Politics

Republicans are trying to fully cement President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., after a Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to remove former President John F. Kennedy’s name from the building and replace it with Dear Leader’s.  The bill, introduced by Missouri GOP Rep. Bob Onder, is called the Make Entertainment Great Again Act. If passed, it would erase Kennedy’s name from the building—which was renamed after Kennedy in 1964 following his assassination and serves as “a living memorial” to the late president, and call it the Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts. A cartoon by Clay Jones. “You would be hard pressed to find a more significant cultural icon in the past 40 years than President Trump,” Onder said in a news release that heaped praise upon Dear Leader. “President Trump’s love and mastery of entertainment has stood the test of time and allowed him to capture Americans’ attention for decades. I cannot think of a more ubiquitous symbol of American exceptionalism in the arts, entertainment, and popular culture at large than President Trump.” Changing the name of the Kennedy Center would fully cement Trump’s takeover of the performing arts powerhouse. Already, Trump fired the entire Kennedy Center board of trustees and replaced them with his own MAGA bootlickers in order to change the kind of programming that is featured in the building. Trump then claimed the board unanimously made him chairman. Republicans are also trying to rename the Kennedy Center’s Opera House—one of a number of theaters inside the building—after first lady Melania Trump in yet another ridiculous and divisive move. Related | What the f-ck is the First Lady Melania Trump Opera House? But renaming the entire building after Trump would likely further damage the performing arts center. Already, artists have decided not to bring their shows or performances to the center in protest of Trump’s takeover. And ticket sales have slumped as much as 50%, as patrons also decide they do not want to financially support Trump’s hostile takeover and changes. But that doesn’t matter to congressional Republicans, who will do anything to prove their love and devotion to their MAGA God. Aside from wanting to rename the Kennedy Center after Trump, congressional Republicans have also introduced bills that would put Trump’s face on the $100 bill, add Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore, and rename Dulles International Airport in Virginia after him. Other Republicans have moved to nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, the long-elusive honor that Trump is so mad he won’t ever get. The Republican ass kissing of Dear Leader is truly stomach churning.

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina continues her transformation into an erratic and increasingly cruel presence in the GOP. Appearing Sunday on Fox News, Mace gushed over President Donald Trump’s inhumane and illegal deportation policies, which include arresting people who are complying with legal immigration processes by appearing in court. “[There’s a] new sheriff in town,” Mace said. “I have to tell you, one of my favorite things to watch on YouTube these days are the court hearings where illegals are in court and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] shows up to drag them out of court and deport them. I can think of nothing more American today than keeping our streets safer by getting those violent criminals out of the United States of America.” YouTube Video Mace’s apparent enjoyment at what best resembles a gestapo-like roundup of people—many of whom are law-abiding and were living in our country legally—serves as a stark reminder of the cruelty that the Republican Party revels in. The ICE project of detainment and deportation without due process has been ruled illegal by federal judges, and the Trump administration has also shown a willingness to violate the rights of innocent people to push a purely racist agenda. Mace’s turn from so-called moderate Republican to bloviating opponent of transgender rights and immigrant rights has been both grotesque and unsurprising. Over the past few years, she has increased her bigoted rhetoric against trans Americans, and her reckless and inflammatory accusations against a variety of people have prompted at least one former staffer to describe Mace as “full of shit.” It seems clear that Mace is also full of cruelty.

Last week saw two more high-profile officials from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency take their leave. Gosh, what will the government do without rich industrialists play-acting at being federal employees?  The biggest departure was Tyler Hassen, the oil executive whom President Donald Trump installed as shadow secretary of the interior. You might remember Hassen from the bloodless coup in April, where the nominal secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, essentially signed full control of the agency over to Hassen, the very epitome of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat.  As of Aug. 1, the government won’t have Hassen to kick around any longer. He’s stepping away from pretending to be in government service, presumably to spend more time with his money. The New York Times piece on Hassen’s departure mentions none of Hassen’s accomplishments while at Interior, likely because there aren’t any.  No word on whether Burgum will get a new babysitter who currently works at a hedge fund or something, but for the moment, the former North Dakota governor put his big boy pants on to go tour Alcatraz with Attorney General Pam Bondi. Nothing says “managing America’s precious public lands and natural resources” like reopening a prison that is, at the moment, a tourist attraction. Also out at DOGE: Antonio Gracias. While on the team, Gracias was responsible for … well, it’s not clear. Gracias is a pal of former DOGE leader Elon Musk, and he was an investor in Tesla. While in government, he kept busy by attacking Social Security and yelling about supposed voter fraud, but beyond that, who knows what he did. Gracias had a pretty sweet deal, though, as he was able to keep his day job running a private equity firm where he managed $2 billion in assets for nine public pension funds.  Thousands of protesters gather for an anti-Trump rally around the Washington Monument on April 5. Earlier this week, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten sent letters to the pension managers for those nine funds, asking them if they were at all concerned that their pension-fund fiduciary was moonlighting as a voter-fraud crank at DOGE. When Weingarten’s office emailed Gracias’ company, Valor Equity Partners, to inquire about his current DOGE employment status, the company stated that he had stopped volunteering with the government on July 1, although neither the government nor Gracias had mentioned this until Weingarten followed up.  Hassen and Gracias are the latest DOGE employees to leave, but they are two of many who departed following the ugly Trump-Musk breakup, which started in late May. A string of DOGE officials followed Musk out the door over the next few months. At least eight of the core DOGE staffers are gone, including Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, who now apparently just works for Elon? And at least seven DOGE engineers, many of whom had unprecedented access to private government data, are also out the door, with more on the way, according to Politico. To be fair, the taxpayers are lucky enough to still be paying for Edward “Big Balls” Coristine and other DOGE kidlets who now have regular government jobs where they all make well over $100,000, despite still having no relevant experience.  These departures highlight how ridiculous it was for the administration to pretend that money managers and tech titans would somehow step in and run the government while also retaining their day jobs as masters of the universe, because how hard can running the government be?  Turns out, a lot harder than Musk and his ilk realized. Now they all get to go back to their incredibly lucrative positions, and we all suffer the consequences of their haphazard, ill-informed cuts to government services. Sweet deal for them, at least.

Well, looks like President Donald Trump is still beefing with windmills. During a press conference in Scotland on Monday, Trump told reporters that windmills are “a disaster” and “a shame.” “Look, wind is the most expensive form of energy, and it destroys the beauty of your fields and your planes and your, and your waterways, and look, look out there. There’s no windmills. But if you look in another direction and you see windmills,” he said. He went on to promote his idea of efficient energy: oil and gas. “You can take a thousand times more energy out of a hole in the ground. This big … this big. It’s called oil and gas. And you have it there, the North Sea, this big that nobody would even see. You can take a thousand times more power because the wind is intermittent,” he said before claiming that every windmill is made by China. YouTube Video Trump’s anger toward wind energy began more than a decade ago, before he ran for president. He started a legal battle in Scotland to block a wind farm near his Aberdeenshire golf course—a battle he ultimately lost. But he’s never relented in his baseless attacks, claiming that wind farms are “killing” everything from birds to Americans to Scotland’s tourism.  In reality, wind continues to be one of the cheapest sources of energy around the world. And despite Trump’s claim, China doesn’t manufacture all of the windmills, and Scotland is generating record-breaking amounts of renewable energy, much of it powered by wind. What’s more expensive than windmills? U.S. taxpayers funding Trump’s golf trips to places like Scotland. Datawrapper Content

President Donald Trump is still putting his foot in his mouth as he tries to spin his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal, for which his administration has been under fire for refusing to fully disclose any evidence. While trying to generate positive headlines for his golf course and trade deals during his trip to Europe, Trump made some comments Monday that put the Epstein scandal back in the spotlight.  When asked about the scandal, Trump tried to claim that he never visited Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The island was reportedly where Epstein carried out his alleged sex trafficking and abuse of underage girls. “I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down,” Trump said. YouTube Video Trump’s assertion, of course, makes it clear that he was at the very least close enough to Epstein to be offered a visit to the island. The two were friends for years, as has extensively been documented. Since the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump sent a lewd birthday note to Epstein, which included a drawing of a naked woman, he has been trying to spin the story.  “I don’t do drawings. I’m not a drawing person. I don’t do drawings,” Trump said before immediately contradicting himself by saying, “Sometimes people say people say, ‘well you drew a building’ and I’ll draw four lines and a little roof, you know for a charity, so—” YouTube Video And since Trump first tried to distance himself from the Journal’s report, several drawings that he’s made over the years—including for charity auctions—have surfaced. By his own definition, Trump is a “drawing person.” He also asserted that he has the power to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, his former party companion. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for assisting Epstein in trafficking and exploiting underage girls. “I’m allowed to give her a pardon,” Trump said. Related | Trump won’t rule out pardoning notorious sex offender he partied with Attempting to project political power, Trump claimed that the Epstein scandal is good for him and that his polling has increased since the story surfaced. This is completely false.  Trump’s approval has fallen since the Epstein scandal began, and it’s particularly notable that his support among Republicans is down on this issue—which has historically been his area of strength. The Epstein story isn’t going away, and Trump is going to have to keep dealing with it. And no matter how hard he tries, his spin is clearly not working.

PoliticusUSA needs your help. Our independent voice can only remain strong with your support, so please subscribe. Subscribe now Donald Trump has a way of admitting things even when he claims to be innocent. In the video above, I break down how Trump’s latest Epstein denial makes no sense, but the big bombshell is that Trump thinks that visiting Jeffrey Epstein’s island was a privilege. Trump tried to explain away his split with Jeffrey Epstein while meeting with the UK Prime Minister: PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. That’s such old history. Easy to explain but I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it. For years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk. He did something that was inappropriate. He hired help and I said don’t ever do that again. He stole people that worked for me. Don’t ever do it again. He did it again, and I threw him out of the place persona non grata. I never went to the island. Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times. I never went to the island but Larry Summers, I hear, went there. He was the head of Harvard and many other big people. Nobody ever talks about them. I never had the privilege of going to his island. And I did turn it down.  Ask yourself, how could Donald Trump step up to the microphone one day and make the Jeffrey Epstein scandal worse? By calling, going to Jeffrey Epstein’s Island a privilege. This story is not going away. Trump is making it worse every single time he opens his mouth. If you didn’t think Trump was acting guilty of something, he clearly is trying to hide something. We don’t know what that is. We don’t know what he might have done or didn’t do, but this is where we stand: visiting Epstein’s island is a privilege, according to Donald Trump. What do you think about Trump calling visiting Epstein’s island a privilege? Join the discussion in the comments below. Leave a comment

During his second term as president, Donald Trump has given a lot of plum jobs to his personal criminal attorneys—which, to be fair, the convicted felon has a lot of. Gotta stuff ‘em all somewhere, right? But perhaps no one has received as sweet a reward as Emil Bove, currently awaiting his likely inevitable ascendance to a lifetime seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.  The steady drip drip drip of bad news about Bove does not seem to be causing GOP senators any undue concern, though. Even Friday’s revelation that Bove admitted to meeting with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a hard-right evangelical law firm, to discuss his qualifications and confirmation does not seem to be slowing things down.  Sure, Sen. Susan Collins furrowed her brow and decided not to back Bove. That also goes for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is back to pretending she has principles after casting a “yes” vote on the Big Beautiful Bill based solely on getting extra treats for Alaska and Alaska alone. But Collins and Murkowski both know that they can afford this little show of faux-independence because Bove clearly already has 50 Republican votes locked up. Related | The Justice Department has turned into a raging dumpster fire under Trump So let’s not expect that the news that Bove met with ADF will actually shake the GOP senators. It’s not like the firm has any cases that are just about to come before the Third Circuit … oh, wait. They sure do—a bigoted transphobic little number where the firm represents a conservative parent suing a school board for trans-ing her child, because that is totally how it works, definitely.  Let’s face it: The only real mystery as to how Bove would rule in favor of bigoted parents in the service of being terrible to trans kids at scale is whether he’d be doing it at the Third Circuit or when both he and this case somehow inexorably end up at the Supreme Court. You think Justice Samuel Alito is bad? Imagine a less astute, less qualified, more unhinged Alito.  But maybe Bove is just trying to emulate a different justice and hoping to take a run at being a replacement someday for Clarence Thomas, a jurist who never met a conflict of interest that applies to him—ever. Though Bove would have a long, long way to go to ever meet the level of corruption Thomas has achieved.  There’s no doubt that the right will spin the news of Bove’s meeting with the ADF as, “Well, nobody complained when the commies running the American Bar Association got to have a role in judicial nominations, and thank god we don’t have to let them any longer—but this is no different.”  Even the extremist Federalist Society appears to be boxed out of the direct access and puppet-mastering the conservative legal organization enjoyed during Trump’s first term. FedSoc poobah Leonard Leo and Trump had a recent falling-out over the fact that some of Trump’s own first-term nominees have had the gall to rule against him.  As bad as it was having the Federalist Society give Trump a slate of judges vat-grown in a lab to achieve conservative aims, even FedSoc is not like the ADF, which is an actual legal organization dedicated to bringing a very specific type of conservative demand before conservative judges 24/7. Now it looks a lot like they’re getting to shape judicial nominations.  Meanwhile, there’s news that another whistleblower has come forward to confirm the bombshell reveal from fired DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni that Bove told DOJ attorneys to disobey a court order. Yep, there’s more than one Department of Justice employee who has filed whistleblower declarations with the Department of Justice’s Inspector General. In fact, they filed their declarations back in May, before Reuveni did, so there’s no way to say this was manufactured to give additional support to Reuveni’s claims. The whistleblower’s declaration reports the same thing as Reuveni’s—that Bove directed the DOJ to defy a court order.  Bove is in many ways the perfect avatar of a Trump second-term judicial nominee: a thumb-headed rageaholic who is wildly unqualified for the job but sure that he’s the smartest guy in the room. He never doubts for a second that his role as judge is absolutely 100% to do what Trump wants, has no issues with being threatening in doing it, and has zero interest in assessing whether something creates the appearance of a conflict or is a conflict. Just give him the robe already, dammit.

PoliticusUSA is 100% supported by readers like you. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now Republicans tried to defund Planned Parenthood in their tax cuts for the rich and no healthcare for everyone else legislation that Trump signed into law. The GOP thought that they could get around legal challenges by only defunding PP for a year, but the courts have stepped in and blocked the scheme. The latest move was a new federal court order that replaced the temporary restraining order, as the AP reported: The new order replaces a previous edict handed down by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston last week. Talwani initially granted a preliminary injunction specifically blocking the government from cutting Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood members that didn’t provide abortion care or didn’t meet a threshold of at least $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements in a given year. “Patients are likely to suffer adverse health consequences where care is disrupted or unavailable,” Talwani wrote in her Monday order. “In particular, restricting Members’ ability to provide healthcare services threatens an increase in unintended pregnancies and attendant complications because of reduced access to effective contraceptives, and an increase in undiagnosed and untreated STIs.” PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What Republicans think of as a big beautiful bill is an anchor around their necks. Since the defunding of Planned Parenthood is only written into the law for a year, there is a growing possibility that the move to defund Planned Parenthood will never happen, as the legislation could remain tied up in court for the next year. There is so much of what Trump is doing that doesn’t stand up legally or politically. It is as if the Executive Branch has been turned into a reality show that has no serious interest in competently governing, but the incompetence has been combined with the extreme agenda of right-wing ideologues, which still has the potential to do damage to millions of Americans. The best thing that can happen for those who could lose their healthcare, whether it be through Medicaid cuts or defunding Planned Parenthood, is for Trump to be disempowered through Democrats winning control of all or part of Congress next year. What do you think about the new order blocking Trump from defunding Planned Parenthood? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

Keenan Norris The administration knows that subduing history as it is doing works to keep people of color in this country disunited and at odds with each other. The post It Has Never Been Easy to Be Both Black and American appeared first on The Nation.

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