patriotism

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."

The revelatory book “Regime Change,” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, is the gift that keeps on giving, said MS NOW journalist Paul Waldman. But he said it’s also revealed a “sinister” relationship between Trump and his aids that have created a “cocoon of sycophancy Trump has built around himself, with dire consequences for the country.”

“The president has finally created an administration that works exactly how he wants it to, and the result is a vicious cycle of incompetence and moral corruption,” said Waldman, citing the new book’s insights. “In short, everything about how the White House operates exacerbates Trump’s most pernicious instincts and character flaws. His aides enable him to be the worst version of himself, and in turn he makes them the worst version of themselves.”

His cocoon was being constructed from the moment Trump began staffing up his second administration, according to Waldman. We know how much Trump has always valued loyalty, but as Haberman and Swan report, “there was a new acid test: January 6.”

“Anyone seeking a place near the center of power had to say it was the act of patriots who were subsequently abused by the Biden administration,” said Walkman. “That weeded out anyone with a real commitment to American democracy. And it forced everyone to publicly proclaim a lie. When you abandon your integrity in that way, you become much more willing to do terrible things in the future.”

Occasionally someone raises a doubt or gently suggests a different course for Trump to take, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging the president to say publicly he had no intention of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in order to calm markets. Former deputy AG Todd Blanche told Trump there were no grounds to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James. But the authors note those moments of moments of dissent are few and far between, and Trump can only be constrained for a moment.

“He did get his bogus indictment of James, for instance, a case that quickly fell apart,y fell apart,” said Waldman. “… The result is an administration full of people who either agree with Trump’s most self-destructive impulses or know that objections are all but pointless.”

Few Trump aides called out the danger of sending in the National] Guard to American cities to enforce immigration law, wrote Haberman and Swan report, and the results were deadly disaster. And when Trump suggests the U.S. take possession of Gaza — a self-evidently ludicrous notion — no one disagrees.

“It’s a strong move,” Communications Director Steven Cheung told Trump, when asked about the prospect, even though Trump aides privately conceded the suggestion was “legitimately nutso.”

What comes of this are disasters like the Iran war. Vice President JD Vance expressed misgivings about the war, said the authors. “But with the exception of the vice president, nobody on the senior team — not his secretary of state, not his chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not his chief of staff — had made a real effort” to talk Trump out of it.

“This is a portrait of an unserious president surrounded by unserious people, all bringing out the worst in each other,” said Waldman. “Most frightening of all, there are still 2 1/2 years left.

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.

Politico reporter Josh Gerstein says a DC Circuit court has declined to stay a ruling against former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge, meaning Herridge is now staring down the barrel of an $800-a-day contempt fine and possibly jail.

As president, Politico reports President Donald Trump will “lack the power to directly waive the fine or potential jail time that Herridge faces, but he could order the Justice Department to settle an underlying lawsuit filed by the woman, Yanping Chen.”

Settling the suit would wipe away the fines and any other punishment against Herridge.

“Herridge relied on one or more anonymous sources for several 2017 stories about potential national security risks related to a Virginia school that was founded by Chen and attended by many members of the U.S. military whose tuition was paid by taxpayers,” reported Politico. “Herridge published details about an FBI investigation into Chen, including photos of her in a People’s Liberation Army uniform.”

But Chen argued that leaks about the probe damaged her reputation, and she sued several federal agencies over the disclosures. As part of that lawsuit, she issued a subpoena to Herridge to try to force her to disclose her source, but Herridge refused. Chen sued the FBI, DOJ, Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security in 2018 for monetary damages and an admission of wrongdoing from the government that leaked about her violated the Privacy Act. But after her depositions failed to reveal the leaker, Chen turned her lawyers loose on Fox News and Herridge.

Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper ordered Herridge to pay the $800-a-day fine for her defiance of the subpoena, but he delayed enforcement of the fine to allow Herridge to appeal. Now that she has lost her appeal, Chen’s lawyers could ask the judge for stiffer fines or even to jail Herridge if she refuses to surrender her source.

“Judge Greg Katsas, a Trump appointee, and Judge Harry Edwards, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, both sounded dubious of Herridge’s legal argument that Cooper should have balanced the public interest in news reporting against Chen’s desire to be compensated for damage to her reputation,” reported Politico last year.

“What is this balancing test? … What does that mean?” Edwards asked in arguments, while Joe Biden appointee Judge Michelle Childs was even less supportive in her comments about who exactly qualifies as a journalist — complete with journalistic protections.

“We’re now in this social media age where people hide behind Twitter, people hide behind other social media outlets. Who are you really protecting?” Childs asked.

Herridge was an investigative TV reporter, Politico reports she left Fox News for CBS in 2019, before being laid off by CBS in 2024. She now publishes her work on Substack.

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.”

“Up and Up” writer Rachel Janfaza covers younger voter concerns and Gen Z issues — and Gen Z is definitely having issues with President Donald Trump’s economy this summer.

“It’s no secret that the job market for Gen Z is bleak,” wrote Janfaza. “That’s true for recent high school and college grads looking for entry-level work. But it’s also increasingly the case for students looking for summer opportunities to make some cash and stack their pre-professional resume.”

Janfaza pointed out that summer hiring for teens is expected to fall (from 801,000 teen jobs gained last summer to 790,000 this summer, according to reports after last year’s eight decade low.

“That would be the worst summer hiring total for teens since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track in 1948,” said Janfaza, which mixes horribly with the rise in young people looking for extra work in the gig economy by taking shifts on apps like Uber.

When asking young adults in the Gen Z community about their summer plans in Trump’s awful job market, they had little good to say about the prospects of retail, waitressing, and corporate internships.

“I do not have a job this summer,” said a 20-year-old student from Pennsylvania, who also said the most recent situation she felt least confident was when is “applying for jobs that I may not have the proper experience for and feeling like I am behind in life.”

“No,” said an 18-year-old in Arizona, who also said his biggest financial pinch is tuition.

“I don’t have a job this summer,” said a 19-year-old student in Miami, Florida, who also complained that gas and food prices are a financial concern.

“The through line was that those without a job weren’t in that situation from a lack of trying. But the reality of a summer without work is affecting their finances and their own sense of self-confidence,” wrote Jafanza, who added that beyond the obvious financial strain and emotional toll, the job market is increasingly becoming a political issue for potential young voters.

“Asked the biggest political issue leading up to the midterms, the 20-year-old from Pennsylvania who’s waitressing at two separate restaurants said: “The cost of everything, people can’t find jobs, can’t afford housing, and can’t afford to put food on the table.”

“Summer jobs are a right of passage — one that boosts confidence, cultivates independence, and builds resiliency,” said Janfaza. “They also, of course, help students save up for college or pay their way through it. In arming fewer young adults with these opportunities, we’re not only bleeding that professional experience, but cultivating frustration from members of a generation desperately searching for it.”

In addition to turning on the Trump administration over the president’s unilateral war in Iran, Genz Z is whacking the administration over inflation and the increasingly shrinking and unfriendly job market.

Joshua Byers, 26, told the Post: "I feel betrayed. I don't know why we are fighting (in Iran) if we have never been attacked.”

Author John Ganz says President Donald Trump is not, by any definition, a “big reader.” But he does have a political cunning for picking up on populist ideas and commandeering them for his own gain.

“[But] he was aware, he saw Pat Buchanan and David Duke running and noted ‘look, they're doing well because there's a lot of anger in this country’ … and he for a very long time have these in protectionist instincts essentially you know he temperamentally goes along with this ideological program which is that the United States relationship with the world is adversarial and our so-called allies are trying to screw us and immigrants are sucking up our resource,” Ganz told Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller. “It's a very zero-sum hostile and paranoid attitude towards the world.”

Helping Trump was the fact that the Democratic Party had moved too far away from its populist tradition, and the fragmentation of media, which “opened up the doors for a lot of things that would not have made it into you know the previous ecosystem of media and that is a boon to all kinds of crackpots and charlatans.”

Additionally, Trump encapsulated the spirit of a third-party candidate.

“Like Ross Perot, who comes out and says, ‘you know, the parties are crooked. I'm going to reform them. I'm going to change everything.’ So there is a populist spirit which is not entirely contained in either party and in fact can attack the party's system itself,” said Ganz. “And if you look at the way Trump takes over the Republican Party, he kind of attacks it as almost a third-party kind of candidate.”

That populist appeal still exists today among a huge swathe of voters — only now the primaries are shaking out in way that puts Trump on the bad side of a populist war, with voters turning on him over his many failures.

“There's probably going to be some coalition a mixture of the Democratic Party, an amalgam,” said Ganz, of a “moderately populist” that will likely be successfully coopted by Democrat for a while.

When asked by Miller about Trump’s political challenge of “reaching the aggrieved,” Ganz said “Trump's coalition of the alienated obviously was extremely fragile and temporary and many of the people he brought on board he quickly alienated himself and they're up for grabs.”

Ganz added: “Are they all going to become Democrats? No. Some of them will just be demobilized. But I do think … a politician who seems to be a fighter against entrenched sloth and privilege and systemic corruption is going to appeal to a certain type of voter.”

But Trump personalizes everything, said Ganz and is “not able to think in terms of systems or abstractions, and “psychologically incapable of understanding things as processes that don't have a person behind them.”

Trump’s mental malfunction is sinking his and Republicans’ chances for the next few years.

For that reason, Ganz said it was good that populist Democrat senatorial challenger Graham Platner is working for Democrats, because the hunger for a populist personality is still burning strong among the electorate.

“I would say I would rather Platner on our side than the other side. I would say from my perspective, he's lending his powers for good,” he said.

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.”

CNN reports President Donald Trump personally pressed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to issue controversial subpoenas that the DOJ later retracted with the power of his emblematic big black marker.

Trump’s heavily politicized Department of Justice, run by his personal attorney Blanche later withdrew subpoenas of several reporters in connection with national security leak probes connected to the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, but CNN reports the episode remains a “troubling example of President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against the news media.”

None of the journalists were ever compelled to testify about their anonymous sources, and the Post confirmed that the subpoena to reporter Ellen Nakashima was withdrawn. A person familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN that the order to the Journal was also withdrawn a few weeks ago.

“The Post remained silent about the matter until Tuesday, when it reported that the Justice Department ‘withdrew the subpoenas earlier this month after they were challenged by the news organizations, according to a Justice Department official familiar with the matter.’”

But even more unnerving, according to officials familiar with the DOJ subpoenas, is the overt influence Trump wields over the DOJ, which is supposed to be independently run.

“Officials familiar with the matter told CNN that Trump personally pushed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to issue the subpoenas. The president delivered the message — with the word ‘Treason’ written in Sharpie — on a stack of printed articles he handed to Blanche,” reports CNN.

Additionally, one of the officials told CNN that the Justice Department’s National Security Division was already preparing to look at some of the stories’ sources, but Trump’s stack accelerated the effort.

Responding Tuesday to questions about the withdrawn subpoenas, Blanche insisted to CNN that “reporters are not our targets,” but added that the Justice Department is “not going to stop investigating people who work in this administration who think it’s okay to leak classified information.”

Press freedom groups counter that the notion that the reporting amounted to “treason” was preposterous.

“With the news out and the subpoena withdrawn, I want to reiterate our unwavering support for the First Amendment rights enshrined in our constitution, the legal protections afforded journalists, and our unblinking support of our journalists and press freedom,” wrote The Post’s executive editor Matt Murray Tuesday morning.

“This institution stands behind each of you,” Murray added. “It is in The Washington Post’s DNA to question, investigate, uncover and report. That’s why we’re here and what we’ll keep doing.”