And wasn't Mussolini associated with the Order of the White Eagle or something like that?
It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. As Philip Kennicott reported in the Washington Post yesterday, more than two dozen experts have sued to stop the plan, saying paint could irreversibly damage the stone and would be a “taxpayers’ nightmare” as the building would have to be repaired and repainted regularly.
But on Monday, deputy assistant to the president Heather Martin filed a declaration saying the White House Office of Administration was beginning preparations for the paint job. As Kennicott points out, the administration is using the case to give the president the ability to “erase the nation’s physical culture, its man-made, natural and cultural wonders.”
The administration is arguing that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that normally handles maintenance of federal buildings, has ceded control of the building to the White House Office of Administration. The GSA follows the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that require extensive reviews and input from experts and the public.
Those laws do not apply to the White House Office of Administration. Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the organizations that sued to stop Trump from painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, told Kennicott: “The precedent is potentially devastating. Anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project, he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review and put it in his own shop.” That change would not be limited to buildings, Kennicott explains. It could be used, for example, to rush a pipeline through pristine wilderness.
A White House official told Kennicott that the White House conducts necessary reviews and that taking over for the GSA allows the White House “to more efficiently and economically manage the project.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would like a word.
Kennicott also calls out the administration’s proposed major rule change in the National Historical Preservation Act (NHPA). Trump installed a loyalist as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. On Friday, July 17, the chair proposed dramatic revisions to Section 106 of the NHPA. This is the section of the 60-year-old law that requires federal agencies to “take into account” what their actions will do to historic properties and places. This is the requirement that gives the public, as well as local, state, and tribal governments, a voice in the changes to historic and cultural sites.
Brent Leggs is the chief executive officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded, nonprofit organization founded by Congress in 1949 to support historic preservation. He warned that “[t]he ACHP’s proposed changes to Section 106 will eviscerate the preservation of our shared civic and cultural heritage in the United States. If [they are] implemented, federal agencies will no longer be required to avoid or minimize damage to our nation’s historic sites and landscapes, or seek public input on federal projects that would impact historic places.”
Yesterday the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, packed with 21 Trump appointees on a 24-member board, voted to move the revisions to Section 106 forward. Rachel Treisman of NPR noted that the National Register of Historic Places lists more than 100,000 properties with more than 1.8 million sites, structures, objects, and districts, all of which will lose protections if the new rule takes effect. Werkheiser told Treisman: “What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether—if ever—to tell an American community that it’s about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource. The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country.”
According to Sara Bronin, who served as the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Joe Biden—the current chair is an “acting” official—the rule changes would also remove from historical protection “significant cultural landscape features” like the Grand Canyon. Supporters of the change say it would help “agencies strike a more appropriate balance between evaluating effects on historic properties and advancing critical federal projects.” Highways, for example, which in the past have leveled entire neighborhoods as well as burial sites, would no longer require review.
Revising Section 106 would smooth two projects important to the administration.
The administration wants to open a ten-mile buffer zone barring mineral, oil, and gas extraction around Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to development. The area “is a vibrant place of prayer, pilgrimage and core to the identity of many Southwest tribes, whose connection to this land stretches back thousands of years,” Representative Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from New Mexico, told reporters on Wednesday. Deb Haaland, who served as Biden’s secretary of the interior and is a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, notes that Chaco Canyon has been recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage Center as a site of universal importance and that the buffer land holds more than 4,700 known archeological sites.
Cochiti Pueblo governor Phillip Quintana called the area “one of the most important Indigenous cultural landscapes in North America, a place whose meaning reaches far beyond any single administration.”
Last November, Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Representatives Vasquez, Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), and Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asking him to protect the cultural landscape around Chaco Canyon.
They noted that “under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), you are legally required to ensure that you consider how your actions will affect historic properties, which also requires consulting with each relevant Tribal government. These steps must be taken before pursuing your proposed action.”
The revisions to Section 106 would remove that requirement.
Bronin noted that the changes to Section 106 would also fast-track the triumphal arch Trump wants to build at Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery.
On June 15, Senator Angus King (I-ME), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on National Parks; Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on Natural Resources; Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the top-ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies and Representatives Maxine Dexter (D-OR) and Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) responded to a Section 106 assessment with a letter to Secretary Burgum.
The lawmakers noted that they were the ranking members in the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over the construction of monuments in Washington, D.C. “We oppose this project in the strongest terms,” they wrote. They called out the Section 106 process as “fall[ing] short of the law.” Among other things, they noted that the comment process for the new project had been only ten days and that the proposed arch would “deface one of the most deliberate and historic sightlines in America.”
They wrote that proceeding with the project would break at least three laws, and warned that officials moving forward with it “would be answerable as individuals” and face penalties up to and including criminal fines and imprisonment.
“Every official who directs this work, and every firm that performs it,” they wrote, “proceeds at their own peril.” “This project is stone-cold illegal,” King told Luke Broadwater of the New York Times. “It is one of the clearest legal cases I’ve seen in more than 50 years of being a lawyer.”
But now, at least some of those legal concerns might go away. Treisman said the revision of Section 106 would mean that the near-constant noise from the arch’s construction would not be weighed as a consideration in its construction, and the arch’s destruction of the historic views built into the capital from its inception would not be considered either.
What is at stake is more than just buildings. It is the whitewashing and bulldozing of our history and culture, created over centuries by the many people who have built the United States, in service to the small vision of Trump and his enablers.
From the time he took office in January 2025, Trump and his cronies have not simply challenged laws or constitutional provisions. They have acted as if the Constitution doesn’t exist.
That’s an important distinction. The former accepts the constitutional order by working within it to challenge it. The latter rejects the constitutional order entirely.
Their actions align with the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right. Schmitt opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies. As J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”
Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that the power of a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view in August 2025 to justify deploying troops to American cities. “I have the right to do anything I want to do,” he said. “I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Although the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate—meaning Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order—since retaking office he has operated under emergency powers. Back in April, Ben Diamond of Lawfare noted that Trump is on track to issue six and a half times more emergency orders in his second term than any other president this century issued during his entire term. That number, Diamond suggests, is probably an underestimate because many of Trump’s orders do not include the keyword “emergency” and so fly under the radar.
Trump’s imposition of a new round of tariffs on products from more than 60 countries, making up 99.4% of trade with the U.S., is a flashing red light.
In April 2025, the administration imposed high tariff rates on countries around the world, claiming legal authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits the president to respond quickly to economic threats during a national emergency. On the same day he announced the tariffs, Trump declared “that foreign trade and economic practices have created a national emergency.”
When the Supreme Court struck down those tariffs as unconstitutional, Trump immediately announced he would find “other alternatives…to replace the ones that the court incorrectly rejected. We have alternatives,” he said. “Great alternatives.” The administration turned to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose tariffs in the case of an international financial emergency.
Those tariffs are limited to 150 days. When that deadline hit on Friday, Trump announced he was imposing tariffs under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits the president to impose tariffs on countries that are using forced labor. A senior administration official told reporters that the tariffs were not an attempt to recreate the previous system and that dealing with the issue of forced labor “is something that President Trump has been focused on…for many years.”
But law professor Barry Appleton, who co-directs New York Law School’s Center for International Law, said: “The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute. That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”
Let’s be very clear here: tariffs are revenue measures, and the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives the power to raise revenue to Congress, not the president. Article 1, Section 8, reads: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposes and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”
This clause was almost the whole game. Control over the nation’s money, sometimes called the power of the purse, was central to the Framers’ concept of republican government. The American Revolution took shape over the determination of colonists to have a say in how their government raised money, a right first articulated in the Magna Carta that in 1215 established the principle that the king did not enjoy absolute power. A key check on him was that he could not pass revenue measures without the consent of the governed.
And so the Framers put it in the Constitution.
But control over the revenue was not quite the whole game. The Framers were also crystal clear that the people must have control over the decision to go to war. They did not trust that much power in the hands of one man and wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they wrote into the Constitution that Congress had the sole power “[t]o declare War” and “[t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
Here, too, Trump has used the idea of an emergency to sidestep Congress’s authority by insisting the threat from Iran was “imminent” even though his own advisors testified that Iran did not, in fact, have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in less than ten years. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, a president has the authority to respond to an “imminent threat” without congressional approval so long as he notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours. Then the president has 60 days either to withdraw U.S. forces from their engagement or to get Congress to authorize the military action.
Trump launched U.S. attacks on Iran on February 28. He notified Congress on March 2. Sixty days from March 2 was May 1. When that deadline arrived, Trump sent letters to House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley (R-IA), officially the leader of the Senate if the vice president is not present, to inform them that so far as the White House is concerned, “the hostilities that began on February 28…terminated” on April 7, when Trump ordered a two-week ceasefire.
Although hostilities and a U.S. blockade of Iran continued, the administration maintained the ceasefire was in place until July 10, when Trump notified Congress for a second time that the nation was engaging in military action in Iran. The administration maintains that this second notification is for a new military engagement and thus restarts the clock under the War Powers Act. Legal analysts say this interpretation has no basis in law, legislative history, or practice.
The Trump administration is claiming the powers of Congress both to tax and to declare war, key powers the Framers established the American people’s right, through their representatives, to control.
When Senator Angus King (I-ME) and five Democratic lawmakers who sit on committees responsible for national parks and resources wrote in June to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to oppose “in the strongest terms” Trump’s proposed triumphal arch, they pointed out that there are many different laws the construction would break. “Most fundamentally,” though, they wrote, the arch falls within an area called Area I that Congress established in the 1986 Commemorative Works Act.
In that law, Congress specified that any commemorative work within Area I requires Congress to pass a law authorizing the memorial. The lawmakers wrote to Burgum: “Because the site is in Area I, the Act requires a second, separate approval, under which Congress must enact a law ratifying the Area I location within 150 days of the Secretary’s notification, following a determination that the subject is of preeminent historical and lasting significance to the United States. Congress has enacted no such laws. Analysis we requested from the Congressional Research Service in January reached the same conclusion: absent these authorizations, construction of an arch in Memorial Circle would not comport with the Commemorative Works Act. Since 1986, every memorial placed on federal land in the capital under the Act, more than forty in all, has come to Congress first…. The Arch’s sponsor has sought no act at all.”
“If the Administration believes the semiquincentennial warrants a permanent commemorative work in the capital,” they wrote, “the path is open and well worn; it runs through Congress, as it has for every memorial since the Continental Congress approved the first, an equestrian statue of George Washington, in 1783.”
Back in October 2025, when officials first acknowledged to reporters that Trump was planning to build an arch, a reporter asked Trump about a model of an arch that was sitting on the desk in the Oval Office.
“It’s an Arc,” he said. “Take a look.”
When a reporter asked who the arch was for, Trump pointed at himself and said: “Me.”
Trump is screaming at his own party to pass a voting law that would knock millions of his own voters off the rolls. Senators know it, that’s why they keep telling him no.
At a rally Wednesday, Trump exploded at Senate Republican leader John Thune, demanding the GOP immediately pass the SAVE Act, his signature voting bill.
The White House then blasted out the video, an unusual move, since it was footage of the president publicly pressuring his own party. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt followed up Thursday: "His patience is running out."
The bill does three things. It requires proof of citizenship to register, a passport or birth certificate presented in person. It requires photo ID to vote. And it effectively bans mail-in voting.
Here is what Trump does not seem to understand about the weapon he is demanding. It points at his own people.
Start with the passport rule. According to voting rights reporter Ari Berman, 146 million Americans, half the country, do not have a passport. The ten states with the lowest passport ownership in America all voted for Trump. His own voters are the ones most likely to show up without the document his bill would require.
Then the citizenship rule. Roughly 69 million married American women have taken their husband's last name, which means the name on their birth certificate no longer matches the name on their ID. Under this bill, that mismatch is a problem at the registration desk.
Women who take their husband's name are twice as likely to be Republicans as Democrats. He would be putting a hurdle in front of his own base's wives and mothers.
Then the mail-voting ban. Ask any Republican strategist in Arizona, Florida, or Alaska whether outlawing mail ballots four months before an election is smart. Republican voters in those states rely on mail voting heavily. Killing it would cut down Democratic turnout and Republican turnout at the same time.
This is why Trump can't get it through a Senate his own party controls.
Murkowski is against it. Tillis is against it and, in Berman's words, "went nuts" on the Senate floor over being pushed to pass it.
McConnell is against it (if he’s even still alive).
Cornyn and Cassidy, both against it. Thune keeps repeating the same thing: the votes are not there.
The Fox News poll that has Trump panicking shows Democrats leading the generic ballot by seven points, the highest number either party has posted in that poll in twenty years.
He is trying to build a wall to keep out fraud. He keeps forgetting which side of it his voters are standing on.
The gun is loaded. It's pointed at his own foot...
One of the most overtly racist policies of Donald Trump’s presidency—and that’s saying a lot—is his refugee program. To understand why, it’s helpful to begin with a story that has received relatively little attention in the American media. It illuminates the absurdity of Trump’s refugee policy. There is ongoing vigilante violence in South Africa against African migrants.
Since April of this year, vigilante groups in South Africa have targeted millions of African migrants, many of them bona fide refugees fleeing conflict in neighboring countries in search of safety and economic opportunity. Gangs have burned homes and businesses. Around 25,000 people have been displaced, and around a dozen have been killed. The violence crescendoed at the end of June when gangs issued a June 30 deadline demanding that all migrants leave South Africa or, in their words, “return in a coffin.” The situation has become so severe that several African governments have arranged flights to evacuate their own citizens.
This is only the latest wave of longstanding xenophobic violence against migrants in South Africa. At times, that violence has been stoked by politicians, including former president Jacob Zuma. This time, the South African government is attempting to stop it, though its security response has been largely ineffective. So, what does any of this have to do with U.S. refugee policy?
It directly contradicts the false, racist narrative at the heart of the Trump administration’s overhaul of America’s refugee admissions program. Going back to his first term, Trump has repeatedly promoted the false claim—originating with extremist White Afrikaner groups—that White South Africans are being murdered and dispossessed of their land by the South African government. Trump refers to this as “White genocide.” It is a complete fiction.
Black South Africans are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than White South Africans. Yet that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from fundamentally reorienting U.S. refugee policy around this fabricated story. Since returning to office, Trump has all but shut down refugee admissions altogether. Yet since October 2025, 99 percent of those admitted to the United States as refugees have been White South Africans.
Let’s be clear about what this means – the United States is not admitting actual refugees in South Africa from neighboring countries, and who are now themselves being targeted by anti-migrant violence. Some of those refugees may have ended up in South Africa after abandoning hope of reaching the United States. I have friends who work with refugees in Africa, and I know that’s a distinct possibility.
Instead, we’re admitting White South Africans who are not refugees at all, based on a false narrative of persecution that is racist in origin. We are admitting them simply because they are White. If that’s not racism, I don’t know what is.
Another stark point of contrast is the administration’s impending deportation of Haitian refugees after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to revoke their Temporary Protected Status. More than 300,000 people—legitimate refugees from a country that the State Department itself still describes as being in “a state of emergency”—are now at risk of being sent back to Haiti. Their 50,000 American-born children are at risk of being separated from their parents. These are people who are meaningfully contributing to their communities and serving vital roles in the American economy, including as home health care workers. These are the people we’re preparing to send back to a war zone. At the same time, we’re admitting White South Africans who remain among the most privileged people in their own country simply because they are White. Again, if that’s not racism, I don’t know what is.
What Does This Have to Do with American Religion?
Trump’s primary base of support, White evangelicals, is a community with a long history of involvement in refugee resettlement through organizations like World Relief and individual congregations. I personally know many Trump-supporting White evangelicals who actively participate in this work. While recent polling specifically on refugee policy is limited, data from the past decade generally indicates that evangelicals have favorable views of refugees and refugee admissions, although much of that research does not distinguish White evangelicals from evangelicals as a whole.
Some of White evangelicalism’s own institutions have also pushed back against Trump’s refugee policies. World Relief has repeatedly criticized the administration and pleaded with the president to reverse course. So has the National Association of Evangelicals. So has the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, along with multiple evangelical denominations. Yet, 80% of White evangelicals voted for a man who has effectively dismantled the refugee program and transformed what remains into a White supremacist vehicle.
Although Trump has lost some support among White evangelicals, roughly 70% still support him. According to PRRI, 60% of White evangelicals now agree with a statement closely resembling the Great Replacement Theory: that immigrants are invading the country and replacing America’s cultural and ethnic background. That figure is up ten percentage points since 2021.
Trump’s administration itself includes prominent White evangelicals who actively pursue policies consistent with those beliefs, including this Whites-only refugee program. So how is this possible? How do people who claim to love refugees—and who often have a documented history of serving, welcoming, and ministering to them—support an overtly racist president and policies that are collapsing America’s refugee system? This kind of cognitive dissonance, particularly around race and culture, is not new. It is part of a long White evangelical tradition.
A Long History of Compartmentalization
The refugee issue is an example of White evangelicalism’s remarkable ability to compartmentalize its beliefs according to the perceived needs of White racial identity. In my book The Missionary Kids, I explore how overseas evangelical missions actually strengthened White evangelical identity even while engaging with other cultures.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, White evangelicals sent missionaries around the world while simultaneously opposing immigration and racial equality at home. The Southern Baptist Convention—the largest missionary organization in history—was founded so that slaveholders could serve as missionaries in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world populated by non-White people.
For well over a century, Southern Baptists ministered to people of color overseas and in tightly controlled American settings, such as Native American boarding schools. At the same time, they held slaves, participated in lynchings, and defended racial segregation. In other words, White evangelicals have long insisted on setting the terms of their own engagement with race and culture. Helping refugees is acceptable when it does not threaten White evangelicals’ cultural position, but when push comes to shove, history suggests that the equality and well-being of people of color rarely wins out.
What One Pastor’s Letter Reveals
A recent letter to the editor in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, written by a Trump-supporting Southern Baptist pastor, illustrates this dynamic remarkably well. The pastor criticizes Trump’s dramatic reduction of refugee admissions. He worries that limiting refugee resettlement will alienate evangelical voters who genuinely care about refugees, but he never mentions the administration’s admission of White South Africans. Instead, he focuses exclusively on persecuted Christians who are now barred from entering the United States as refugees. That distinction is revealing. The idea that a pluralistic, secular democracy should prioritize Christian refugees over non-Christian refugees is itself an example of Christian nationalism.
The pastor goes on to argue that Trump’s refugee policy could ultimately hand control of Congress to politicians whose views conflict with “core evangelical beliefs,” specifically citing abortion and LGBTQ issues. Ultimately, that is the heart of the matter. For many White evangelicals, helping refugees is not actually a core belief—particularly when those refugees are not evangelical Christians themselves.
Trump’s refugee policy doesn’t simply expose the priorities of one administration. It exposes the priorities of a religious movement that has long found ways to reconcile humanitarian work with racial hierarchy—and, when forced to choose between them, has too often chosen the latter.
For White evangelicals, when it comes down to it, helping refugees is not actually a core belief, especially if the refugees aren’t evangelical Christians like themselves. And blatant racism has never been among White evangelicalism’s defining concerns.
On July 22, Sam Fortier of NOTUS reported that the Trump-appointed judges of the Presidential 1776 Award competition, emceed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, apparently rigged the competition to cut out a 17-year-old Indian immigrant in favor of a homeschooled blonde girl from Wyoming, a Michigan boy who attended a private Catholic school, and a girl from Washington who told CNN she supported Trump and wanted to see “everyone walking away from the competition knowing this is the greatest country of the world.”
In order to privilege white contestants over an immigrant, the judges apparently changed the acceptable answers to questions about our history.
This story mirrors the larger attempt of the Trump administration to rewrite the history of the United States. Trump officials reject our traditional understanding that the country was based on the ideas the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence and that Americans from all walks of life have struggled ever since to make those principles come to life.
In place of that historic understanding, the administration argues that the United States was founded as a white nation whose citizens are defined by their European heritage and the land they inhabited, an echo of the “blood and soil” ideology of Germany in the 1930s.
Making that shift requires erasing not just our multicultural past but also our history. On July 4 the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report titled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The report says that the National Museum of American History (NMAH) “fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage.” '
It continued: “Our central finding is not that the Museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope. Rather, it is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
Even more oddly, the report was a direct and personal attack on Dr. Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, whom it accused of exercising “an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
The report claims that NMAH “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.” It claims that the Founders are minimized or excluded and that the story told of the nation is “one of regret, tragedy, and shame.”
It claims the museum has a “longtime staff reading group devoted to” a framework that treats museums as places of activism and that NMAH engages in “illegal alien activism” and “transgender activism.” It attributes to the museum guilt by association for organizations that have helped to fund exhibits, including the Mellon Foundation, which, an endnote explains, “allocated $72 million to ‘racial justice’ projects.” Indeed, the authors of the report appeared to be most exercised over racism, shown in their anger over the museum’s presentation of human enslavement.
They said the NMAH should “tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices” and how “America’s Founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery.” They want the museum to emphasize how 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War—they did not appear to want mentioned that 258,000 of them died to protect enslavement—and how “Americans came to reject Jim Crow and segregation.” It should tell how “the United States…has done more to advance and secure fundamental rights than any other nation in the world.”
Part of that, the report says, should include “America’s contributions to global freedom, from saving Europe from multiple tyrannies, to illustrating the virtues of a market economy and a free people.”
The White House report is a nakedly political document, seeking to prove that “the museum profession has catechized and codified the ideological dogma of DEI to…an astonishing degree.” It builds on Trump’s belief that the Smithsonian has an “improper ideology” that Trump says is too focused on “how bad slavery was.”
That political purpose was clear on July 21, when Hartig and Yale University U.S. historian David Blight appeared before the House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Testifying as well were two critics of the Smithsonian: Mike Gonzalez of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Matthew Spalding, from Michigan’s Christian Hillsdale College. Another hearing the next day before the House Administration Committee continued the same themes.
Hartig told the committee that the report was inaccurate, saying “we unwaveringly attest that it does not accurately or fairly characterize the full range of work at the museum.” In fact, the report ignores large, long-term gallery exhibitions on subjects like the history of the U.S. military currently on display—that exhibit includes George Washington’s sword and the chairs Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee used at the Appomattox surrender—in favor of past, temporary, revolving wall exhibitions in display cases along a wall. The exhibit that infuriated the Republicans by mentioning transgender youth, called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated),” closed more than three years ago.
In her testimony, Hartig responded to the report’s accusation that the museum “fails to substantively present America’s Founders and Founding.” As Kelsey Ables of The Atlantic reported, Hartig pointed out: “We have a dozen exhibitions that include the founding era right now: 368 objects, 340 labels. George Washington is mentioned 54 times. You have to walk by a whole section on George Washington in the Kenneth Behring Hall of Military History to get to a 15-foot-tall reproduction of the Declaration of Independence.”
But, in fact, the goal of the report was demonstrably to create a straw man for MAGA supporters to hate. Ben Davis of artnet reported that Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) claimed Hartig strives “to represent queer pedophiles, indoctrination, and grooming of kids at an American history museum,” and demanded: “Do you know how many kids get raped by adults every year in this country?” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) repeatedly demanded of Hartig where the exhibitions honoring “50 million aborted babies” are. Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO) demanded: “Do you love America?”
“I love this country unconditionally,” Hartig replied. She would repeat that sentiment repeatedly over the course of the two days of hearings as representatives talked over her to get clips to put on social media.
In a response to the administration’s report, Representative Joe Morelle of New York, the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, pointed out that in February 2017, a month after his first inauguration, Trump praised the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, for sharing “the great struggle for freedom and equality that prevailed against the sins of slavery and the injustice of discrimination.”
“Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today,” Morelle writes; instead, “the President changed his position on whether they should be allowed to teach it.”
Morelle pointed out that the White House report demonized Hartig by taking her words out of context. For example, it made much of her statement, “Loving America is very complicated,” while omitting that she said that in a discussion with descendants of enslaved Americans.
It attacked her use of the common historical term “problematize,” which means to show that a simple idea is more complex than people realize, criticizing her statement that “the profession has ‘to figure out’ how ‘we’re going to’ ‘problematize’ the ‘250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.’”
Morelle points out that the disjointed fragments of this sentence show how deliberately the authors of the report butchered it. The full sentence was: “We have to figure out, all together, how we’re going to commemorate, problematize, remember, [and] celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.” The report cut those words and then criticized her for insufficient celebration of the U.S.
The president doesn’t control the Smithsonian, so the only thing the report’s authors could recommend was “a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’” On July 24 the president issued Executive Order 14415, titled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” It ordered the National Park Service to place temporary signage outside the Smithsonian “that corrects inaccurate information presented inside the Museum.”
As Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted, the attacks will take a toll on “the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards and the rest of the loyal staff [who] will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work.” And it’s likely the MAGA ecosystem will pick up the harassment. Earlier this month, Bridget Gillespie, a former intern at Jefferson’s home, Monticello, detailed in The American Prospect how that harassment—accusations of “wokeness,” reviews calling tour guides “morons,” visitors in pairs with one asking something provocative about slavery or states’ rights while the other filmed—changed the way interpreters operated.
History is not just a set of facts and events. It is the study of how and why societies change. Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? What makes one fail?
Accuracy is imperative. Without it, we will learn the wrong answers—not just about the details the judges of the Presidential 1776 Award competition seem to have changed to privilege white Americans over an Indian immigrant, but also over whether our country’s foundation is about race and land or, as the Founders said, about principles and the rule of law.
The US delegation walked out of a UN Security Council meeting on Monday, in protest at comments made by France that compared Washington's voting on human rights to that of authoritarian states.
The diplomatic row was initially sparked last week, when the US joined North Korea and Russia in voting against extending Volker Turk's term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
After the vote on Friday, France's UN mission criticised the US and compared it to North Korea and Russia. "The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore," it posted on X.
In response, US ambassador Mike Waltz accused France of voting for a human rights chief who had been "lecturing" democratic countries while "cozying up to the world's worst oppressors", without elaborating on what he meant.
Turk has criticised Russia's war in Ukraine and Israel's military conduct in Gaza.
The US team's walkout came while France's ambassador Jerome Bonnafont was speaking during an emergency Security Council meeting on Russia's war in Ukraine.
US ambassador Dan Negrea said the delegation would continue to make similar protests until France "renounces their condescending and disrespectful rhetoric".
The fight over Turk's second term, which was passed with 144 states in favour, 10 against and 13 abstentions, reflects tensions between Washington and the United Nations.
The Trump administration has cut funding for UN agencies and withdrawn from dozens of its entities.
On Friday, US ambassador Jeff Bartos criticised Turk's reappointment and said "there will be consequences" to the assembly which "tolerates procedural overreach, backroom deals, and the misuse of UN posts".
"The United States will immediately reassess our engagement, participation, and funding," he said.
However, French ambassador Bonnafont described Turk as "a voice of conscience" who demonstrated "rigor and impartiality" during his first term.
Today we’re talking about yet another Trump executive order. This is an executive order that Donald Trump issued over the weekend directing the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, to post signs outside the Smithsonian–outside the National Museum of American History–warning visitors that the accounts of American history contained inside are not accurate and directing them to alternative resources. It’s essentially the creation of an alternative past based on fantasy.
This is not an order that somehow changes the content of the displays in the museum. One of the issues Trump has faced is that he can’t unilaterally determine what goes into the Smithsonian. He can’t simply remove the director of the Smithsonian.Instead, he has undertaken this executive order. It directs the National Park Service, which manages the federal land around the Smithsonian, to put up signs stating that the historical content of the Smithsonian is incorrect and directing people, again, to other resources.
There’s no official timeline for enforcement of the order. As far as I’ve been able to tell—and as far as anyone has reported—these signs have not yet gone up. Thus, it’s an executive order that hasn’t gone into effect yet. But this is significant because it follows other developments related to the Smithsonian in the recent past.
First, it reflects a report issued by the White House on July 4 that reached the absolutely preordained conclusion that the Smithsonian was, quote, “an instrument for a radical leftist cohort that tried to reframe the American story to serve its ideological ends.” The White House essentially commissioned a report that came to exactly the conclusion that anybody who knows the White House, knows Trump, and knows the Trump administration knew it would reach.
The report said the Smithsonian was advocating an ideological viewpoint opposed to America, American truth, and American exceptionalism. It also criticized the Smithsonian for failing to “appropriately honor”—that was its language—the signers of the Declaration of Independence during America’s 250th anniversary.
Then, at a July 21 hearing, Republicans also criticized the director of the National Museum of American History, Anthea Hartig, for serving a “woke ideology.”
All of this is reflected in the executive order: the notion that the Smithsonian is presenting viewpoints that are antithetical to American exceptionalism and the so-called truth of American history. These criticisms—that the Smithsonian and its director serve a woke ideology—have all been well reported.
What This Means
Here’s what’s significant about this: When the government dictates what counts as “true” history, you have an example of authoritarianism 101, pure and simple. In the Trump administration’s view, history is whatever the government, the executive branch, and ultimately the president say it is.
Again, everyone knew what the White House report would say. It’s MAGA orthodoxy. That’s all it is. If you read the report, you can see that it says the quiet part out loud by accusing the Smithsonian of reframing the American story to serve its ideological ends. In reality, that is exactly what the White House report itself does. The report, which is supposed to provide the political and historical cover for this executive order, reframes the American story to serve its own misguided ends.
A Mythical Version of America
MAGA ideology frames American history in very specific mythical terms.
America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, as a divinely ordained city on a hill. It was founded by virtuous white Christian Europeans. Slavery, in this mythical account, played absolutely no significant role in the nation’s founding or in the lives of the founders. Ethnic and religious minorities played no notable role in the nation’s founding. Women played no notable role in the nation’s founding.
It’s a very specific mythology about the founding of America, the divine purpose of that founding, and the founders themselves–one that is supposed to carry American history forward.
This is not history based on facts. It’s Trumpian fantasy. It’s a myth grounded in nothing but ideological doctrine. This executive order is aimed at operationalizing that ideology and making sure that only the authorized version of American history gets a hearing.
What Comes Next
We’ll continue to monitor this story. We’ll see what happens if these signs go up and if a timeline is announced. I have no doubt these actions will be challenged in court, and different kinds of legal battles will follow.
It will also be worth continuing to monitor the mostly quiet but nevertheless robust pushback from the Smithsonian. Members of the Smithsonian, including the director, have pushed back against these allegations and stood firmly behind the quality of the scholarship and the historical research that has gone into their museum displays. I think the Smithsonian’s strategy—which has largely been to avoid commenting directly while quietly pushing back and continuing its work despite pressure from the Trump administration—is worth paying attention to.
But for now, this is a very dystopian executive order, one that seeks to tell us that American history is whatever the president of the United States and his party say it is.
...because I would have liked to hear her opinion.
Ariel Edwards-Levy of CNN reported today that a new CNN poll conducted by the public opinion research firm SSRS found that 70% of adult Americans disapprove of the way President Donald J. Trump is handling the economy while only 30% approve. A whopping 75% disapprove of how Trump is handling inflation, while only 25% approve. When it comes to gas prices, the numbers are even worse for the president: 79% disapprove while only 21% approve. Sixty-five percent think Trump’s own economic policies have hurt the country, while only 22% think those policies have improved the economy.
Seventy-three percent of those polled said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems, while 27% said he has the right priorities. Sixty-six percent agreed that Trump puts his own gain over the good of the country; 34% agreed that he does not. Only 43% of those polled thought Trump “has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president,” while 57% did not agree with that statement.
As Edwards-Levy notes, Trump’s overall approval rating in the new CNN poll matches his rating just after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—his lowest ever—at 34%. The number of those who strongly disapprove of him is 50%, a new high, while only 15% strongly support him, a record low.
Edwards-Levy points out that people polled aren’t keen on the way Trump’s handling the situation in Iran: 72% disapprove while only 28% approve. Sixty-seven percent think his actions there have hurt the U.S., while only 21% think those actions have helped the U.S. So, as she puts it: “Just 28% approve of his handling of the situation in Iran, 25% on inflation and 21% on gas prices, with significant pockets of disapproval even among his supporters.”
Americans unhappy with Trump’s war on Iran are unlikely to be cheered by the news from that conflict over the past few days.
Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark today about how the Trump administration seems stuck in a loop, “orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want.” Adina Renner of the New York Times today called this “The Whiplash War” and provided charts of attacks showing what this looping looks like on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Iranian negotiators have made their demands quite clear: sanctions removed, troops out, no more discussion of nuclear weapons, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Laura Wise, a scholar of peace and conflict resolution at the University of Edinburgh, told Renner that the process of ending the war has been complicated by the fact American negotiators seem focused on “getting a deal rather than making peace.”
Davis Winkie of CNN reported that on Saturday, the Pentagon changed the way it was accounting for military personnel injured in the Iran war. After the removal from Defense Casualty Analysis System of four service members killed by Iranian strikes in Jordan and Iraq last week created an outcry and brought renewed attention to accusations the Pentagon was not being transparent about the human toll of the war, on Saturday the Pentagon added more than 140 additional soldiers to the database and restored the four missing soldiers.
The numbers now show 18 troops dead and another 624 wounded since February 28, when Trump began strikes against Iran.
Over the weekend, military strikes in the region paused as Trump decided against an escalation. According to U.S. officials who spoke to Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, that decision came in part because the U.S. military is running low on Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions necessary to shoot down Iranian missiles.
The journalists reported that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine had warned that further combat would “dangerously deplete” interceptors, a leak that suggests real dissent within the White House over the execution of the war. On Meet the Press on Sunday, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz told host Kristen Welker that any problems with munitions were former President Joe Biden’s fault but added that the U.S. has “everything that it needs to conduct this campaign…and…the people who are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”
Top advisors also expressed concern over a widening war and the economic crunch caused by the crisis.
But yesterday, U.S. Central Command posted that forces from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had launched missiles “in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces.” Jared Malsin and Suha Ma’ayeh of the Wall Street Journal noted that this surprise attack is the first in which the Iranians have gone on offense. Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow specializing in Iran at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told the journalists that this shift indicates Iranian officials “see themselves as having the upper hand. It was a signal of a sort of calibrated escalation.”
They might have increased confidence because, as John Irish and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported yesterday, they are expecting a shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense missile launchers within weeks.
U.S. Central Command said all of last night’s Iranian missiles were intercepted. Trump nonetheless took the attacks poorly, telling the Fox News Channel: “We are going to beat the f*cking sh*t out of them. We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces struck against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq.
Oil prices rose with the news of renewed strikes. Despite concerns about rising inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9 to 3 to hold interest rates steady; the three dissenting regional Fed bank presidents voted to raise interest rates. Concern over inflation and uncertainty about the economy sent the stock market plunging today in its worst day since April 2025, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs.
And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media.
On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020.
But, as Savannah Behrmann and Jeanine Santucci of USA Today reported in October 2020, Trump turned on Fauci as he cautioned against Trump’s confident predictions that the disease would disappear quickly. By February 28, Trump insisted that Democrats were “politicizing” covid, and by April 26, news broke that Trump wanted to sideline Fauci, although Fauci was considered trustworthy and viewed favorably by a 3:1 margin.
By the summer, as Trump’s panic over how the economic crisis caused by the pandemic might hurt his reelection prospects, he turned on Fauci, who continued to support measures to stop the spread of the disease. Trump worked to undermine Fauci’s warnings, saying that the doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “lying” about covid.
By July, he mused about why Fauci had a high approval rating and he didn’t. When Fauci testified to Congress that U.S. cases were spiking while European countries were seeing sharp drops in covid cases because European countries had shut down 95% of their economies while the U.S. had shut down only 50%, Trump posted: “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country…. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”
As Trump continued to criticize Fauci and yet ran a campaign ad suggesting Fauci endorsed his reelection, the doctor continued to emphasize that he was “not a political person.” He added: “And I have never—either directly or indirectly—endorsed a political candidate.” In October he dismissed Trump’s attacks, saying: “They don’t bother me. I know what my job is, and I’ve gotta do it and I’m going to do it. So that kind of—whatever you want to call it—is to me, I just, it’s noise.”
As Aaron Rupar reminded us today, Trump himself awarded a presidential commendation to Fauci “in recognition of [his] exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed.”
But with the arrival of a vaccine that helped to put the worst of the pandemic behind us, MAGA Republicans began to demonize Dr. Fauci not only as the source of the mask mandates and school shutdowns they hated, but also as the source of the virus itself, alleging—without evidence—that the disease had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding.
After voters reelected Trump to the presidency in 2024, he and his loyalists vowed to prosecute Fauci. Trump ally Steve Bannon called for “rough Roman justice” for Fauci, as well as special counsel Jack Smith and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Before he left office, former president Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci—and others—to protect them from political prosecution, saying: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
But Republicans have continued to demonize Fauci, ginning up anger against him in their base even as the rest of the country has moved on. Now, with the political tides running so strongly against the Republicans before the 2026 midterm elections, they are clearly trying to rekindle the fury of the last presidential election.
As the Associated Press reported today, for years, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has accused Fauci of lying about the origins of covid, an accusation Fauci has called “preposterous” in testimony before Congress. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest and imprisonment and, in 2023, published a book with Fauci on the cover, explicating what he called the “Great Covid Cover-Up.”
The Trump administration has fed Paul’s crusade, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. searching for eight months to find Fauci’s private diary on government computers, then handing the files over to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Neither Kennedy, Paul, nor Johnson told Fauci they had obtained his 1,000-page diary before they published it, in full, last week.
In July 2021, Fauci wrote in his diary that an analysis of the viruses used in the Wuhan lab “clearly indicate(s) that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into” the covid virus.
Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul’s many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today.
In an opening statement, Fauci said that he believed “the sole reason [Paul] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.”
“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
More than 100 times he did exactly that as Republicans berated him, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” mocking him, and asking him, “Do you feel like you’re in deep sh*t?” What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws.
More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering: “Who the f*ck do you think you were?” F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor, and the outburst has gotten significant media attention.
That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing as his daughter’s ex-husband, Representative Max Miller (R-OH), has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their 2-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller, who is running for a third term, to resign.
