Donald Trump is tearing down the East Wing of the White House to make way for a gigantic gilded ballroom. He initially promised that there would only be small changes to the building, and nothing would be destroyed. Now, it’s being entirely demolished.

According to the president, he met with “two geniuses” — men he didn’t name — who told him he didn’t need permits or permission to make whatever changes he liked to the White House. “I said, ‘how long would it take? They said, ‘Sir, you can start tonight. You have zero zoning conditions. You have no approvals.’‘” Trump said. “I said, ‘you gotta be kidding.’ He said, ‘Sir, this is the White House. You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want.’”

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There is actually a body charged with overseeing changes to the nation’s capital city and preserving its history; Trump has ignored them. The ballroom he’s building is massive, and historic preservationists warm it will overwhelm the primary building and compromise the aesthetic of the White House grounds. It’s not exactly a shock that the man who owns Mar-a-Lago and whose favored aesthetic is “throw more gold on it” is not overseeing the classiest renovation. But this really does look like it’s going to be a monstrosity. Here’s a mockup — you can see the ballroom on the right, over the former East Wing, which used to be roughly the same size as the West Wing:

The ballroom dwarfs the primary White House residence. It feels quite visually unbalanced. It’s ugly. It’s tacky. It’s also reportedly going to be connected to the primary White House building by a glass bridge (ugh); it’s hard to imagine how one builds a glass bridge into the White House without making some significant changes to that structure, too. And it’s all about being built because an egomaniacal president wants to leave a huge mark that is all about him — even if the mark is a giant eyesore.

Adding a larger ballroom to the White House isn’t itself a bad idea, and it seems like the space really is needed. But it’s a question of process (and, to be honest, taste). The White House isn’t Trump’s personal abode; it’s a place he’s living for four years, that he is a custodian of. Changes to it should never be made unilaterally, and should have the input of people who understand and respect the building’s history and integrity. Past presidents have renovated where needed, and they generally didn’t face much in the way of backlash, because at least in the modern era the renovations have been modest, necessary, and completed after undergoing a thorough approvals process. They didn’t just jam through what they wanted.

I was struck by Trump’s comment that he was told, “‘Sir, this is the White House. You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want.’” It harkens back to another famous Trump observation: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy.”

This kind of entitlement is what has characterized Trump’s entire adult life. It’s what is characterizing his presidency.

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It should also not be lost on us that Donald Trump is demolishing the East Wing, where First Ladies and their staffs worked. This is an administration characterized by virulent misogyny, and a president elected on the by white-hot male resentment. This is a presidency of the manosphere. Of course they’re destroying the area of the White House grounds largely associated with women.

Last week, Trump also posted an AI video of himself dropping excrement on American cities. The point was to mock the No Kings protesters who took to the streets. The visual, though, was him literally dropping shit on America. This presidency is shocking in a million ways, but this video really was a new low: The juvenile humor of it, the very fact of an American president declaring that millions of his fellow citizens deserved to be shat on because they disagree with him. Past presidents have almost to a one understood themselves to be president for all Americans. Not Trump. In his view, only Americans who are loyal to him are truly American at all.

Most American presidents, even ones I think were terrible, understood themselves as custodians — of a historic home, sure, but more importantly of an office, a people, a national creed, and a founding document that set out bold and crucial principles that would become a model of freedom and democratic rule. America is not perfect, but part of what has made America admirable is that our citizens and leaders alike have been committed to a set of ideals. We haven’t always lived up to those ideals — far from it — but the best parts of our history have been the times in which groups excluded from America’s promise demanded the country honor its commitments.

What we’re seeing now is a man who does not believe himself beholden to anything — not tradition, not morality, not the rule of law, not the US Constitution. And what is to me even scarier is that a significant minority of the nation lines up behind him, and also apparently has no fealty at all to America as a place and an idea and a collective that is ours only temporarily, that we have a collective obligation to preserve, improve, and pass on. This same group has deemed half the nation not really American by virtue of our liberal or even moderate politics, and they cheer the president on when he says that their fellow citizens are enemies. They claim removing confederate statues that are only a few decades old is an unacceptable erasure of history, but shrug as the president bulldozes part of the White House. It’s not about principles. It’s about dominance. These are not people who love American democracy and our history. They are people who simply want their guy in charge, so that he might humiliate, denigrate, and destroy the Americans they collectively dislike.

It is not normal to applaud a president for saying he shits on America. It’s not normal to allow private donors to funnel money to a presidential vanity project that involves destroying a large part of the single most iconic symbol of the United States.

“You can do anything you want.” “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” Trump is the most un-American president in modern American history. He’s destroying not just a physical manifestation of that history, but the social glue that has held this enormous, diverse, complicated country together. He’s not just taking a bulldozer to the East Wing; he’s taking it to all of us.

xx Jill

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Chickenshit pretenders.

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Two Americans, Judith A. Voorhees and Charles K. Voorhees, filed a lawsuit today in federal court in Washington D.C. seeking a temporary restraining order “enjoining Defendants and any third parties from further destroying any portion of the White House.” That may sound like slamming the door after the horse has escaped from the barn, but the lawsuit recognizes that if Trump wanted to, he could tear down the entire White House and build some sort of garish South Florida monstrosity in its place, and there would be no way to stop him.

The lawsuit says that Trump broke the law. He violated the National Capital Planning Act of 1952 by failing to submit plans for his “renovation” of the White House to the National Capital Planning Commission. He violated the National Historic Preservation Act (“NHPA”) of 1966 by failing to notify or consult with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (“ACHP”) and the D.C. State Historic Preservation Office (“SHPO”) before beginning work on the property and by failing to evaluate the effects of any proposed work on the historical property of the White House. Last, but not least, Trump bypassed “legally required oversight by the Commission of Fine Arts (“CFA”), which reviews and advises on the design and aesthetics of the exterior modifications to the White House and its grounds.”

Trump clearly broke several laws by leveling the East Wing of the White House, but he doesn’t care. The Supreme Court – six of the justices anyway -- allowed him to break the law and not face any consequences, because they ruled that Trump cannot be charged with a crime for any official act he carries out as president.

Tearing down a portion of the White House is an official act. So, it doesn’t matter that Donald Trump ordered that the East Wing be torn down in favor of a privately funded monument to himself that the White House is already calling “The Donald J. Trump Ballroom.”

It wouldn’t matter if Trump decided to tear down the entire structure of the White House, which has stood, in one form or another, since the year 1800. He could do it. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, looking rather pleased with herself, in answering a question from a reporter, said today that Trump can tear down anything he wants, including the White House or the Jefferson Memorial, because permission is required from the National Capital Planning Commission “only for vertical construction,” but not for demolition.

But of course, she is wrong about that. Trump can tear down any federal structure he wants in Washington D.C. or anywhere else in the country because the Supreme Court said his official actions as president are not to be challenged under law.

It is probably the case that the dimwits on the Supreme Court, in granting to Trump or any future president ultimate power under the unitary executive theory that they are so fond of, did not foresee that Donald Trump would use that power to destroy part of the national monument that he lives in. That is the problem with right-wing beliefs like the unitary executive theory held by the so-called “conservatives” on the Court. They presuppose that the American people will elect at least a sane person fully in possession of his mental faculties and maybe even a person with a conscience.

That did not happen last November. The American people elected a person so consumed by self-adoration and a grossly inflated sense of his worth as a human being that he is utterly and completely out of control. Upon announcing his plans to add a gigantic “ballroom” to the White House, Trump promised that the structure of the building as it stands would not be touched, because he is its “biggest fan.”

He lied. He knew at that moment that he would do anything he wanted to the White House, because that is the way he has lived his life. Trump infamously told Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood tape that he could “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything you want.” He was not only describing his proclivity for sexual assault, he was telling the world that in his life so far, he could do anything he wanted to do and get away with it, because he was Donald Trump.

He is still Donald Trump, and thanks to the Supreme Court of the United States, we are stuck with him. He can tear down the East Wing of the White House. He can slap gold leaf on stair treads in the White House if he wants to. He can hold fund raisers in the White House and line his own pockets with millions of dollars. He can sit in the Oval Office and plan crypto scams and rake in the bucks from MAGA suckers if he wants.

He can order the U.S. military to shoot boats out of the water based on his suspicion that the people on the boats are smuggling drugs, which would be murder under any sane system of laws.

He wakes up in the morning and he breathes air filled with magic dust scattered by a Supreme Court with six justices who think that the power that they have aggregated to themselves and passed on to him allows him to, in his own words, do anything he wants.

Donald Trump can turn the White House into Mar a Lago. His Supreme Court is poised to allow him to go to war against his own people using the United States military. His Supreme Court will allow him to declare an emergency and station soldiers outside polling places in November of next year, because under their theory of executive power, he can do anything he wants.

If you visit Washington D.C. today, or next week, or the week after that, you will see soldiers in the streets carrying rifles, and you will see a national monument, the White House, that has been vandalized by a madman.

We live in a country that we do not recognize because last year, our fellow citizens voted for a dictator as president.

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In this Reality Check video, DCReport’s co-founder, and Pulitzer Prize winner, David Cay Johnston, takes a closer look at the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey—and why dismissing the case too quickly could conceal the truth. Johnston argues that instead of granting Comey’s request to throw out what appears to be a politically motivated prosecution, the judge should allow full subpoena power to uncover whether Donald Trump’s Justice Department engaged in vindictive prosecution. It’s a moment that could test the very integrity of America’s justice system.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post James Comey: Vindictive Prosecution? David Cay Johnston Weighs In appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Three weeks ago, and I put out our weekly podcast, and I gave it the following title: Trump Just Lost The Military Forever. The premise was simple. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth had summoned all of America’s generals and admirals together for a historically dangerous meeting. And then proceeded to give speeches that convinced even the most die-hard MAGA in uniform that these are not men fit to lead a Kindergarten field trip.

Now, here we are three weeks later, and that initial assessment appears to have been 100% accurate:

Numerous high-ranking officers painted Mr. Hegseth’s Sept. 30 speech to hundreds of generals and admirals gathered at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia as a turning point in how his leadership style, attitude and overall competency are viewed in the upper echelons of the U.S. armed forces.

“It was a massive waste of time. … If he ever had us, he lost us,” one current Army general told The Washington Times.

Most days, I wake up and my first thought is, “God, I hate being right.” Because most days, the terrible things I was worried about coming to pass, do. Some days, though, the regime lives down to my low expectations and that is exactly what I was hoping for. Oh boy! Did they ever!

Back in April, I pointed out that Trump was in a Catch-22. Pete Hegseth is a loser, but Trump can’t put anyone EXCEPT a loser in charge of the military.

TL;DR - Trump needs someone who is broken and weak to run the military. Someone who will obey his every illegal order because they have no future without Trump. Hegseth is that man.

Trump needs a man like Hegseth because he only has two years to seize power before Democrats take control of Congress and expose everything the regime has been doing through investigations. Trump will need the military to seize control of the 2026 midterm elections.

BUT! Such a weak and broken man like Hegseth can never command the respect of the military, which has 250 years of tradition and service and sacrifice and honor, something Hegseth knows very little about.

Accordingly, Hegseth is a laughably bad fit for the job:

“Hegseth’s focus on fitness, weight and appearance reflects his experiences as a junior officer. These are perennial challenges at the small unit level; anyone who has commanded a small unit in the military understands where he’s coming from,” Mr. Cancian wrote. “However, if his military experience had been at higher levels, he would have discussed strategy, threats and warfighting at the operational level. As it was, these topics were nearly absent from his remarks.”

Hegseth is unqualified for the job he has, and he’s definitely incapable of the job Trump hired him to do: Remake the military into a fascist weapon willing to overthrow the constitutional rule of law to preserve Donald Trump’s power.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre laughs at sad little Pete...

Where does this leave us?

Hegseth will grow increasingly erratic and hostile as he orders the military to respect him. Small men always lash out when their betters look down on them and there’s not a single general or admiral who considers Hegseth to be their superior officer, just a higher-ranking one.1 Expect more temper tantrums, firings, and obsessive attention to trivial bullshit. Anything to give Hegseth the illusion of control and authority. He doesn’t really know how to be a real leader so this is all he’ll have.

Trump will continue to try to manufacture a “national crisis” to justify using the military to seize control of the elections, but that will prove impossible to sell to the public as legitimate with video of inflatable costumes flooding social media. The Supreme Court will still almost certainly allow the deployment of troops despite knowing for a fact the narrative being used to justify the deployment is a lie, but the court of public opinion will not be swayed so easily.

Remember, it is critical for stolen elections to appear legitimate; otherwise, the entire scam falls apart. As I keep mentioning, this is a very large country with 400 million guns. Even if the United States military were completely behind Trump, and they very much are not, they could not possibly seize power here and hold it. The only way to do this is to maintain the fiction of democracy and legitimacy, possibly deploying the military to crush a blue city or two to make a point.

None of that is going to happen now because Hegseth has ensured no one will follow him down the road to fascism, even if they were so inclined in the first place.

Thank god Trump is so weak and stupid that he has to surround himself with men who are even weaker and stupider. Our greatest ally in this fight continues to be the regime itself.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 11 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Trump and Hegseth sure do like the word, “lethal.” But it’s a meaningless word in the context of the modern world. How did U.S. lethality work out in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did all our warships and our stealthy fighters and bombers and our highly trained soldiers win us anything even marginally resembling a victory in those two countries? The four-year anniversary of Russia’s war against its much, much smaller neighbor, Ukraine, is fast approaching. How’s that working out for you, Vlad? Scheduled your victory parade for Red Square yet?

What the hell is happening over there in Ukraine? What the hell happened to us in Iraq and Afghanistan? With all our wealth, all our technological superiority, all the weapons systems we have spent decades building and equipping our army and air force and navy and marines with, why weren’t we able to roll into Afghanistan in 2001 after 9-11 and kick ass and take names and get our revenge and declare victory and get out of there? Why was “shock and awe” in Iraq such a dud?

I read something the other day that said a main battle tank like the U.S. Abrams facing enemy drones is estimated to have a 75-minute lifespan on the modern battlefield. Those Abrams we sent to Ukraine? They’re either dead or useless. Same for Russia’s main modern battle tank, the T-90. According to an authoritative Dutch open-source intelligence site called Oryx, it has been visually confirmed that Russia has lost 187 T-90 tanks since the war began in 2022. The Ukrainian army has destroyed them with American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles and another missile made by Sweden, the fire-and-forget NLAW. Ukraine has also used drones to destroy Russian tanks, dropping small explosive warheads down the commander’s cupola, or using drones to put anti-tank mines in their way.

I spent a few hours this afternoon reading the latest update on the Russia-Ukraine war from the Institute for the Study of War, which follows the war using open-source methods and reports from the battlefield gleaned from sources in Ukraine and Russian military bloggers. Scrolling through the ISW report, dated October 21, what you see is a depressing tableau of a pitiful helpless giant nibbling at Ukrainian front-line defenses all the way from the border with Russia to Kherson in the South.

One paragraph of the ISW report of the Russian fight for Pokrovsk – one paragraph – reads like this: “Russian forces attacked near Pokrovsk itself; north of Pokrovsk near Rodynske; northeast of Pokrovsk near Sukhetske, Krasnyi Lyman, Novoekonomichne, and Mykolaivka; east of Pokrovsk near Myrnohrad; southeast of Pokrovsk near Promin and Lysivka; south of Pokrovsk near Zelene; and southwest of Pokrovsk near Zvirove, Kotlyne, Udachne, and Molodetske on October 20 and 21.”

Expanding on that paragraph, ISW reports that a Ukrainian drone battalion commander described street to street fighting with small groups of Russian soldiers attacking Ukrainian drone operators and mortar crews one by one with “small arms.” ISW reports like that one go all the way from Kupyansk in northern Luhansk through Donetsk and outside of Bakhmut – remember Bakhmut? They’re still fighting a few miles outside of that piece of flattened Ukraine. And down the front lines the fighting goes, through Zaporizhia all the way to just outside Kherson.

Here is a description of a Russian assault on a town called Orikhiv in the Zaporizhia region: “Artillerymen and drone operators of the 4th Military Base (58th CAA); drone operators of the 42nd Motorized Rifle Division, including its 417th Reconnaissance Battalion and Unmanned Systems Company; and Molniya-2 loitering munition operators of the Russian Chechen Vostok-Akhmat Battalion are reportedly striking Ukrainian positions and forces near Mala Tokmachka.”

Got that? “For loitering munitions” read: drones. For “Unmanned Systems Company” read: drones. There are similar descriptions of actions by Ukraine’s forces. The war, along a front that is more than 600 miles long, is being fought with drones, mortars, artillery, and occasionally rifles. It’s modern, but it’s not. War today is still bullets and artillery shells and rockets and explosions and death.

So, we have one of the world’s big powers, a country with as many if not more nuclear weapons than the U.S. has, a country with a zillion barrels of oil under its ground, one of the countries that defeated the Nazi war machine, and what are they doing? They’re flying armed drones over Ukraine. They’re shooting mortars at positions held by Ukrainian soldiers that are so deeply dug-in that there are few, if any, casualties. Russia now has somewhere in the vicinity of 600,000 soldiers in Ukraine, many with training of only a few weeks.

Russian losses have been staggering. Politico reported last week in a story titled, “Russia bleeds troops for microscopic frontline gains,” that Russia has lost “281,550 soldiers in Ukraine in the first eight months of this year, according to a document that Ukrainian intelligence says contained leaked Russian data.” Based on Western intelligence estimates, The Economist estimates that there have between 1 million and 1.5 million Russians killed or wounded since February of 2022. The British Ministry of Defense estimates that about 250,000 Russian soldiers have been killed.

Those Russian soldiers were killed in the kinds of attacks that I just described happening all along the front lines. Ukraine can be said to be winning its war against Russia, even as they lose a kilometer here, a village there, because they have turned a 600-mile front line into one gigantic Battle of Bakhmut. Russia attacks and attacks and attacks again, all along the front and after two or three months, ISW reports that they now occupy this village in the north or that village in the south that less than a thousand Ukrainians once called home.

Meanwhile, Russia is sending rockets and drones into Ukraine by the hundreds on a nightly basis. They hit a kindergarten in Kyiv last night. ISW reports that Russia is carrying out “acts of sabotage and hybrid operations” in Poland and Romania and elsewhere in Western Europe. Russian operatives are attempting to booby-trap supply shipments into Ukraine with explosives. They’re flying jets over Estonian airspace. They’ve flown armed drones across the Polish border.

This is the war being waged by one of the world’s alleged “superpowers.” Their rockets destroyed a kindergarten. Armed Russian drones are flying into apartment buildings in Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson. They are killing Ukrainian civilians every single night. Russian soldiers are being sent to the frontlines with incomplete uniforms having spent less than a week shooting their AK-47’s in training. It’s no wonder that they are dying and being seriously wounded by the hundreds of thousands. Politico reports that Ukraine has recently captured 2,300 Russian soldiers. Almost 34,000 Russian soldiers are described by Russia itself as “missing.”

What happened to Putin’s big attack on Ukraine? His generals told him he would take Kyiv in five days. Today, restaurants and movie theaters are open in Kyiv. The government is functioning. The same Ukrainian president whom Putin thought he would force from office is still the country’s leader.

After nearly four years.

Warfare for big countries has become one huge Vietnam. Spend hundreds of billions. Commit millions of troops. Blow shit up. Invent and put new kinds of weapons into the war. Play the game of catch-up with remote controlled drones and computers that hack the enemy’s defenses. Shoot more artillery shells. Fire more missiles. Blow more shit up.

Where is the victory? Where are the Russian flags over Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson? What is Putin doing on the phone with Trump? He’s demanding that Ukraine give up territory that he cannot take having spent the lives of nearly 300,000 Russian soldiers this year alone. Trump, to his everlasting shame, actually listened to him in Anchorage, and then turned around and told President Zelenskyy what Putin said. Then he lectured Zelenskyy at the White House last week, telling him once again that he would have to give up Ukrainian land that his army has fought over for four years.

What kind of war is this? For Russia, it’s a losing war. For Trump, it’s a war that he cannot “end” in the way he thinks he has “ended” all the other wars he has hallucinated on his way to his hallucinated Nobel Peace Prize.

This is what happens to countries that have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out whole populations and turn tens of millions of square miles into inhabitable wasteland. They sit on those stockpiles of unusable bombs and missiles, they waste hundreds of billions on “defense” or on “war” in the way we wasted money and material and the blood of our human beings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Putin has wasted his soldiers and his rubles in Ukraine.

Then, Putin attacks his neighboring country, and with itchy fingers and visions of camouflaged sugarplums in his head and nothing else to do, Donald Trump goes to war against his own citizens. He commits tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars and his uniformed and armed soldiers to the streets of his own country.

That is what our military is doing today. Its soldiers are bopping down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. in a cartoon version of a parade. Its generals are flying to a theater somewhere in Virginia so they can be lectured to by two cartoon characters in ill-fitting suits babbling about beards and haircuts and pushups and winning elections that were not won. Its soldiers are picking up garbage and raking leaves in its nation’s capital.

This is why big countries should not go to war. They will lose because the leaders of their armies are delusional ignorant fuckwits with too many gold bathroom fixtures and too much desperately unearned self-importance. It’s a recipe for disaster, a gigantic display of powerlessness by the powerful, and it’s happening right now in Ukraine and in the streets of the United States of America.

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