monday. “Researchers have found that these forward-looking assessments become a primary driver of voter behavior in open-seat contests. Voters look ahead at what policies and leadership styles the new candidates might bring to the office.”

In a study led by Macromedia University of Applied Sciences researcher Andreas Graefe, the scientists created a so-called “Issues and Leaders model” to figure out why voters make the choices they do rather than simply profiling their support for different candidates at specific points in time.

“The Issues and Leaders model focuses entirely on two variables: issue-handling competence and leadership perception,” Petrova explained. “To calculate issue-handling scores, the model requires three conditions to be met. Voters must be aware of an issue, they must perceive it as important, and they must trust one candidate more than the other to manage it.”

The study revealed that near the end of the 2024 election between Harris and Trump, the Democrat actually had a slight advantage over Trump when it came to perceptions of her overall competence, even though she initially trailed Trump by 20 points in July (when she first entered the campaign).

“The final forecast generated by the model on Election Eve predicted a near tie, with Trump receiving 50.2 percent of the two-party popular vote and Harris receiving 49.8 percent,” Petrova wrote. “This cautious projection stood in contrast to many conventional polling averages, which generally showed Harris retaining a slight lead. Ultimately, Trump won the national popular vote by approximately 1.5 percentage points.”

In short, it seems that Harris was able to close the gap between herself and Trump, but simply did not have enough time to do so fully.

In the paper, which was published in the scholarly journal Research and Politics, argued that its conclusions can be used to anticipate future election results.

“A particularly notable insight is the role of leadership perception in forecasting Trump’s narrow victory,” Graefe wrote. “While Harris held a modest edge on issue competence, Trump maintained a consistent lead in leadership perception—a factor that gained predictive weight closer to the election. The model anticipated Trump’s advantage before most polling averages reflected it, highlighting its potential to signal electoral dynamics that might otherwise be overlooked.”

Graefe added, “Beyond forecasting accuracy, the model offers practical value by providing a real-time lens into campaign dynamics. By emphasizing prospective voting, it helps identify evolving voter priorities and candidate strengths. This makes it a potentially useful tool not just for forecasters, but also for campaign strategists, journalists, and political observers.”

Earlier on Monday, The Guardian reported that the coalition which elected Trump is starting to fray. Citing numbers from the 2024 election, it pointed out that "Trump won 66 percent of white voters without a college degree." Today, though, it found via a CBS News poll that "54 percent of that demographic disapprove of his performance. That was up from 45 percent disapproval in February (before Trump began bombing Iran) and up sharply from 32 percent in February 2025."

A conservative commentator argued that President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, instead of seeming all-powerful, are instead appearing to the world as “impotent.”

“The state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a sort of moron-populist version of Chernobyl,” wrote The Dispatch's Nick Catoggio on Monday, referencing the Soviet Union’s infamous mishandling of a nuclear power plant leak in Ukraine in 1986. “In both cases, the government’s incompetence and corruption created a vexing ecological problem. And in both cases, the government undertook to cover up its culpability in the matter.”

After adding that the nuclear meltdown in 1986 was more consequential than the Reflecting Pool’s algae growth in 2026, Catoggio noted that the Reflecting Pool crisis occurred because the White House valued cronyism over competence.

“Instead it awarded a no-bid contract for a quick fix to a firm owned by a Trump donor—except that the quick fix, applying sealant to the pool’s bottom, didn’t solve the issue of water leaking between the concrete slabs,” Catoggio wrote. “Days after the renovation was finished, the pool had more algae in it than at any point in June over the last five years.”

Despite using hydrogen peroxide and “advanced nanobubbler technology” without killing the algae, Catoggio argued that Trump made himself look worse by blaming saboteurs without basis instead of his own ineptitude for the blue sealants cracking and being ripped off in chunks.

“Former Fox News talking head turned U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro dutifully vowed zero tolerance for pool-peelers,” Catoggio continued. “And she meant it: One man arrested by Park Police on Friday claims he did nothing more than touch a piece of floating debris before the cuffs were slapped on. At last check, armed members of the National Guard had been hastily deployed to stand watch over a basin that’s now almost as green as the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day.”

Yet Catoggio concluded that the fundamental problem facing Trump is his own inability to get things done, whether in cleaning up the Reflecting Pool or winning the war he waged against Iran.

“Between the war on algae and the war abroad, Trump has never looked more pitifully impotent than he does right now,” Catoggio wrote. “The perfect metaphor for his first year back in office came when, without warning, he demolished the East Wing to make way for his precious ballroom. That episode captured the political zeitgeist of 2025: Americans had elected a caudillo who cared not a bit about the country’s civic traditions and would bulldoze them—literally—to get what he wanted, whether the other branches liked it or not.”

He added, “The reflecting-pool idiocy is the perfect metaphor for his presidency in 2026, coinciding as it does with our national humiliation in Iran. Postliberalism promises effective problem-solving through energetic authoritarianism, but as things stand, not only can’t the authoritarian in chief forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, he can’t even successfully clean a public pool in D.C. The zeitgeist has flipped.”

This is not Catoggio’s first harsh critique of Trump and his administration. Earlier this month he noted that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, despite being ostensibly as right-wing as Trump, refused to kowtow to him — and that this further reflects his waning power.

“After 10 years of degrading bootlicking obeisance by the president’s many courtiers, it was startling to see someone who needs a relationship with Trump assert her dignity against his insults,” Catoggio said regarding Meloni’s harsh reply to Trump’s insistence that she “begged” him to “take a picture with him.”

When Meloni rebuked Trump by saying that neither she nor Italy begs for anything, Catoggio commented that “casually demeaning someone because he bears them a grudge is as instinctive to Donald Trump as applying bronzer or bloviating about ‘strength.’”

He continued, “But those who need to stay on his good side — like, say, every Republican official in the country — are doomed to follow the Ted Cruz career arc between 2016 and 2021, broadly speaking. That is, if Trump insults your wife, you find a way to let it slide and salute when he asks you to help him stage a coup.”

Meloni refused to play along, though.

“And so the prudent, if pathetic, thing to do when an imperious postliberal goblin insulted you was to bite your tongue,” Catoggio wrote. “Not Meloni, though. She’s had enough.”

President Donald Trump reportedly wants to seize the Smithsonian Institution, one of America’s most prestigious collection of museums, and to use them to whitewash the United States’ history on issues like slavery.

“When President Trump summoned Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for lunch at the White House on August 28 of last year, Bunch’s advisers assumed that the end was near,” The Atlantic’s Clint Smith wrote on Monday. “Trump had spent months threatening the Smithsonian’s independence; just nine days earlier, he’d written on Truth Social that ‘the Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.’”

Bunch, who unambiguously believes that slavery was a negative for America, was also the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is known to have pushed back against attempts by Vice President JD Vance and Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL), who sits on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, as well as others in the Trump administration to scrub so-called “woke” ideas in the museum that they described as a “divisive ideology.” Trump also tried to fire the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, even though the Smithsonian is meant to be independent of the government.

Despite these challenges, Bunch was able to avoid winding up in the administration’s crosshairs, at least for a while. Yet as various key personnel step down from the museums’ boards, Smith anticipates that Trump may ultimately get his wish of hiring loyalists who will reshape the museum to his liking.

“The current and looming vacancies, and the need for congressional and presidential approval, raise the possibility that Trump could attempt to install new board members who are loyal to his agenda,” Smith wrote. “(Trump’s March 2025 executive order said that the White House would work with officials ‘to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.’)”

Smith added, “In April, The New York Times reported that the regents had agreed on nominations for some of the replacements, but the House committee responsible for reviewing and vetting the nominees before they move to the full legislature for approval had yet to receive the names under consideration—intrigue that suggests some manner of strategy, although it’s far from clear whose. Minutes from board meetings earlier this year show that the regents have voted to give existing members additional duties because of the current and expected vacancies.”

Despite these pressures, Bunch vowed in an internal memo to staff that “we remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research and the arts to all Americans. We will continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections and objects, rooted in expertise and accuracy.”

Earlier this month, federal Judge Angel Kelly ruled against Trump’s attempts to remove historic content that is featured at national parks. Trump specifically targeted content that discussed America’s history of racism, including slavery.

"To establish a likelihood of success on the merits, Defendants must do more than express disagreement with the Court’s prior ruling; they must make a strong showing that they are likely to prevail on appeal," Kelley explained in response to the administration’s objection to being forced to allow the National Parks Service to accurately represent American history.

She added, "To establish irreparable harm, Defendants bear the burden of demonstrating that, absent a stay, they will suffer irreparable injury that is substantial, certain, and inadequately remedied by monetary damages or later appellate relief. ... Here, Defendants raise three theories: (1) the Injunction Order hampers government speech by preventing the National Park Service (“NPS”) from proffering its preferred narrative at National Parks; (2) implementation of the Injunction Order is practically infeasible and costly; and (3) the Injunction Order conflicts with a recent order issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit regarding Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, PA, thus subjecting Defendants to inconsistent obligations with respect to that site. The Court is unpersuaded by these arguments and explains why."

President Donald Trump is worse than the mafia, a news anchor argued on Monday, because at least the mob tends to be competent.

“I actually think the comparisons to the mob are unfair, because as violent as the mob is, they — historically — can be more competent than that,” MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace said on Monday. She was referring to Trump’s failed attempt to renovate the Reflecting Pool. “This was a botched redecorating of a monument.”

She added, “It doesn't belong to Donald Trump. It doesn't belong to any president in office. He's the steward of it for four years, and he ruined it.”

Journalist Scott MacFarlane continued that Trump’s arrests of people he claims without evidence sabotaged the Reflecting Pool are baseless and not even serious cases.

“They're not major cases,” MacFarlane told Wallace. “They are U.S. Park Police or federal law enforcement citations. If the Department of Justice wants to make these major cases and charge these people with felonies, they have to go to a grand jury. And though grand jury deliberations are secret — held in a closed room — you might hear the laughter outside the grand jury room if they try to bring this case to a D.C. grand jury. It's not going to fly.”

He added that people who visit the Reflecting Pool notice “a smell that's emanating now that is reminiscent of a high school locker room. You have a police force, a National Guard presence, that is profound. It's never bad to have federal law enforcement near a gathering place, and a lot of people are gathering there to rubberneck at the damage. But it's like a jewel heist from the Muppets — the caper's gonna happen. You have so many police hanging out there, and it seems to be a misappropriation of resources.”

In contrast to Wallace, former US Attorney Barbara McQuade argued earlier this month that Trump acts very much like a mob boss.

“He uses his power to try to control others, especially would-be critics,” McQuade argued, speaking to The Guardian. “He uses any leverage he can get, inflicting pain to try to coerce them to come to the table to negotiate their own punishment. He’s done it with law firms and the media and universities and even foreign allies with tariffs.”

As one example, she cited how Trump attempted to punish the State of Michigan because of local politicians there opposing him.

“He has threatened to hold up the opening of the Gordie Howe bridge between Detroit and Canada and there’s an owner of a private span next to it who made a million-dollar donation to the MAGA SuperPac at around the same time,” McQuade observed.

A candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump claimed that he tried to commit voter fraud, but did not provide any evidence that such fraud is an actual issue.

Georgia State Sen. Greg Dolezal, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, told the Charlie Kirk Show in a February broadcast only recently discovered that he and “a number of friends” submitted fraudulent mail-in ballot applications that included forms signed by children. Their goal was to prove that they received ballots in return to prove that Georgia’s system facilitates fraud.

Notably, Dolezal did not furnish any evidence to verify his claims.

“Earlier this year, Dolezal introduced Senate Bill 568 (SB 568), a proposal that would have assigned early voters to a single location, required voters to use hand-marked paper ballots and expanded the public release of voter information,” Democracy Docket reported. “While that bill failed two votes short of the majority needed, Dolezal has continued attempting to revive Republicans’ push to overhaul Georgia’s elections.”

They added, “During a special legislative session Saturday, Dolezal proposed an amendment to an election bill that would require counties to manually recount every voter cast in the top two races on a ballot before certifying an election. The GOP-controlled Senate approved the amended bill and the House is considering the measure Monday. If passed, the recount requirement would apply to the races for governor and U.S. Senate in November.”

In his appearance on the Charlie Kirk Show, Dolezal said that “the way you get an absentee ballot is you would sign your name to a ballot request form, send it in, and they’d send you a ballot. They’re supposed to check the signatures. Well, we know essentially that they didn’t check the signatures because myself and a number of friends botched our signatures, had kids sign signatures, do all that, send our ballots in the ballot request forms, and in every case, we got a ballot back.”

He did not identify the friends who helped him, elaborate on how voters names were supposedly swapped, explain how the effort was organized or discuss if any of the ballots issues were completed, cast or counted.

“So, yes, we do have essentially a Republican, governor or secretary of state, General Assembly,” Dolezal said. “We’ve moved the needle a good bit. We did move on voter ID, and we have passed some good things, but there has been really no interest in looking at what happened in 2020.”

Democracy experts argue that Trump is trying to spread misinformation about voter fraud so he can falsely claim that any election lost by Republicans was stolen. He falsely claimed that the 2016 Iowa GOP caucuses were stolen when he lost them, that he actually won the 2016 presidential election popular vote when he did not and that he won the 2020 presidential election when he did not. On that last occasion, he attempted a coup after being defeated by then-former Vice President Joe Biden.

Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet earlier this month that Trump is trying to rig the 2026 midterm elections by sowing doubts about the validity of likely Democratic victories.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

President Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool scandal speaks to deeper systemic failures in his presidency, at least according to one Marine veteran.

“With the news that the Trump administration’s attempt to beautify the Reflecting Pool is looking like a spectacular backfire, a lot of people said it was a perfect analogy of how things are going in general,” wrote Joslin Joseph, an Iraq war veteran and recipient of the Military Reporters and Editors award for Best Commentary-Opinion, in an editorial for The Hill.

Joseph added that Trump “likes to get things done, but he doesn’t get them done right.” In the case of the Reflecting Pool, Trump reportedly focused on getting the pool done as fast as possible and hired his personal associates rather than contracting the process out to the highest quality business willing to perform at the lowest bid. From there, Joseph connected Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle to his recent attempts to wrap up the war he waged against Iran.

“Just like the Interior Department’s claim of crystal clear water, the Trump administration is now selling the American public that the job he set out to do in Iran was done right, despite evidence pointing to the contrary,” Joseph wrote. “Although the Reflecting Pool and Iran are on different levels of importance to the American people, the outcomes from both so far are an indictment on how poorly Trump’s ‘get things done and worry about the fallout later’ approach goes.”

In addition to his shunning of expertise and planning with the Reflecting Pool and the Iran war, Joseph also pointed to Trump’s DOGE destroying government agencies “without understanding how the government worked only to see the effort fail to cut spending and waste,” as well as his “Liberation Day” tariffs that raised prices, harmed the economy and were in some cases found to have been illegal.

“Getting things done is laudable, especially with the gridlock that has plagued Washington for a while,” Joseph concluded. “But competence, accountability and judgement are still needed to get things done right. If you don’t have those, you end up with sweetheart deals for Iran and a reflecting pool that looks like a swamp.”

Joseph is not alone among individuals scoffing at Trump’s attempts to renovate the Reflecting Pool. Despite the president pressing charges against people for supposedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool — claims that he has made without evidence, and despite the physical implausibility of someone making a 100-yard gash in the sealant as he alleges — commenters by and large do not seem to believe his claims.

"Reflecting Pool story: Under Obama, responsible people carefully studied the problem, sought best solutions - and failed,” conservative journalist David Frum posted on Sunday. “Under Trump, irresponsible people imposed a hasty solution that enriched inept cronies - and failed even more spectacularly."

A top former government official, like Joseph, connected Trump’s Reflecting Pool failure to his broader shortcomings as an administrator.

"Like most things Trump touches, the Reflecting Pool is now in worse shape than before,” former US Attorney Barbara McQuade said on X on Sunday. “Adding cosmetic paint did not solve the underlying problem. And now he baselessly blames vandals for his failure."

Editor's Note: This article was updated to include a missing quotation mark and correct a typo when spelling "The Guardian."

Speaking for his podcast Can’t Be Censored, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said he is leaving the Republican Party — and he blames President Donald Trump’s ostensible support for Israel.

“I would not support the Republican party, there's no chance I would support the Republican party,” Carlson declared in his Thursday episode, with him reposting the clip on X on Monday. “How could I support a political party that is not loyal to the United States. I voted Republican my entire life, I have been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican party, but there is no defending this. I'm out.”

Carlson argued that, by starting a war against Iran in February, he prioritized Israel’s interests over those of the United States. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, Carlson asserted that the president was unduly influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to enter a war that America has “effectively lost already.” He added that he believes Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was funded by individuals whose “loyalty to Israel” does not align with American foreign policy priorities.

The right-wing podcaster’s split with Trump over Israel is part of a broader pattern on both sides of the aisle. A February poll taken by Gallup found support for Israel has dropped among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. Independents support Palestinians over Israel by 41 to 30 percent and Democrats do so by 65 percent to 17 percent. Republicans still overwhelmingly support Israel, by 70 percent to 13 percent, but this still counts as a 10-point drop since 2024. Overall American support for Israel has fallen from 46 percent to 33 percent in favor of Israel in 2025 to 41 percent to 36 percent against Israel in 2026.

Speaking exclusively to AlterNet, former Harvard law professor, former lawyer for Trump and Zionist activist Alan Dershowitz argued that rising anti-Semitism on both sides of the aisle will compel Israel and the Jewish community to become “stronger” and more cautious about the future.

“The alternative is to be strong,” Dershowitz told AlterNet. “The alternative is to prepare for the worst. The alternative is for Israel to be completely self-reliant, for Jews not to expect help from other people, but to do it on their own, the way they did it when they were the best musicians, the best chess players, the best inventors, the best entrepreneurs.”

He added, "I think Jews have to realize that they're not going to get, they can't count on the kindness of strangers, and they shouldn't give up any of their security in the name of public relations.”

When asked about the rise of anti-Israel sentiment from both the right and left, Dershowitz characterized it as anti-Semitic and compared the current historical moment to the World War II era.

“The antisemite to the right, antisemite to the left have more in common than they are different,” Dershowitz said, then comparing the current movements to those of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. “And that goes back to [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler. Stalin and Hitler had only one thing in common, that they both hated Jews.”

Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s war against Gaza has led to 72,835 fatalities as of May, according to the World Health Organization. The initial Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7th led to 1,195 Israeli deaths, including 815 civilians, as well as 251 additional civilians who were taken hostage, according to Human Rights Watch.

Speaking with AlterNet in March about the tendency to blame Israel for America’s war against Iran, Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna said that one can criticize Israeli government officials without being anti-Semitic just as one can criticize American government officials without hating America. The challenge, he added, is discerning when those criticisms are used to denounce all Israelis, delegitimize Israel’s right to exist or hold Israel to a double standard compared to its predominantly Muslim neighbors.

“I can be critical of President Trump without being un-American,” Sarna told AlterNet. “Most people who criticize President Trump or the Republicans would assure you how much they love America and hold a fundamentally positive view of it. It seems to me that it's deeply important for us to do the same with Israel — that is, to make clear that there is a huge difference between disliking the policies of the Prime Minister of Israel and hating Israel itself.”

He continued, “If you wouldn't equate criticism of the President with hating America, there is no reason — and indeed it is wrong and wicked — to do so with regard to Israel.”

Ironically, Israel itself is starting to turn on Trump, with many Israelis believing that his tentative settlement with Iran will leave the nation as powerful as before and just as capable of attacking Israel directly or through proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah. As restaurateur Daniel Dorfmann, an Israeli in the town of Metulla which is close to the Lebanon border, angrily told The Guardian, “Everyone was very pleased with the war [against Iran] but the US agreement is really not good for Israel … It’s a big mistake.”

While Carlson is officially leaving the Republican Party over Israel, this is not his first deviation from the GOP on policy matters. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Carlson challenged Republicans for seeming to prioritize capital over labor.

“My intention in writing it was to remind the Republican Party that these are now issues of concern for you, because for a hundred years you represented capital over and against labor,” Carlson told Salon at the time regarding an editorial he composed on the need for the party to be more pro-labor. “I mean that’s kind of the purpose of the Republican Party. They used to represent the investor class, right? So the conventional criticisms of the Republicans as the party of management were 100 percent true, obviously.”

He added, “What I wanted to remind Republican lawmakers was that it’s no longer true, that’s not your constituency anymore. You have a new constituency and it’s people who are primarily wage earners and primarily — not low income, but lower income.”

President Donald Trump has threatened a decade in jail for the people who supposedly vandalized Washington DC institutions like the Reflecting Pool — yet his own Justice Department’s recent results poke a giant hole in that claim.

“On Monday, one might have expected a stiff punishment when Washington resident Micah Avery Jr. was finally sentenced after a five-year legal saga that began during the mass protests against racism and police violence in the spring of 2020,” Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported on Monday. “Avery was charged with destruction of federal property for painting the words ‘Yall not tired yet?’ onto one of the stone outcroppings of the Lincoln Memorial.”

Gerstein made this point because Trump claims the people he accused of vandalizing major monuments will receive 10 years in jail for doing so.

“If you so much as touch, or even think about destroying, a statue or a monument in Washington D.C., you go to jail for 10 years with no probation, no anything,” Trump said earlier this month to justify his attempt to take over the Washington DC police force and deploy the National Guard troops throughout the city.

“You get jailed 10 years, no curtailed sentence, 10 years,” Trump added, in comments that the administration referenced again when accusing people of sabotaging his Reflecting Pool renovations.

Yet Avery, a Black Lives Matter protester who spray-painted a slogan on the Lincoln Memorial, received a plea deal under Trump’s own Justice Department that included one year of probation, 60 hours of community service and a $500 fine.

“The key decisions leading to that sentence — handed down in federal court Monday afternoon — were made under Trump appointees: Ed Martin, the controversial interim U.S. attorney for Washington at the outset of Trump’s second term, and Jeanine Pirro, Martin’s Senate-confirmed successor,” Gerstein reported. “Under Martin, federal prosecutors and Avery’s defense attorney hashed out a deal to downgrade Avery’s case from a felony to a misdemeanor. It is just the sort of plea bargain that Trump has repeatedly suggested would not take place.”

Gerstein added, “That deal was presented to and approved by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, in the first days of Pirro’s tenure. And earlier this month, Pirro and her deputies recommended that the judge give Avery probation, even though he could have received up to a year in prison under the plea deal.”

A White House spokesperson dismissed the outcome of Avery’s case as an aberration caused by recordkeeping issues.

“Improperly kept records from a crime that was committed five years ago limited the penalties this individual was able to receive,” a spokesperson told Politico. “The administration will continue to seek the highest penalty available and not tolerate any sort of vandalism or destruction of our beautiful monuments and memorials.”

Trump’s position on vandals is particularly relevant now because he is accusing vandals, including a former Olympic canoeist, of causing the Reflecting Pool to turn algae green with peeling paint during his renovations. The president has provided no evidence to back up any of his claims, with Olympian David Hearn saying he merely touched a piece of the peeling paint that had already been dislodged. Trump also says vandals slashed a gash in the sealant as large as a football field, even though such an act would have been observed by onlookers.

"Reflecting Pool story: Under Obama, responsible people carefully studied the problem, sought best solutions - and failed,” posted conservative journalist David Frum on Sunday. “Under Trump, irresponsible people imposed a hasty solution that enriched inept cronies - and failed even more spectacularly."

A prominent former government official echoed Frum’s sentiments.

"Like most things Trump touches, the Reflecting Pool is now in worse shape than before,” former US Attorney Barbara McQuade posted on X on Sunday. “Adding cosmetic paint did not solve the underlying problem. And now he baselessly blames vandals for his failure."

President Donald Trump has dishonored America through the actions of his top armed forces cabinet officer, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is openly denigrating Black soldiers.

“Black Americans fought to destroy a white supremacist regime overseas, while living under legalized segregation at home,” wrote Steve Schmidt, who served as an adviser to President George W. Bush, on Sunday. “Their courage exposed America’s contradiction. So did the Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Their families lived behind barbed wire while they fought and died beneath the American flag.”

Yet under Hegseth, the Trump administration has worked to scrub military history of references to heroic individuals like General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. and is denying promotions to qualified Black officers, thereby "dishonoring" the military, Schmidt argued. Hegseth has even fired people for seemingly no other reason than that they were Black, and has repeatedly implied that when Black officers only received these types of honors by denying them from more qualified white officers.

“The road from Normandy leads to Selma,” Schmidt argued. “The road from Monte Cassino leads to the Voting Rights Act. The road from the skies over Berlin leads directly to an American military where command would increasingly be earned through merit rather than inherited through race.”

He continued, “That transformation didn’t weaken the United States. It made America stronger — not because diversity became a slogan — but because excellence became the standard. The greatest military in the history of mankind became greater when it finally began drawing upon the talents of the entire American people.”

Hegseth’s actions, Schmidt claimed, put this heritage “at risk.”

“When accomplished Black officers are removed, marginalized or publicly disparaged under circumstances that create the appearance that race has become a defining factor, the damage extends far beyond individual careers,” Schmidt said. “Memory is wounded. History is distorted. The sacrifices of generations of Americans are diminished. That isn’t conservatism. It’s historical vandalism.”

He continued, “The United States military has never been great because it belonged to one race. It’s been great because it belonged to the Constitution.”

In addition to being a fierce critic of Trump’s administration, Schmidt has also often set his sights on Trump himself, in particular by pointing out his physical and mental decline in his 80th year of life.

“Vice President Harry Truman was an honest man, but he deceived the country after he had his one and only visit with the 32nd President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Schmidt told his podcast on Wednesday. “He knew that Roosevelt was a dying man and he did die on April the 12th, 1945. He was inaugurated for the fourth and final time on January 20th. This matters because Franklin Roosevelt wasn't seen in public every day quite like Donald Trump is. The images of Roosevelt at Yalta are shocking. The war etched onto his face, old before his time, falling apart. The burden of command weighing heavily.”

He also compared Trump to the Roman emperor Nero.

“Look at his decomposition physically,” Schmidt argued. “He can barely get out of a chair. He's lost with the European leaders who are redirecting him back into the photo. Does it remind you of anyone? A previous president off-derided by Donald Trump for getting lost in similar photo ops?”

He added, “Look at Trump's hands. Look at his ankles. The swelling is obviously attributed to a coronary condition. His words slur. He falls asleep. He is poked and prodded by 22 different medical specialists like he's ET at Walter Reed Army Hospital. All of this is to say, J.D. Vance, his fascist understudy, puppet to Peter Thiel, general weirdo and lover of the couch, may soon be commander in chief. We should talk about this more.”

President Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to claim the “Sesame Street” puppet Elmo as one of their own — but online commenters are not allowing them to get away with it.

“The GOP has been faced with their anti-Elmo history after trying to welcome him into the MAGA fold,” reported The Daily Beast's Katie Francis on Sunday. The story began with Elmo declaring, regarding the ongoing World Cup soccer event, that “Elmo loves you, and Elmo loves you, and Elmo loves you, and Team USA, and everybody who’s playing." Yet Elmo then concluded, “Elmo just wants to set the record straight... GO TEAM USA!”

He also clarified, “Just to be clear, Elmo wants Team USA to win, okay? But Elmo loves everybody!”

Notably, the Muppet predicted that his preference for Team USA might be exploited when he asked viewers to not “make this a thing.” Yet despite this warning, House Republicans quickly posted the video with the comment that "Elmo is a certified PATRIOT!”

They then added, “Meanwhile, Democrats are rooting for foreigners...”

What the House Republicans neglected to acknowledge was that Trump and his supporters have fiercely criticized “Sesame Street” and the TV station PBS for its supposedly “woke” culture. Social media users on X quickly reminded them of these facts.

“You clowns literally defunded elmo,” one person posted.

“You a-----es voted to defund PBS and called Sesame Street woke,” another wrote. “You couldn’t be more hypocritical, loud, wrong, or clueless.”

Trump’s vendetta against “Sesame Street” may be personal as well as ideological. Last year The Daily Beast reported that after the president signed an executive order to immediately halt all federal funding to PBS, “almost immediately, people began to suspect that Trump’s vendetta against the network wasn’t because of its 'woke programming.' Instead, it’s all to do with a certain puppet show that has been trolling the man since the ’80s.”

Ronald Grump was a periodic but long-running spoof of the then-hotel magnate that began in the 1980s, as The Daily Beast reported. With song lyrics like “he’s got so much trash it spills out of his can,” locations like “Grump Tower” and occupations like “famous Grouch builder,” Ronald Grump was an undisputed antagonist who tried to do nefarious things like force Oscar the Grouch to give up his garbage can (where he lives) and pave over all of “Sesame Street” so he can turn it into “Grump World.”

After Trump became a reality TV star, the spoofing continued. In a later episode, “Sesame Street” mocked Trump’s NBC reality show “The Apprentice.”

President Donald Trump is literally isolated, according to a Trump biographer, in large part because he is on distant terms with both First Lady Melania Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump.

“An old-time monarch could only dream of the total absolute isolation on display inside the gilded fortress of the executive mansion,” explained The Daily Beast’s Michael Wolff on Sunday. “Now at eighty years old, Donald Trump sits utterly alone.”

On an immediate political level, Trump is isolated from much of the government he purportedly runs, from avoiding important meetings and spending long periods of time away from senior staff to weakening relationships with key US allies.

"Melania remains vacant, Ivanka Trump has distanced herself, and the remaining children function more like his elite corporate employees," Wolff said. "The daily court is populated solely by professional sycophants, retainers, and parasites whose closeness is strictly transactional."

He added that Trump’s children behave more like employees at a corporation than like kids interacting with a parent. Specifically he said that the adult children who remain close to Trump, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, act “more like his elite corporate employees” who depend on the president for transactional rather than emotional reasons.

The author added that sometimes Trump has even weaponized family estrangements to his advantage. He alleges that, when Trump decided to divorce his first wife Ivana, he kept that development in the news in order to make sure he would not lose fame he had acquired as a tabloid celebrity. Wolff has not independently corroborated that claim.

Others have pointed out Trump’s unusual family relationships. Ex-Republican presidential adviser Steve Schmidt wrote in April that First Lady Melania Trump — despite being notoriously cold toward her husband — decided to defy the First Amendment by calling for a comedian who criticized the president to be fired.

“Melania Trump’s demand to fire Jimmy Kimmel seems unsurprising from the first third wife to become an American First Lady in our 250-year history,” Schmidt said on Tuesday. “Severe, unsmiling and brutally indifferent Melania is a perfect match for her husband, who recently declared that he isn’t a rapist or pedophile on ‘60 Minutes.’”

The First Lady demanded Kimmel’s firing after he joked about their marriage and the president’s age in a comment made prior to, and which had no relationship with, an assassination attempt on the president. Schmidt’s “rapist or pedophile” comment involves Trump’s longstanding friendship with the late child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.

“Melania Trump’s demand is un-American,” Schmidt wrote. “The former model, who was reared in a Slovenian backwater under a communist government, seems ill-acquainted with the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

According to a former pro-Trump lawmaker, President Donald Trump’s greatest legacy is being a sore loser — and by spreading that mindset to most Republicans, he has eroded American democracy in the process.

“I've said repeatedly — ad nauseam — that Donald Trump's greatest legacy is the destruction of truth,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) said in a podcast posted on Tuesday. “Not a surprise, right, when this good, great, decent country puts into the White House twice somebody who lies every time he opens his mouth.

Walsh continued that Trump’s “greatest legacy is not winning twice and not getting to the White House twice. His greatest legacy — you want to understand Donald Trump's greatest legacy?

Here it is: Sixty — depending on the poll you look at — 60, 70, 80, 90 percent of one of our two major political parties believes right now that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. That right there is Trump's legacy. That right there is Trump's greatest legacy.”

Walsh pointed out that it imperils democracy for a “vast majority” of one of America’s two major parties to believe that whenever their candidate loses, it means the other candidate was cheating.

“When you look at what's happening in California since their primary election last week, it just reaffirms this point,” Walsh explained. “It expands Trump's legacy. Not only is Donald Trump's greatest legacy — and none of this is good — his greatest legacy is the destruction of truth. His greatest legacy is that he has turned the Republican Party into a party of sore losers, into a party of election deniers, into a party of democracy haters. Trump's greatest legacy is convincing Republicans not to accept the results of elections where their candidate loses. His greatest legacy is convincing Republicans that every time their side loses, it was rigged, it was stolen. Trump did that. Trump turned the Republican Party into that. A party that, when they lose now, never lost — it was stolen.”

While he added that “this is so easy to make fun of,” Walsh finds it difficult to do so “because I can think of nothing more destructive that Trump has done than convincing one of our two political parties not to accept election losses. I can't think of anything more destructive to our democracy that Trump has done than that.”

Prior to Trump, every president who lost an election peacefully relinquished power, tracing all the way back to President John Adams in 1800. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Harvard law professor and Trump impeachment defense attorney Alan Dershowitz cited this precedent in denying that Trump would try to overturn the 2020 election if he lost.

“No president will refuse to step down if his opponent is elected in his place,” Dershowitz told Salon at the time. “It just will not happen, and the American public would never tolerate it.”

Despite Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, conservative commentator and former presidential adviser George F. Will broke down in February how Trump’s claims have been thoroughly debunked, including by many Republicans such as his own attorney general, Bill Barr, and his own vice president, Mike Pence.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will explained. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will continued, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

In May, discussing Trump’s being a sore loser, Walsh said that he believed the president became unforgivable “the very first time in American history, a sitting American president lost an election and refused to accept the result. I still believe to this day the American people, all of us, no matter anyone's politics, should have turned their backs on him — all of us — and told him to just get the hell out of our lives. We're done with you. That's the one thing. Because it's the thread by which this representative democracy hangs together, keeps it together.”

Walsh added, “Six years later, what still saddens me more than anything else is that the American people did not make him pay for that. The American people did not hold him accountable for that. The American people did not stand up and say: ‘oh my f — — God, this doesn't happen in America. You're running for Congress, you're running for the Senate, you're running for mayor, you're running for dog catcher, you're running for president — man, woman, whoever you are, you accept the result. You lose, you accept the result.’ Get out of here!”

He concluded, “That the American people did not say — of everything Trump's done, that with that one, not accepting an election result, that the American people, no matter our political divide, did not stand up and say: ‘Get lost. How dare you. How dare you attack this representative democracy?’ It's a — I don't mind saying it, and if it offends people, I don't care — it will be the one thing that I will never forgive the American people for.”

President Donald Trump is arresting people for supposedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, despite lacking any evidence, and ignoring the signs that it has turned algae green with peeling blue paint because of his own incompetence.

For doing these things, he is being roundly mocked on social media.

"Reflecting Pool story: Under Obama, responsible people carefully studied the problem, sought best solutions - and failed,” posted conservative journalist David Frum on Sunday. “Under Trump, irresponsible people imposed a hasty solution that enriched inept cronies - and failed even more spectacularly."

A prominent former government official also claimed that Trump has failed to fix the Reflecting Pool and is instead falsely blaming other people to deflect heat from himself.

"Like most things Trump touches, the Reflecting Pool is now in worse shape than before,” former US Attorney Barbara McQuade said on X on Sunday. “Adding cosmetic paint did not solve the underlying problem. And now he baselessly blames vandals for his failure."

A social media influencer named Jo (JoJoFromJerz), who has 1 million followers on X, received a lot of responses when she pointed out a double standard in Trump’s approach to criminal prosecution.

"If you beat the police during the insurrection Trump incited, you get a pardon,” Jo wrote. “But if you touch the peeling reflecting pool paint he created, you get arrested."

Another prominent social media personality, liberal commentator Harry Sisson, also observed that "Trump is treating people around the reflecting pool worse than the January 6th insurrectionists and that is terrifying."

Meanwhile Democratic strategist Christopher Webb denounced conservative media outlets like Fox News for going along with Trump’s inaccurate claims that the pool was vandalized.

"SHAME ON FOX, OR ANY NEWS OUTLET, FOR HEADLINES LIKE THIS,” Webb posted on X. “Everyone with eyes knows the Reflecting Pool wasn't vandalized, and every reporter knows it too. 📌 Former Olympian David Hearn was handcuffed after he picked up a section of the pool liner that was already peeling away. He says he didn't vandalize anything."

As Webb noted, the Trump administration targeted three-time Olympics canoeist David Carter Hearn, 67, as one of the so-called vandals of the Reflecting Pool. Trump’s $14 million-plus renovation project on the Reflecting Pool has been so unsuccessful, he has begun plans to partly drain the pool for “necessary repairs.”

“I was just a curious, concerned citizen,” Hearn explained regarding his own arrest. “I guess I was there at the wrong place, wrong time.” Trump said on Saturday that vandals “poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool,” even though he has no evidence of this.

A conservative is worried that President Donald Trump is delusional about the limits to his power — and that this may spark a global catastrophe.

“Donald Trump's latest claim that there are now 'no limits' to his power after launching war with Iran has alarmed political insiders and commentators in Washington, who warn his fixation on 'absolute power' risks catastrophic miscalculations abroad and deepening chaos at home,” reported the International Business Times’ Briane Nebria on Sunday. Trump made these remarks on the HBO program “Axios on HBO” and occurred after he said his ability to declare a war against Iran had proved there were no constraints on how he can use his presidential powers.

After the interview, CNN host Pamela Brown explained to viewers that Trump suggested he was more powerful than Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, both infamous authoritarians in their own right. Jonah Goldberg, a conservative commentator who co-founded The Dispatch, actually agreed with the mainstream news network.

“There are only two possibilities,” Goldberg explained to Brown. “Either he believes it or he's just saying it. And I'm not sure which one is better.” He added that Trump is either refusing to accept that raw power alone does not confer moral legitimacy or is genuinely incapable of understanding that distinction.

“He only measures things on the metric and the rubric of power,” Goldberg told Brown. Because the president has tremendous global influence, this refusal to distinguish between the two could have dire geopolitical consequences.

“I think [that delusion] is going to create more problems in foreign policy and maybe domestic policy going forward,' Goldberg said to Brown. “If Trump genuinely cannot see, or refuses to acknowledge, the constraints built into the American system, then 'he's going to make the same mistakes again.”

Goldberg, despite being conservative, has long opposed Trump’s presidency. In April he wrote an editorial for the Grand Island Independent in which he pointed out that the president’s double standard in expecting other nations to treat him with respect while he is disrespectful is hurting his foreign policy.

“The essence of this low-road-for-me, high-road-for-thee dynamic rests on the belief that Trumpism is a one-way road,” Goldberg explained on Wednesday. “Insulting Trump, deservedly or not, is forbidden, while Trump's antics should be celebrated when possible, defended when necessary, or ignored when neither of those responses is possible. But he should never, ever face consequences for his own actions.”

He added, “Trump has routinely mocked our allies. For efficiency's sake, let's forgive all of the petty jabs from the first term ostensibly intended to get them to spend more on defense. In Trump's second term, he claimed our NATO allies would never fight on our behalf, even though the only time NATO invoked Article 5 -- an attack on one is an attack on all -- was in the wake of 9/11.”

Goldberg concluded, “Back in January, in Davos, Switzerland, Trump revised this false claim, admitting some did fight in Afghanistan, but that ‘they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.’ This infuriated not just allied leaders, but their voters. Indeed, Trump is even unpopular with the populist right across most of Europe.”