What did Donald Trump do today?

He lost another court battle to punish veterans for exercising their First Amendment rights.

Last November, six Democratic members of Congress released a brief video in which they restated a basic legal fact: military or government agents have both the right and duty to disobey illegal orders. If they don't, they are criminally liable for those illegal acts. Put another way, it is not a valid legal defense in the United States to say "I was just following orders," any more than it was at the Nuremberg trials.

The context of those lawmakers' statements was obvious: Trump has openly talked about using federal agents and National Guard forces to violate Americans civil rights and even interfere in elections. Trump's response at the time was to call for their execution on the grounds that stating the simple fact of the law was "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR."

Of course, there is no such legal case to be made, although Trump demanded that the Department of Justice try anyway. Earlier this week, Trump's political appointee and former Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro failed to get a grand jury to indict the lawmakers. This is a humiliating rebuke: because prosecutors effectively conduct grand juries themselves, and because the standard required for an indictment is so much lower than what is needed for a criminal conviction, it is extremely rare for a grand jury to refuse to indict. In one year, it happened in 11 out of about 162,000 cases, or 0.0068%. 

But with no real hope of accomplishing anything more than creating a nuisance in court, Trump has also been trying a more theatrical approach to punishing elected representatives for speaking out against him. He ordered the Department of Defense to start an administrative proceeding that would retroactively reduce Sen. Mark Kelly's former military rank. Sen. Kelly (D-AZ) is a former astronaut and retired Navy captain. Reduction in rank is a severe and deliberately humiliating punishment, and almost never used against senior officers. (One recent example of a Navy officer whose conduct was so bad that it required a reduction in rank was Ronny Jackson, Trump's official White House physician and political protégé. Jackson, a former rear admiral, was reduced in rank to captain when an investigation revealed that he dispensed drugs, including amphetamines and fentanyl, in the White House without a prescription or keeping accurate records, and without proper examinations.)

Today, a federal judge issued a scathing preliminary injunction against the Department of Defense. In blocking Trump from reducing Kelly's rank, Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote that Trump's attempts to use military discipline to silence Kelly violated not only Kelly's right to freedom of speech, but his constituents' rights to have him able to represent their interests in Congress:

United States Senator Mark Kelly, a retired naval officer, has been censured by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for voicing certain opinions on military actions and policy. In addition, he has been subjected to proceedings to possibly reduce his retirement rank and pay and threatened with criminal prosecution if he continues to speak out on these issues. Secretary Hegseth relies on the well-established doctrine that military servicemembers enjoy less vigorous First Amendment protections given the fundamental obligation for obedience and discipline in the armed forces. Unfortunately for Secretary Hegseth, no court has ever extended those principles to retired servicemembers, much less a retired servicemember serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military. This Court will not be the first to do so! 

…This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly's First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees. After all, as Bob Dylan famously said, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!

Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years. If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!  
 

Why does this matter?

• The law is what the law says, not what Donald Trump wants it to say.   

• Going outside the law to punish people standing up for the law is about as authoritarian as it gets. 

• The only reason a president would be mad about someone telling soldiers they don't have to obey illegal orders is if he wanted to give soldiers illegal orders.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He forced the military to give long-term contracts to the coal industry.

American utility companies have been using less and less coal to generate electricity every year for decades now. The reason is simple economics: coal is more expensive on a per-kilowatt-hour basis than either renewable fuels like solar and wind or its main fossil fuel competitor, natural gas. 

 

Coal is a uniquely dirty fuel, even setting aside the fact that burning it contributes to climate change. It's also a major environmental source of cancer: burning it in the massive quantities needed to generate electricity puts tons of naturally occurring radioactive elements that would normally be safely underground right into the air. Even when the chemical fallout from coal isn't toxic in and of itself, like sulfur dioxide or fine particulates that clog lung passages, the downwind radioactive plume is a cancer-causing agent.

It also destroys the natural environment in the areas its mined. Toxic chemical agents used in the mining process can permanently foul water tables, and the acidic runoff kills wetland ecosystems. Even when coal companies have complied with government mandates to fix some of the environmental damage they've caused, the health problems for people living in coal-mining communites persist, and range from "traditional" mining diseases like emphysema and black lung to long-term genetic damage.

The nation's heaviest coal-mining areas are also its poorest, which is not a coincidence. The coal industry has a centuries-long reputation for ruthlessness when it comes to its own labor force. Even when prevailing wages for miners are enough to support a family on—and they have not been for quite a while—the work is incredibly dangerous, and grisly and preventable accidents due to mine owner neglect are still common. One example is the 2006 Sago Mine disaster, which killed 12 miners after an explosion in a mine that was operating with more than 200 active safety violations. Trump appointed the owner of that mine, billionaire Wilbur Ross, as his secretary of commerce during his first term.

The result of all this is that coal is a dying industry—and one that Americans from coal country, who know it best, are happy to see die. Virtually every other form of energy that exists is cheaper, cleaner, safer, more reliable, more profitable, easier to scale up, and requires less and cheaper infrastructure. And because coal's main use is in electricity generation, it's also the most easily replaced fuel: electrical grids don't care where the electricity comes from.  

Today, Trump held an event in the White House for coal industry executives—all of whom financially supported his political—where he signed an executive order requiring the United States military to buy coal-generated electricity far into the future. It's hard to think of an organization that needs coal or coal-derived electricity less than the modern military, but it is the largest budget that Trump has control over, and so the easiest to force into the coal subsidy business.

In other words, Trump has ordered a massive, locked-in subsidy of an industry that is failing the test of the free market, and one that benefits his political cronies. This isn't the first time that Trump has dabbled in that particularly corrupt form of socialist central planning, as actual conservatives have noticed. 

Trump, who is nearly 80, appears to genuinely believe some truly ridiculous things about the superior alternatives like wind power (which he thinks causes cancer somehow) and solar (which he falsely believes can't be stored in batteries after the sun sets) that have been developed since he was a boy. But he also seems to think that coal is a much bigger and more economically important industry than it is. There are only about 45,000 coal miners working in the United States at present, or just under one in every 8,000 Americans. (That's fewer than the number of florists, and about the same number of people as work in the specific job of packaging seafood.)

Why does this matter?

• Countries that are serious about having energy stability in the future—even other dictatorships, like China—are investing in anything but coal. 

• Republicans who voted for Trump because they thought he shared their belief in the free market might not like him doing the Putin-style version of socialist welfare supports for oligarchs. 

• Presidents who can't or can't be bothered to update their understanding of energy from the 1940s aren't mentally competent to serve in the 2020s.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He let a wealthy donor try to block an infrastructure project that's already built and cost American taxpayers nothing.

In 2012, the Obama administration struck a deal with the Republican governor of Michigan and the Conservative-led government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to build a new bridge connecting the cities of Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. The bridge, named for Detroit Red Wings legend Gordie Howe, was paid for by the Canadian government, who also put up most of the money needed to build a customs checkpoint on the American side of the border.

The new Gordie Howe Bridge, which links I-75 and Ontario Hwy. 401 directly and is capable of handling heavy trucks.

Both the United States and Canada agreed the bridge was necessary because the only other road connection across the Detroit River, the privately-owned Ambassador Bridge, empties onto surface streets in Windsor. That makes for long traffic delays, urban blight, and increased shipping costs—when shipping is possible at all. The Ambassador Bridge has a poor maintenance history and cannot be used by large trucks.

Today, with just weeks to go before the new bridge was set to be opened, Trump demanded that the United States—which, again, did not pay for the bridge and will benefit from it economically through more efficient trade—be given a cut of the tolls.

The reason for Trump's sudden interest in the bridge is that the family that owns the Ambassador Bridge, and has been fighting unsuccessfully for twenty years to keep any competing bridge from being built, is a major Trump donor. And while the White House has not yet admitted it, the direct cause of Trump's multiple outbursts on the subject of a bridge he'd never mentioned before is a meeting between the Ambassador Bridge's owners and Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

(Lutnick was also in the news today for unrelated reasons.) 

In other words, Trump is trying to metaphorically blow up a free bridge that a friendly foreign government has already paid for and built, because wealthy supporters want to maintain a local monopoly on their expensive and poorly maintained bridge.

Trump threatened to close the bridge if his demand for a cut of an investment the United States didn't make wasn't honored, which is presumably what his donors want. This would, of course, hurt the United States in the meantime while merely delaying the inevitable opening of the already-built Gordie Howe Bridge.

Trump first brought up the subject of the bridge in a social media post yesterday, although he lost his train of thought and started ranting instead about how China would take over Canada and cancel the Stanley Cup. (China is not involved with either bridge and has not made any unusually hostile moves towards the National Hockey League.)

Why does this matter?

• Denying Americans basic government services to help political patrons is corruption, pure and simple. 

• Not letting Americans use a free bridge that's already been built makes Trump look stupid, not tough.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got offered a particularly tempting bribe (and didn't turn it down).

Ghislaine Maxwell was Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator in the massive child sex trafficking operation they ran together. She was not a hands-off facilitator: rather, victims have testified that she groomed, seduced, threatened, and raped them personally.

Trump has shown extraordinary generosity towards Maxwell, who is currently serving a twenty-year federal prison sentence. He recently had her moved to a resort-style minimum-security facility where she can enjoy private visiting privileges (complete with complimentary snacks for her guests), unmonitored internet access, and sessions training puppies to work as therapy dogs. Under the Bureau of Prison's rules for any other convict, Maxwell—as a felon convicted of heinous sexual crimes against children—would never be permitted any of these perks, or to be transferred to a minimum security facility in the first place. But Trump, acting through his former defense attorney and current deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, made it happen after Maxwell gave a prison interview in which she declined to implicate Trump in criminal activity.

Trump—who has openly insulted literally thousands of Americans by name—is so considerate of Maxwell's feelings that he won't even publicly express any negative sentiments about her, not even after her convictions. Instead, he has only repeatedly said that he "wishes her well" and implied that the only real criminal was her "boyfriend" Epstein.

That much is old news. But today, there were two new developments. The first is that Maxwell escalated her campaign to get Trump to pardon her or commute her sentence, explicitly offering to testify to Trump's innocence if and only if he grants her clemency. 

Her lawyer made this statement today, after she invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a Congressional panel: "Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump."

She's chosen her moment strategically: Trump is desperate to get out from under the mounting scandal of his name appearing tens of thousands of times in the DOJ's investigative files. Worse for Trump, members of Congress are now getting access to the unredacted files, and some—including members of his own party—are threatening to expose Epstein and Maxwell's criminally implicated associates. 

This is the bind that Trump is in: even if he didn't personally rape or abuse children, he's admitted to his political allies that his "friends" are implicated, and that he's trying to protect their interests. But in doing so, he's made himself look incredibly suspicious. Maxwell's testimony clearing him of direct wrongdoing, however obvious bought-off, might help him in that regard. 

Under normal circumstances, any politician offered such an obviously corrupt bargain for a declaration of innocence about crimes they were actually innocent of would renounce it at full volume. Neither Trump nor any spokesperson has done anything today to even hint that they will be rejecting Maxwell's offer. In fact, he's always been very careful not to rule out the possibility that he might free her from prison.

The second new development comes from those files. It shows that in 2006, Trump was telling a very different story about Maxwell, calling her "evil" in a police report and saying that "everyone knew" what she and Epstein were up to. That makes the fact that his close association with both of them continued for years afterwards—and his sudden tenderness towards Maxwell—vastly more damning.

The result of that mid-2000s investigation, in which Trump played no significant part, was a scandalously lenient plea deal signed off on by then-District Attorney Alex Acosta. When Trump took office in 2017, he appointed Acosta his Secretary of Labor. 

 

Why does this matter?

• There is absolutely no reason to even consider this kind of naked corrupt bargain from a heinous criminal for an instant that doesn't involve Trump being guilty, complicit, blackmailed, or protecting people who are. 

• Nobody that Ghislaine Maxwell has anything to offer can be trusted with the power of the presidency.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He booed an American athlete for exercising freedom of speech.

Hunter Hess is an American freestyle halfpipe skier at the Winter Olympics. Last week, he said this at a press availability:

It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now I think. It's a little hard. There's obviously a lot going on that I'm not the biggest fan of and I think a lot of people aren't. I think for me, it's more I'm representing my friends and family back home, the people that represented before me, all the things that I believe are good about the U.S.

He later added:
 

Just because I'm wearing the flag doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on in the U.S. I just kind of want to do it for my friends and my family and the people that supported me getting here. I just think if it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I'm representing it.

 

 

Hess didn't mention any specific criticisms, but the Trump crackdown on immigrants, refugees, and any American who refuse to support those policies has been big news in Italy during the games. Vice-President JD Vance was brutally booed at the opening ceremonies, even as American athletes were given a warm welcome. And Italians have taken to the streets by the thousands to protest the still-unexplained presence of ICE agents at the Cortina games. (ICE has no jurisdiction in Italy and no reason for being part of the delegation.)

Hess is hardly the only Olympian who has mixed feelings about what American national symbols mean in the wider world. At the same press conference, his teammate Chris Lillis said he was "heartbroken" about what ICE is doing in and to the United States.

 

 

Trump is spending the day avoiding being booed at the Super Bowl, having claimed that California was "too far" from Washington for a person with a private jet. But he (or perhaps an anonymous staffer this will later be blamed on) did weigh in on the world of sports, calling Hess a "Loser" on his private social media network and lying about what Hess had actually said.

Trump and his political allies are openly trying to fight the popularity of American athletes—or at least the ones they think pose a political danger—through threats and intimidation. Figure skater Amber Glenn, who came out as bisexual years ago, has been chased off social media due to what she called a "scary amount of hate/threats" after she simply acknowledged that Trump was making it hard on the LGBTQ community.

Why does this matter?

• No matter how upset it makes Donald Trump, Americans still have the right to criticize their government.  

• There's thin-skinned, and then there's that reaction to someone saying that "there's obviously a lot going on that I'm not the biggest fan of."

• Name someone who's directly insulted more Americans, individually and as a nation, than Donald Trump.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He invited a collection of dictatorships to the first meeting of his "Board of Peace."

The Trump administration announced today that it would hold a meeting of his so-called "Board of Peace," a sort of sham version of the United Nations that Trump is trying to use to bolster his image as a diplomat and dealmaker. Virtually all of the current members are one form or another of authoritarian state. The meeting will supposedly take place February 19th in the building housing what is left of the United States Institute for Peace, an independent nonprofit agency whose headquarters Trump unlawfully seized shortly after returning to office.

The announcement of the meeting came on the same day that Italy announced it would not be joining, like essentially all of the United States' actual diplomatic and military allies. The official reason cited by Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani is that Italy's constitution forbids the country from joining any organization in which it would not be in a "condition of equality with other states." The charter of Trump's board rests all its authority in him specifically, by name, independent of whether he holds the office of the presidency.

Of course, Trump's board isn't going to exert any influence on world events anyway, so Italy isn't losing anything by not joining—and neither are virtually any of the United States' actual allies. But it will save its dignity, and the $1 billion fee Trump is trying to charge for admission.

Why does this matter? 

• It's bad if dictatorships can buy the personal favor of the President of the United States. 

• Donald Trump may be the only person in the world who cannot see the contempt that the countries willing to join his "Board of Peace" have for him. 

• A competent president would want to form diplomatic relationships with prosperous democracies rather than monarchies, dictatorships, and military juntas.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He spent the day figuring out who besides himself was to blame for a racist meme he posted.

Early this morning, Trump posted a meme to his private microblogging service that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. This is a racist trope even older than Trump, but it plays into 19th-century ideas that Trump actually believes and endorses, namely that people like him have "good genes" while people from other races or cultures are like "rats" or "vermin" or "dogs."

The White House's initial reaction was to say that the meme was a harmless joke. Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt released a statement this morning claiming that it was a harmless joke, adding, "Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public."

By mid-afternoon, with the video still up and both parties expressing anger, Trump's PR team changed their stance. They said it had been posted inadvertently by a staffer, who they refused to name. (If so, the staffer was working well after midnight, and just by coincidence posted right after another late-night post Trump hasn't disavowed.)

But that raised a whole host of even more troubling questions. If so, why wouldn't Trump identify the staffer? How could anyone tell the difference between a "real" Trump tweet and one he found politically inconvenient after the fact? Which of the more than thirty posts that "Trump" spent the working day on are genuine? How many people were involved in the "mistake?" How many people can post as though they were Trump, and does he know who all of them are? Why did everyone in Trump's own party—including his own press secretary—initially have no trouble believing that Trump himself was the one who had knowingly posted a racist meme? And if Trump wasn't involved, why did the video stay up long after it became clear that posting it had been a "mistake?"

These questions aren't theoretical. Trump's post on social media can have dramatic effects on diplomacy, financial markets, and even international military postures. It's not uncommon for him to go on posting binges of a hundred or more posts in the course of a few hours, and racist imagery is par for the course.

Then, this evening, reporters on Air Force One asked Trump about the post directly. His explanation was that he himself had approved the tweet, but had not watched the one-minute-long video all the way to the end to the point where "there was some kind of a thing that people don’t like." 

Trump refused to apologize, pinning the blame on the still-unnamed staff who also didn't notice the racist imagery. "Certainly if they had looked, they would’ve seen it, and probably they would’ve had the sense to take it down." But he did say he wouldn't be firing or revealing the mystery person or persons in question.

To summarize: where this particular racist depiction of Black Americans as apes was concerned, Trump was at first responsible, then absolutely responsible, then not responsible at all, then finally sort of involved, but not ultimately responsible.

Why does this matter?

• Americans of every race, creed and color deserve a president who doesn't make gutter racist "jokes." 

• The fact that nobody thought this was beyond the pale for Trump tells you how bad it is.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to put his name on at least three more things.

There are hundreds of things named for Donald Trump: buildings, hotels, bankrupted casinos, a defunct airline, discontinued commercial products from designer sneakers to frozen steaks, a fake university, and a fraudulent charity, among many other things. There are even two of his own children named after him—Donald Trump Jr., and Barron Trump, whose first name appears to be an homage to Trump's alter ego John Barron. But what almost all of them have in common is that Trump named them himself. 

But the list of public places in the United States named for Trump where other people had a say is as follows: two streets in Florida, a rural county courthouse in Nevada, and this short stretch of highway in the panhandle of Oklahoma. This compares pretty poorly with, for example, former President Obama.

 

Since returning to office, Trump has given up waiting for people to give him the honors he thinks he deserves, and has decreed that his name be added to the Kennedy Center (which he has shut down in anger), the United States Institute for Peace (which he first illegally seized and then vandalized), a watered-down version of the 529 Savings Plan, and a pay-to-skip-the-line scheme for permanent residency.

Today, he tried to add at least three more items to that list. The first is TrumpRx, a sort of limited version of commercial services like GoodRx that provide bulk discounts on drugs for consumers without health insurance. In fact, it is the private company GoodRx under the hood, which is why its prices aren't any lower. (In fact, a lot of them are higher than prices on the open market.) People who do have health insurance won't benefit from it, although thanks to Trump's refusal to fund the ACA in the current budget, that number is going up sharply.

He also tried to get his name put on Dulles Airport and New York's Penn Station, according to reporting today, in a deal he floated with Congressional Democrats. In exchange, he promised to release funds for a long-awaited NYC tunnel project that he shut down in an attempt to get political revenge on Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). 

Trump's offer was rejected. 

Why does this matter?

• Using the power of the presidency to name public facilities after yourself is the same kind of pathetic as using your power as the owner of a golf course to declare yourself the winner of a golf tournament you didn't play in.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lied about crime in general and in Minneapolis specifically.

In an interview with NBC News today, Trump once again claimed that crime rates had dropped because of his deployment of military and paramilitary forces into American cities, including in Minneapolis. 

In reality, Minneapolis's rates of violent crime haven't changed much at all since Trump began his orchestrated ICE/CBP terror campaign against the city, except that federal agents are responsible for two-thirds of the homicides it's seen so far in 2026.

More generally, violent crime has been steadily dropping for decades. The causes of and solutions to those crimes are local, and who is president on any given day doesn't usually have much to do with how likely someone is to commit a murder or an armed robbery. 

 

That doesn't mean federal policies have no effect, though. When people have better access to mental health care, domestic violence interventions, criminal rehabilitation, general health care, child care, after-school programs, food assistance, community-based policing, job training, drug rehabilitation, suicide prevention programs, and lead abatement, it lowers violent crime rates in the long run.

Trump has zeroed out or deeply cut federal spending on all of those things since returning to office. 

Why does this matter?

• Presidents with real accomplishments don't need to lie about them. 

• Anyone who can't see that cutting programs that help Americans will hurt Americans is too dumb to be president.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said a female reporter asking about victims of child sex trafficking should smile more.

Trump had this exchange with CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins today:

COLLINS: A lot of women who were, are survivors of Epstein's are unhappy with those redactions that came out. Some of them, entire witness interviews are totally blacked out. Do you think that they should be more transparent—

TRUMP: Well, they're also unhappy with the thought that they released too much, you know, I heard that, and you tell me something else, well. Uh, I think it's really time for the country to get on to something else. And now that, uh, nothing came out about me other than — it was a conspiracy against me, literally by Epstein, and other people. But I think it's time now for the country to maybe get on to something else. 

Trump is correct about one thing: many of Epstein's surviving victims are furious that their personal information was carelessly—or possibly deliberately—left exposed, even as the names of Epstein's closest associates were blacked out. They also complained about Trump's DOJ publishing unredacted nude images of girls and young women. One survivor called it "weaponized incompetence."

There's no evidence of an anti-Trump conspiracy in the documents that have been released so far, although Trump's name appears thousands of times in the files. For example, one witness submitted a sworn affidavit in a 2016 lawsuit brought by another victim saying that she witnessed Trump sexually abusing girls, and that Trump threatened the plaintiff's life. 

Collins then followed up:

COLLINS: Well what would you say to people who feel like they haven't gotten justice, Mr. President. 

TRUMP: Like healthcare, or something that people care about. Yeah, what did you say? Go ahead.

COLLINS: What would you say to the survivors who feel like they haven't gotten justice?

TRUMP [crosstalk]: CNN. You are so bad, you know, you are the worst reporter. No wonder C — CNN has no ratings because of people like you. You know she's a young woman, I don't think I've ever seen you smile. I've known you for ten years. I don't think I've ever seen a smile on your face. 

COLLINS: Well I'm asking about survivors of Jeffrey Epstein— 

TRUMP: You know why you're not smiling? 'Cause you know you're not telling the truth, and you're, uh, you're a very dishonest organization.

Trump's handlers ended the press availability almost immediately afterwards.

Why does this matter? 

• There's a reason most people don't want to "maybe get on to something else" when the subject is a massive child sex trafficking ring. 

• Kaitlan Collins not smiling enough when discussing the trafficking and rape of children by Trump's close friend is not the problem for anyone but Donald Trump.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he wouldn't completely destroy another physical monument to the Kennedy legacy, for whatever that's worth.

An enormous amount of Trump's time and waning energy during his second term has been spent on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which isn't even part of the executive branch. He's spent whole days touring it, replaced its board with loyalists, shoehorned himself into an emcee gig for its annual awards ceremony, floated the idea of giving the nation's highest award for artistic achievement to a long-dead baseball player, dictated its programming, sampled custom marble arm-rests for its chairs, used it for a screening of a vanity project for his wife that doubles as a bribe, and slapped his own name up on the sign for it. (The name hasn't actually changed, no matter what he says.)

Predictably, both artists and patrons are having none of it. Last week, composer Philip Glass became the latest artist in a long list to cancel a show, and ticket sales have fallen off a cliff since Trump started trying to make it part of his personal brand. 

In a fairly obvious attempt to stave off further embarrassments like that, Trump abruptly announced over the weekend that the Kennedy Center would be closed for two years for "renovations," something he decided to do without informing anyone who works there. Their surprise at learning about his plans from social media might have come from the fact that the Kennedy Center just finished a $250 million renovation, which now looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the structure that Trump thinks is "broken, tired and dilapidated" and "kind of dangerous."

In describing his plans for it today, Trump promised to rip the structure down to its structural steel, but said that he wouldn't completely demolish the building itself.

Quite possibly he won't. In fact, quite possibly he'll never get around to doing the "renovations" either. But then, that is exactly the same lie that he told about the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. 

Why does this matter?

• Two years of music, dance, art, education, and children's programming is worth a lot more than Donald Trump's ego. 

• Anyone who thinks the Kennedy Center isn't fancy enough is either delusional or just has incredibly bad taste.  

• This is mad-king shit.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he'd never heard of an election he was flogging the day before.

 

Yesterday, in a runoff special election for a deeply Republican state Senate seat in Texas, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won by 14 points, an enormous margin in a race that normally wouldn't even have been competitive. He did this in spite of having been outspent by a massive margin, and the runoff saw Republican voters crossing party lines to support him.

Special elections are not always perfect predictors of how candidates or parties will perform in general elections—although they certainly show which way the wind is blowing,. This one, however, is especially chilling to Congressional Republicans from Texas, who saw their district lines redrawn by the state legislature at Trump's specific command in a desperate attempt to stave off a wave election in the midterms. But gerrymanders can backfire, because they involve making the average seat less dominated by voters of the majority party. Many of the "safe" seats occupied by Texas Republicans have only a 6-8% Republican "lean." This means that if the electorate swings that much, not only will Republicans not gain any House seats, they might lose quite a few. 

Rehmet's district swung 31 points. 

On that subject, Trump had this exchange with a reporter today:

Q: Mr. President, in Texas, a Democrat won a special election in an area that you had won by 17 points. What is your reaction to that?

TRUMP: I don't know, I didn't hear about it. Somebody ran — where?

Q: In Texas, a special election for a legislative seat.

TRUMP: I'm not involved in that, that's a local Texas race. You mean I won by 17 and this person lost?

Q: Yes. 

TRUMP: Things like that happen.

Q: Does it worry you—

TRUMP: Well you don't know whether or not it's transferable. You know, I'm not on the ballot, so you don't know whether or not it's transferable. …No, I don't know a thing about it. I didn't know — I mean I know there's a race going there, and, uh, it's too bad. What can I say? 

In reality, Trump was very well aware of the race—or so he claimed on Friday and Saturday, when he posted about it three times to his private microblogging service.

 

That leaves three possible explanations for the discrepancy:

1. Trump remembered his involvement in the race he'd posted about repeatedly in the previous 48 hours, and was simply lying.
   
   
2. Trump had already forgotten about something he'd done several times in the past two days.
   
   
3. Someone on Trump's staff used Trump's account, and even "signed" it as a genuine post directly from him, and didn't bother to tell him about it. 

Why does this matter?

• It's a problem when "lying, senile, or manipulated?" is a question that comes up so often with the President of the United States.