Sixty years ago today, on July 30, 1966, Medicare and Medicaid went into effect. A year earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Medicare and Medicaid amendments Congress had made to the Social Security Act of 1935, establishing two national health insurance programs. Medicare used federal funds to cover seniors, while Medicaid covered people who qualified on the basis of income using federal and state funding. The programs expanded health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans.
Americans and their leaders had called for government support for healthcare since the early 1900s, but the final push to expand healthcare coverage in the United States came out of the New Deal. In 1945, President Harry Truman continued to expand the social safety net anchored by the 1935 Social Security Act signed into law by his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On November 19, 1945, Truman reminded Congress that in September he had proposed an Economic Bill of Rights that guaranteed “certain rights which ought to be assured to every American citizen.”
“One of them,” he reminded them, “was: ‘The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.’ Another was the ‘right to adequate protection from the economic fears of…sickness....’”
“Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” he said. “Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.”
Truman reminded Congress how shocked Americans were when the WWII military draft revealed “the widespread physical and mental incapacity among the young people of our nation.” About 30% of those examined for military service were classified as unfit. Of those who made the cut to join the military, about a million and a half had to be discharged for physical or mental disability and an equal number had to be treated for preexisting diseases or infirmities. More than a third of the women applying to the Women’s Army Corps were also rejected.
Access to the benefits of modern medical science had never been equal, Truman said, and never would be “unless government is bold enough to do something about it. People with low or moderate incomes do not get the same medical attention as those with high incomes. The poor have more sickness, but they get less medical care. People who live in rural areas do not get the same amount or quality of medical attention as those who live in our cities.
“Our new Economic Bill of Rights should mean health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race—everywhere in the United States.
“We should resolve now that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation.”
Truman proposed a new healthcare program funded through fees and taxes, but Republicans who took control of the House in 1946 opposed new taxes and, although Truman had been careful to insist that the state would not take over hospitals, warned that the program looked too much like “Communism.” Instead, under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed a bill covering healthcare costs for indigent elderly Americans.
When he took office, President John F. Kennedy made the expansion of health insurance a priority, but while the American people liked the plan, it faced strong opposition from the American Medical Association, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. In 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, both chambers passed their own measures, but they couldn’t resolve their differences to pass a law.
When LBJ won a landslide victory over right-wing Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in 1964, he had the votes to pass Medicare and Medicaid. LBJ made a point of signing the new measure into law at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. He gave Truman and his wife Bess Truman the first two Medicare cards.
In his remarks at the signing, Johnson told the crowd: “The people of the United States love and voted for Harry Truman, not because he gave them hell—but because he gave them hope.” He told Truman that those like him—men of vision who are willing to stake their reputations and position to help others—“illuminate the life and the history of a nation.” He and his advisors had come to Independence not in tribute to Truman himself, Johnson said, but in tribute to the America that he represented. “For a country can be known by the quality of the men it honors,” he said. “By praising you, and by carrying forward your dreams, we really reaffirm the greatness of America.”
Johnson explained what the measure did. “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years. No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts.”
“And,” he said, “no longer will this Nation refuse the hand of justice to those who have given a lifetime of service and wisdom and labor to the progress of this progressive country.”
But now, in 2026, the Republicans in charge of our government reject the vision of a government that works to support its people. They see government regulation, taxation, and a social safety net as an attack on individual liberty.
In their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which they passed in July 2025 with no Democratic votes, the Republicans delivered Trump’s signature economic policy. The law partially offset trillions of dollars in tax cuts by cutting $911 billion from Medicaid over ten years. Most of those cuts will begin to take effect in late 2026 and early 2027, after the midterm election.
And the cuts continue. On Tuesday, Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is planning to end a Biden-era program that capped out-of-pocket spending for drugs for Medicare recipients at $2,000 a year. The program provided subsidies for Medicare Part D, a Medicare prescription plan for seniors, by paying insurers. It also allowed Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies for certain medicines.
The Trump administration says the subsidies encouraged insurers to raise rates and that they weren’t needed because other policies that hold down the cost of drugs will stay in place. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, posted: “We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed.”
Mathews notes that higher prices for drugs could drive more Medicare participants into the private-insurer version of Medicare, called Medicare Advantage. Pushing people toward Medicare Advantage was outlined as a desired outcome in Project 2025, the right-wing program to unwind the modern American state.
“History shapes men, but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history,” Johnson said as he signed the measure creating Medicare and Medicaid. He credited FDR with beginning the process of creating a basic social safety net when he signed the 1935 Social Security Act.
He noted that FDR at the time called the Social Security Act “a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but it is by no means complete.”
Courtney Kube, Monica Alba, Peter Nicholas, Gordon Lubold, Katherine Doyle, and Andrea Mitchell of NBC News reported Wednesday that President Donald J. Trump is “exasperated” that the Iran war is dragging on and that his advisors can’t agree what to do next. Reportedly, he erupted last week during a meeting with his national security team, shouting expletives at the officials in the room. One of Trump’s allies told the reporters that Trump had not expected the war to last as long as it has. “There was not a real strategy for how long or what they should do to get to the endpoint.... He did not intend this to be a long, drawn-out war,” the person said.
Yesterday the war began to widen as a drone hit a gas storage tanker owned by a U.S. company in Egypt near the Suez Canal—no one has claimed responsibility—and Iran struck at American installations in Jordan. U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces launched strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.
At a Cabinet meeting at Camp David today, Trump told reporters he intends to hit Iran with heavy military strikes again to force Iranian negotiators to give in to his demands. “We will be hitting them very hard,” he said. “And you know at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’” “We just want to win,” he said. “We’re doing very well.”
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not appear to have a strategy for their war on Iran. Instead, they had an ideology. That ideology elevates individualism over the idea behind the modern American state: that government should regulate business, maintain a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and support an international order based in rules rather than in military might.
Since the 1950s, opponents of that modern state have celebrated the American individual, especially the American cowboy, as the figure the American government should privilege and protect. In their mythology, the cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to rise through his own hard work, protecting himself and his family from wrongdoers with his gun and his principles. The education, expertise, cooperation, and coalitions on which the modern U.S. stood before Trump were signs not of strength, but of weakness.
That ideology seems to have been what was behind the attack on Iran. In 2015 the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections, in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump maintained it was “[o]ne of the worst deals ever made by our Country.” He took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought this ideology into the Defense Department, which he tried to rebrand the “Department of War.” In 2024, Hegseth published a book titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. In it, he claimed that the U.S. military was weak and “effeminate” because its leaders had embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion.
His prescription for the country involved getting rid of the Geneva Conventions, which recognize human rights for noncombatants in war, claiming they forced the U.S. troops to fight “with one hand behind our back.” In his confirmation hearings, Hegseth refused to tell Senator Angus King (I-ME) that he would honor those agreements.
On September 5, 2025, Hegseth said changing the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War was part of his campaign to spread a “warrior ethos” at the Pentagon. The rebranding, he said, was part of “restoring intentionality to the use of force…. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.”
But Trump’s war on Iran has illustrated the weakness of that vision. Trump reiterated yet again today that the U.S. has dominated Iran’s military. “They’re being decimated. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no anti-aircraft,” he said. But for all that, they retain their ability to choke world trade by controlling the Strait of Hormuz—the very condition previous presidents worked to avoid through negotiations.
An article yesterday by Politico senior foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Toosi suggests that the “cowboy” approach to foreign policy has another downside. Toosi called out the extreme attacks of Trump and his aides on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and wrote that, although the U.S. is not a signatory to that court, former government officials and legal scholars suspect Trump and administration officials are worried about future prosecutions.
On July 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the administration intends to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.” A press release from the State Department on the same day said that the U.S. “will feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”
A Republican operative close to the White House, Bill Cortese, told Toosi that some administration officials are afraid that “if Democrats come into power…, an unchecked ICC and other international institutions are going to unleash a wave of litigation against this administration and anyone associated with it.” Toosi notes that during the administration, U.S. law enforcement and military officials have been accused of human rights violations that reach across borders.
Notably, on September 2, 2025, three days before Hegseth’s “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” speech, the administration began strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Those strikes have killed more than 220 people, but the administration has offered no evidence to prove its claims that those killed were “narcoterrorists” killed to stop the flow of cocaine to the U.S.
Trump claims the strikes have virtually ended drug trafficking by sea, but on July 27, Alex Horton, Terrence McCoy, Samantha Schmidt, and Dylan Moriarty of the Washington Post reported that according to Pentagon officials and officials from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the strikes have not reduced the cocaine coming into the U.S. Indeed, the dropping price of the drug suggests there is more of it now than there was a year ago. Instead, the strikes have simply prompted criminal organizations to find new routes. The strikes have also disrupted the law enforcement system in which lower-level participants inform on higher-ups, as the lower-level sources are being pulled back.
While the strikes appear to have done little to stop the flow of drugs, legal analysts say they look a lot like former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and users. Law professor Charlie Trumbull reminded readers of Foreign Policy that in 2017, Trump called Duterte to congratulate him for doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem.” Trumbull also noted that “Duterte is now behind bars in the Hague,” charged with crimes against humanity for trying to get rid of criminals by unlawful means, including murder.
“The Trump administration should be concerned,” Trumbull warned.
On July 25 the U.S. State Department cheered Venezuela’s withdrawal from the treaty that established the ICC and said it welcomed “the new Venezuelan government’s partnership on American-led efforts to dismantle the corrupt and worthless ICC.” It continued, “The ICC is neither credible, independent, nor legitimate,” and called on all members of the ICC to abandon it.
Today Missy Ryan and Nancy A. Youssef of The Atlantic reported that in the wake of the U.S. strike on the Minab school that killed 168 people, mostly schoolchildren, in the first hours of the war, the Pentagon is considering reversing some of the deep cuts Hegseth made to the staff at the Defense Department. A report by the Pentagon inspector general found that cuts to the civilian-harm protections staff who work to protect noncombatants may have violated laws.
Ryan and Youssef explain that the U.S. military had spent decades building its civilian protections. Leaders understood that battlefield victories were insufficient to win military operations and that protecting civilians is crucial to public support for those operations. Ryan and Youssef noted that to reflect this understanding, the Pentagon in 2006 “formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its Principles of Joint Operations, defining legitimacy as ‘the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken.’”
A U.S. official told Ryan and Youssef that the leadership of U.S. combat commands uniformly support the restoration of the personnel whose job it is to protect civilians. But Hegseth has not committed to the restoration of the old system, the journalists note, and even if he does, it will have little effect unless he changes his own rhetoric.
For his part, Trump appears to be addressing concerns about future prosecutions, whether by the ICC or at U.S. courts, by keeping control of the government after the midterms. Today Trump disagreed with the assessment of investigators that a recent cyberattack on municipal water systems in Minnesota was likely the work of Iranian hackers. Instead, he blamed Democrats.
“We heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran,” he told reporters. “I don’t think so. I think. I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent. There was a cyberattack of thirty water plants. And I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota.”
There is another piece of evidence this week that the abandonment of education and expertise in favor of a “warrior ethos” has weakened the U.S. on the world stage. At an international conference on AIDS in Rio de Janeiro, an official of the U.S. State Department showed a map of Africa on which six fake countries were identified with the names of random real countries—including Nigeria, where several hundred U.S. soldiers are deployed. Reuters identified the image as AI.
Attendees took screenshots and posted them online. “Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” one wrote.
Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.
In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.
In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”
Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn’s indictment on July 2. She said that she had “tremendous evidence” that Mr. Hearn had committed a felony, and noted that he faced up to 10 years in prison.
But on Friday, Ms. Pirro said that her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark.
Ms. Pirro said that the pool’s new blue coating had actually started to peel within two days of the project’s completion, and that the Interior Department kept that fact from prosecutors, telling them that “nearly all of the damage” was done by vandals.
Later, Ms. Pirro said, prosecutors visited the pool themselves and saw that could not be true. The lining was peeling in many places, some far from the edge where Mr. Hearn had stood. After that, she said, prosecutors had demanded more information from the Interior Department, which made clear that the pool’s problems had developed during the renovation itself.
“Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism,” Ms. Pirro wrote in her motion to the court.
The filing was a remarkable and detailed indictment of a project that, until now, the Trump administration had defended as an astounding success. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who fixed the Reflecting Pool permanently before deranged people vandalized it,” Katie Martin, an Interior Department spokeswoman, said earlier this month.
Ms. Pirro blamed both the government’s vendor and the administration’s timetable, saying the pool’s poor state “was the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration” on July 4.
The Interior Department did not respond to questions about the filing on Friday evening. It is not clear if there would be consequences for the Interior Department officials whom Ms. Pirro accused of deception.
The Reflecting Pool has been fenced off and drained so the faults in the lining can be inspected and repaired. In a recent filing in a separate court case, the Interior Department said it would be closed until August 10.
Six other people have been arrested on charges of vandalism, federal officials have said. Three face misdemeanor charges of destruction of property under $1,000, court records show.
Mr. Hearn, who pleaded not guilty last month, was the only person known to be facing a felony charge, rather than a misdemeanor, related to Mr. Trump’s false claims of vandalism to the pool. A lawyer for one of the other defendants said Friday night that his case had not been dropped. It was unclear what happened to the rest. Ms. Pirro’s office could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Hearn’s trial on a charge of destruction of property had been scheduled to begin on Sept. 28.
In a statement on Friday, lawyers representing him said that the charges should never have been brought.
The dismissal of charges “does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong,” the statement said. “The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Reflecting Pool, built in the 1920s, has been plagued for years by water leaking out between its long concrete slabs.
This year, the Interior Department bypassed regular procedures to give a no-bid contract to fix the pool to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a small firm in rural Virginia. Mr. Trump said at first that he had chosen the firm personally, because it had repaired a pool at one of his golf clubs.
Later, Mr. Trump reversed himself and said he did not know the firm.
The Interior Department asked the firm to do something that had never been done before at the pool: In addition to filling the gaps between the slabs, it wanted the contractor to spread a dark blue waterproof coating across the pool floor, including the slabs themselves. That added time and cost. The company also added a 20 percent profit margin to its bill, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. So far, the government has agreed to pay the company $14.7 million.
Soon, problems appeared. The firm’s first efforts to seal the gaps between the slabs failed, internal documents showed. Bubbles and holes appeared in the blue coating. The work fell behind schedule. The pool was finally finished and refilled in early June.
But both Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Mr. Trump insisted that the damage to the pool was caused by vandals, not errors in the installation. The Justice Department motion revealed that this account was not just for public consumption: Prosecutors said that the Interior Department had told them the same.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to requests for comment on Friday evening. In the past, the company has defended its work, saying that the problems affected a “very small part” of the pool’s lining, and that it would fix them under warranty.
The Trump administration also awarded a no-bid contract to add water-purification devices called “nanobubblers” to the pool’s filtration system. But soon after the pool was refilled, an algae bloom turned its water bright green, in part because the nanobubblers had been removed during the time that a promotional event connected to an Ultimate Fighting Championship Event at the White House was planned at the Lincoln Memorial.
Mr. Trump claimed that the algae bloom, too, was the work of vandals dumping in fertilizer, though the pool had been plagued by algae blooms for decades. No one has been charged with adding fertilizer to the pool.
In a classic Friday night news dump, the Department of Justice last night moved to dismiss the criminal charges against David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian the Justice Department indicted for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The filing says that “damage to the Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
President Donald J. Trump announced in April that he was planning to renovate the reflecting pool and on May 7 said it would take a week and cost about $1.8 million. By May 8 the cost had jumped to $13.1 million, with the contract awarded on a no-bid basis. When the pool reopened on June 6, Trump declared it a triumph, writing on social media: “Thank you President Trump.”
But the day after the reservoir filled with water, algae began to bloom in it. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the algae were “residual” and a normal part of the process of refilling the pool. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” she said in a statement.
By June 16, crews from the National Park Service were pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to kill the algae that had turned the pool bright green even as Trump insisted the pool was perfect.
By Thursday, June 18, the new blue epoxy at the bottom of the pool was peeling off and floating in the vivid green pool. David Fahrenthold reported in the New York Times that the National Park Service contracted not only the coating and painting of the pool under a no-bid contract—the price tag had jumped to at least $14.2 million—but also an additional $1.7 million contract for a water purification system.
That no-bid contract went to a firm called Greenwater Services, whose ultimate owner is the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by Trump donor John J. Cafaro, whose wife chaired the 2017 International Red Cross Ball at Mar-a-Lago and who lives near Mar-a-Lago at a mansion that is listed as the water treatment company’s address in Florida corporate records.
On June 19, U.S. Park Police officers arrested 67-year-old Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, who had stopped by the pool on a 52-mile bike ride and reached into the water to feel what the detached material felt like, for destruction of public property. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told David J. Lynch and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
That night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By the next day, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”
Administration officials insisted that the problems with the reflecting pool renovations were entirely the fault of vandals. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on Walz’s statement, saying “The vandalism is very real.” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, scoffed at the idea that there had not been vandalism, telling Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel that she had just been at the pool and “someone was intent on doing incredible damage to the pool.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Dana Bash of CNN that the contractors had nothing to do with the problems; it was “vandalism.” He insisted the government could prove there were vandals and suggested there were “photographs.” When Bash pressed him over whether the government actually had “photographs of a person or people cutting a 300- or 350-foot gash in the bottom of the reflecting pool,” he deflected, saying: “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question” the president’s version of events.
On June 29, Trump posted: “The Reflecting Pool, which suffered great damage due to the Vandals and Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country, has been, for the past two days, in full operation. It looks beautiful! After July 4th, we will release the water, fix the damage done to the very expensive waterproof matting, with the use of sharp knives and muscle, including the 350 foot gash along its right side, and have it looking as good as it was two weeks ago, when it was absolutely PERFECT!”
Now, of course, the Department of Justice’s filing proves that the idea of vandals was always a lie. The problems with the renovation of the reflecting pool were exactly what critics said all along: a hasty, expensive, ill-thought-out project failed. This case is so bad, Chris Geidner of LawDork noted, that Pirro went out of her way to blame the Interior Department for the misguided indictment.
The disparity between the fantasy Trump and his cronies sold to their supporters and the reality of the situation when they were forced to prove their allegations in court matters. Administration officials insisted before the media that the project had been a great success, hurt only by “Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country.” In order to prove their lie, administration officials used the power of the government to harass, indict, and threaten a random individual whom they could blame for their own failures. Then, when forced to prove their allegations in a court of law, they withdrew the claim entirely.
This has always been the pattern of Trump and his cronies: weave a fantasy story in front of friendly media cameras, a fantasy of their own great success undercut by haters, then abandon—or lose—the legal cases based on the fantasy.
For all the bluster before the cameras of Trump cronies insisting the 2020 election was stolen, Trump’s attorneys backed away from the claims. They either withdrew or lost all but one of the 60 lawsuits they brought over the election. As a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it in 2020: “Trump Cries Voter Fraud. In Court, His Lawyers Don’t.”
The one case Trump’s lawyers won found that the Pennsylvania secretary of state overstepped by allowing voters extra time to provide missing identification for mail-in ballots. Even with that ruling, Daniel Barnes of NBC News reported, Biden still won the state by more than 80,000 votes.
Even as reality makes it clear that his claims are a fantasy, Trump continues to spin his yarns, seeming to have little else to convince voters to support him. Today he doubled down on his insistence that vandals caused the problems with the reflecting pool. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM…. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT”
