Our House Was a Very, Very, Very Fine House
Trump views the physical history of the White House much as he views the nation’s laws: something to be swept aside at will.
The applications have been received, and the new-look Pentagon press—representatives of those publications that were willing to sign Pete Hegseth’s document of standards for state-approved journalism—is in. Gone are all the major news outlets, all the trade publications, even most of the old-school conservative media. In their place will be a motley crew of right-wing content creators and Trump-worshiping streamers: Real America’s Voice, Mike Lindell’s Lindell TV, the Gateway Pundit, the Post Millennial, RedState, and Tim Pool’s TimCast.
What kind of coverage should we expect from this hot new crew? Pool offers a clue: “Our access is mostly for general inquiries and interviews,” he said in a statement. “Should a story, for some reason, end up in our laps that may put us at odds with the Pentagon’s press policy, we will always prioritize the public’s right to know and transparency. However, given that we are not investigative reporters, we don’t expect to find ourselves in these circumstances.” Which is, of course, the whole point. Happy Thursday.
The Asbestos Wing
by William Kristol
Here in Washington yesterday, a fine new organization, the Society for the Rule of Law, held a conference on . . . the rule of law. The panel discussions were well attended, the speakers’ remarks excellent, the mixing and mingling at the reception afterwards was lively. The takeaway: One shouldn’t underestimate the speed and thoroughness of the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law.
Meanwhile, just over a mile away, it was becoming obvious that one shouldn’t underestimate the speed and thoroughness with which the Trump administration was demolishing the entire East Wing of the White House. It’s expected to have disappeared into the literal dustbin of history by this weekend.
You’ll be shocked to learn that in this instance, as in so many others, Trump is breaking a promise. He had said in July that the existing White House wouldn’t be touched by his ballroom construction. “It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”
But that pledge by the President is no longer operative. Why not? Well, Trump explained yesterday, the East Wing “was never thought of as being much. It was a very small building.”
Very small is bad. Very big is good. And so Donald Trump decided that the small old East Wing would be summarily replaced by a big new ballroom.
What, you ask, will that grand structure be called? Did you have to ask? According to the pledge agreement sent to donors, they’ll be contributing to the construction of ”The Donald J. Trump Ballroom at the White House.”
The donors seem happy to help. The defense contractor Lockheed Martin is among the companies reported to have pledged at least $10 million. That sum is close to what the company spent in all of 2024 on federal lobbying. Lockheed, which takes in tens of billions in dollars of federal contracts, knows where its bread is buttered—and who in this day and age is doing the buttering. As Jalen Drummond, vice president of corporate affairs, said, “Lockheed Martin is grateful for the opportunity to help bring the President’s vision to reality and make this addition to the People’s House a powerful symbol of the American ideals we work to defend every day.”
The “addition to the People’s House” will cover 90,000 square feet and will dwarf the main White House.
Perhaps that’s appropriate. That old and sedate building was fit for an older Republic governed by the old-fashioned rule of law. But as the presentations at yesterday’s conference emphasized, it’s by no means clear that we still have such a government.
Abraham Lincoln captured the spirit of that old republican government in impromptu remarks to soldiers of the One Hundred Sixty-sixth Ohio Regiment, who stopped in front of the White House on August 22, 1864 on their way home from the war. Lincoln explained why the fight was necessary:
It is not merely for today, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives. . . . I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.
That was Lincoln.
Trump, on the other hand, as he sat Tuesday at his desk in his newly gilded Oval Office, looking out on his paved-over Rose Garden, not far from where he plans to build his new imitation of the Arc de Triomphe, said this: “We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again. We just can’t let that happen. I know Kash is working on it, everybody is working on it. And certainly Tulsi is working on it. We can’t let that happen again to our country.”
Unlike Lincoln, Donald Trump doesn’t seem to imagine himself a mere temporary inhabitant of the building in which he resides. He apparently doesn’t intend to allow for the defeat of the incumbent administration, and a peaceful transfer of power, in November, 2028.
But at least we’ll be allowed to watch Trump celebrating his triumph over the old republic along with his wealthy enablers in his palatial new ballroom.
How Many Flip-Flops Is This Now?
by Cathy Young
Pity poor Russian propagandists as they try to keep up with Donald Trump and sometimes flip the switch from love to hate in mid-broadcast. Imagine that you’ve spent days crowing about Trump’s new summit with Vladimir Putin and gloating about Volodymyr Zelensky’s diplomatic disaster, only for the Budapest summit to be called off. If you’re Russia’s top propaganda jock, Vladimir Solovyov, it’s enough to trigger psychopathic musings about Russia’s ability to nuke Europe and the United States into oblivion.
So, what happened and where is Trump in his Russia-Ukraine zigzagging? Some details remain murky. There have been disturbing reports that the Trump-Zelensky White House meeting last Friday really was a fiasco comparable to infamous JD Vance dressing-down in February, with Trump yelling and cursing, demanding that Ukraine give up the entirety of the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine, and recycling the Kremlin talking point that Putin can destroy Ukraine “if he wants it.” Publicly, however, Trump has called for stopping the war at the battle lines and negotiating solutions later. (“Let both claim Victory, let History decide!” he proposed in a Truth Social post in a very Trumpian flourish.) A freeze along current frontlines is a position Ukraine first accepted months ago and for which Zelensky now professes full support.
Meanwhile, Russia still wants all of the Donetsk and Luhansk territory (which it has formally annexed but about a quarter of which remains in Ukrainian hands). This position was apparently restated by Putin’s top diplomat Sergey Lavrov in a “productive” phone call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It was firm enough that Rubio concluded that an actual in-person meeting with Lavrov—which was supposed to precede the Trump-Putin summit—would yield no results. And so, we now have no Lavrov-Rubio meeting and no Putin-Trump summit, though Trump still says that “we’ll do it in the future.”
Donbas is probably not the only stumbling block. There is no sign that Russia has relented on security arrangements that would include peacekeeping forces from third countries. And at a press conference in Moscow on Tuesday, Lavrov also reiterated Moscow’s rejection of any agreement that leaves most of Ukraine under a “Nazi” regime (read: not under a pro-Kremlin puppet government). All of which makes abundantly clear that Putin hasn’t given up on subjugating all Ukraine, and believes that a current freeze of hostilities would impede that goal.
What now? In what some see as a hopeful sign that Trump’s pro-Ukraine pivot is back on, the administration has imposed, in Trump’s words, “tremendous sanctions” on Russian oil companies. There is some debate on how much bite these sanctions will have, with loopholes and exemptions for non-U.S. companies that buy and refine Russian oil. Even so, India is apparently preparing to slash its Russian imports in response. Be that as it may, combined with new European sanctions, this move is clearly a step forward—but how much it will accomplish, and how long Trump’s “pivot” will last, remains to be seen. There are already conflicting reports on whether the U.S. has given Ukraine a green light to strike targets deep inside Russia with British-supplied long-range missiles that use U.S. targeting data. The president has taken to his social media site to insist he has nothing to do with the matter (which could be either backtracking or plausible deniability).
If Trump is trying to strong-arm Putin into making concessions, he’s doing it very half-heartedly. But, for the moment at least, it seems clear there will be no new lovefest with Vlad. That’s what passes for good news nine months into Trump’s purported quest for peace in Ukraine.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The CDC Diaspora Fights Back… In The Breakdown, JONATHAN COHN reports on how America’s scientific army is trying to stand up for public health—and stand up for itself.
Raze the White House Ballroom? On The Next Level, JVL, SARAH, and TIM discuss all the things: the controversy over Democrat Graham Platner’s alleged “Nazi tattoo,” the Maine Senate race, the left’s search for a Trump-style outsider, Trump’s corrupt White House ballroom, the “No Kings” protests, and how far America has slipped into banana-republic territory.
Mixed Signals from Washington Cost Lives in Ukraine… Dithering, delaying, and doubting only invite Russian attacks, writes GEN. MARK HERTLING.
Quick Hits
OLD FAITHFUL: If Donald Trump actually decides to pursue his hilariously unethical plan to extract $230 million from the Department of Justice in supposed repayment for its poor treatment of him over the years—payments that, as Greg Sargent writes at The New Republic, could probably be made without any immediate public disclosure—we know one guy who won’t be standing in the way: House Speaker Mike Johnson. Asked at a press conference yesterday how comfortable he would be with such a transaction, Johnson started by saying “I don’t know the details about that.” Then he was off and spinning:
I know that he believes he’s owed that reimbursement. What I heard yesterday was, if he receives it, he was going to consider giving it to charity. I mean, he doesn’t need those proceeds. But we’re for the rule of law. We’re for what is just and right. And it’s just absurd that—as has been noted here several times this morning, they attack him for everything he does. It doesn’t matter what it is.
You’ve got to give Johnson credit: This is some truly high-octane Grade A bullshit. And we’re not even talking about the fact that he’s giving Trump credit merely for considering giving some of the funds to charity.
Describing the $230 million Trump is reportedly seeking as a “reimbursement” is ridiculous. Yes, Trump burned through tens of millions of dollars in legal fees while defending himself against various felony charges between his presidencies—and to pay the bills of various co-defendants and witnesses in his cases. But that money wasn’t coming out of his own pocket. Instead, Trump routinely dipped into his Save America PAC to cover the costs, as was widely covered at the time. Saying Trump deserves a “reimbursement” from the Justice Department now is to say he should get to double-dip the same scam twice: First on his own campaign donors, then on the whole taxpaying public.
ANOTHER BOAT BOMB: Pete Hegseth’s “blow up boats first, ask questions never” policy has spread to the Pacific. The U.S. struck alleged drug-trafficking boats for the first time outside the Caribbean this week, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announcing yesterday that it had sunk two vessels in the East Pacific, killing a total of five people. According to Hegseth, those killed were “known by our intelligence to be involved in illegal narcotics smuggling.”
The response has been the same as ever since the White House’s boat-bombing campaign began: overwhelming condemnation by legal experts, shrugs from elected Republicans. The lone exception has been Sen. Rand Paul, who said this week that the boat strikes “go against all of our tradition” and warned that “all of these people have been blown up without us knowing their name, without any evidence of a crime.” Trump lashed back at once, calling Paul a “nasty liddle’ guy” and a “sick Wacko who refused to vote for our great Republican Party, MAGA, or America First.” He also didn’t invite the Senator to his lunch reception at the paved Rose Garden, to which every other Senate Republican was extended an invitation.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Donald Trump was crabby yesterday. All he’d done was suggest America could help the good people of Argentina out by buying more of their beef. And now he had ranchers all over his ass, complaining that any such plan would hurt their bottom lines. So over he hustled to Truth Social:
The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil. If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years — Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!
Andrew and Sam Stein cut a Bulwark Takes video yesterday breaking down the whole bizarre history Trump is talking about here. American ranchers have been helped by tariffs on Brazil, which have indeed driven beef prices up—much to the consternation, of course, of American consumers who buy beef. (Not that Trump himself was thinking about this when he put the tariffs on Brazil in the first place, which were explicitly intended to punish the country for having the gall to prosecute the crimes of another old Trump buddy, former President Jair Bolsonaro.)
The whole situation is remarkably ironic. Trump claims that the entire reason he is taking so many pains to bail out Argentina is because of his deep appreciation for Milei’s free-market overhaul of the country. Meanwhile, in the very same breath, Trump grumbles that ranchers aren’t properly appreciative of all the ways he wants to do distortionary micromanagement of the American economy. And Milei, the global avatar of economic libertarianism, is gladly extending his hand for the bailouts. If the enormous gulf between Milei’s stated free-market beliefs and his own love for central planning has ever even occurred to Trump, you wouldn’t know it from his posts.
Cheap Shots
The defacing and defiling of the White House feels like Sherman's March come to Washington. All the "kitchen table' voters, behold how your president spends his time and your money. While it's donors supposedly funding the symbolic destruction of our Republic, Trump is sending billions of your dollars to prop up Argentina while putting into motion a scheme to put hundreds of millions of your dollars in his own pockets and his personal attorneys' pockets over investigations into his crimes, crimes that you overlooked because, well, "kitchen table" issues.
I saw an AP headline that our most recent trillion dollars added to the national debt was the fastest trillion ever outside of the pandemic. Tell me now how DOGE saved us all this money by firing tens of thousands of federal workers and cutting/eliminating federal programs?
You voted for a convicted felon who tried to overturn a democratic election because of "kitchen table" issues. I voted for Harris because what we're seeing now is what happens when you make a criminal insurrectionist president. Now, we get this authoritarian garbage and no relief on those sacred, venerable "kitchen table" issues.
We just had to vote for this. This is happening way too fast.
I usually wait to read Morning Shots each day before I get started on projects. But today? I could only get through the first two paragraphs before I shut down my table and in essence yelled, F**k it.