HELP THEM, TRUMP!

 

Glory to Ukraine (Слава Україні!)

 

Across Ukraine, centuries of history live in golden-domed cathedrals, medieval city streets, ancient fortifications, and remarkable architectural treasures. These places tell the story of a nation and its people—and they are part of humanity’s shared cultural heritage.

Sadly, many of these treasures are now at risk.

🏛️ Ukraine’s cultural heritage is under attack. As of July 29, 2026, UNESCO had verified damage to 545 cultural sites across Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. These include religious buildings, historic structures, museums, monuments, libraries, and archaeological sites. Not all are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, but each represents a piece of Ukraine’s cultural history.

⛪ Saint-Sophia Cathedral and Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra have suffered damage. This remarkable World Heritage property in Kyiv represents nearly a thousand years of Ukrainian history, faith, and architecture. In June 2026, a Russian drone strike severely damaged the Dormition Cathedral within the Lavra complex, affecting its roof and structure. UNESCO has been working to support emergency stabilization and preservation efforts.

🏰 Odesa’s historic center has also been hit. Recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023, Odesa’s historic center is celebrated for its distinctive architecture and rich cultural history. Russian attacks have damaged historic buildings and religious landmarks, including the Transfiguration Cathedral. UNESCO has sent experts to assess the damage and support restoration efforts.

🏘️ Lviv’s historic heritage faces threats, too. The historic city center is renowned for its architectural layers and cultural influences. Russian attacks have caused damage to historic buildings in the city and its surrounding heritage areas, highlighting the risks facing Ukraine’s architectural legacy.

🌍 Why does this matter to the world? UNESCO World Heritage Sites are recognized for their outstanding universal value. They belong not only to the countries where they stand but also to the cultural inheritance of humanity. When a historic cathedral, museum, or centuries-old building is damaged, the loss extends beyond bricks and stone. It threatens the stories, craftsmanship, traditions, and memories passed down through generations.

💙💛 Preserving Ukraine’s heritage means preserving its identity. Ukrainians continue to protect their museums, document damaged monuments, rescue cultural collections, and work to restore what has been lost. Their determination shows that defending a country also means defending its history and culture.

At Ukrainian Apparel, we believe that supporting Ukraine means more than wearing its colors. It means learning about its history, celebrating its culture, and helping keep its stories alive.

Every design is an opportunity to share a story, celebrate Ukrainian identity, and connect people around the world with Ukraine’s heritage.

Thank you for standing with Ukraine and helping keep its history alive.

With Love, 💙💛
— Ukrainian Apparel

 

"Trump is openly embracing Putin and is working to destroy the strongest and most successful alliance in human history..."

 

It was exactly ten years ago that then–Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the American people that Russian president Vladimir Putin hoped to have a “puppet” in the White House, and that Donald Trump was that puppet.

A scowling Trump responded: “No puppet. No puppet.”

Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear.

Trump interjected: “You’re the puppet.”

Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear you won’t admit…”

Trump interjected: “No, you’re the puppet.”

Clinton: “...that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race.”

Trump shook his head disparagingly.

Ten years later, Trump is openly embracing Putin and is working to destroy the strongest and most successful alliance in human history to cement that partnership, apparently with an eye to enriching himself.

And so, the events of the present change the way we see the past. Had Trump strongly supported Ukraine as Congress has demanded, and stood firm against Russia, a country that is, after all, a minor economic player whose military is flailing at its attempt to absorb its neighbor, we would rightly dismiss Clinton’s warning as campaign hyperbole. As it is, though, Trump’s tie to Putin—the story he has always tried to bury by calling it the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”—seems likely to emerge as the central story of the Trump years.

As Clinton wrote today: “In just the last few days: Trump made a deal for the U.S. to buy Russian diesel, an economic lifeline for Putin; he and Elon Musk blamed each other for an order that slowed down Starlink satellite connectivity over Ukraine, hampering the country’s defenses during a devastating Russian attack; and Trump waived sanctions on Russia that Congress, led by his late friend Lindsey Graham, had pushed for. Now, Putin has proposed a summit with Trump and Xi to decide Ukraine’s fate for them, bulldoze a century of international cooperation, and frame Russia as an equal to the U.S. and China. We’ll see if Putin’s puppet continues to dance on his strings.”

Second, as no one paying even a modicum of attention can have missed, Trump is so unpopular that support for Republicans has fallen into historically low numbers. The gutting of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), tariffs that have destroyed markets for agricultural products and increased prices, the war on Iran that has sent prices of gasoline and especially diesel soaring and thus increased the cost of everything that travels by train or truck, the blatant corruption that is lining the pockets of Trump and his cronies while ordinary Americans can’t make ends meet, and now Trump’s open embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin—all wildly unpopular positions—mean that the districts that were firmly Republican by double digits just two years ago are now up for grabs.

That shift has revealed something interesting. Republicans running for office are refusing to hold town halls or to engage in debates with Democratic challengers. When they do show up, they tend to show how unserious they are about filling elected office, as Republican Dan Sullivan of Alaska illustrated when he asked the moderators at a debate with Democrat Mary Peltola if she had been given the questions beforehand because she seemed to be reading from notes while he didn’t know how to answer the questions. As the moderators quashed his allegation, Peltola noted: “I’m prepared!”

In the past, Republicans in safe Republican districts did not have to appeal to constituents or campaign, apparently because the letter “R” was enough to get voters to make a mark next to their name. In this new environment in which constituents are furious with Republican policies, Republicans hoping to be elected continue to keep their heads down, apparently hoping that they can be elected, or reelected, if they simply keep their mouths shut.

Their invisibility raises the question of why these people, who evidently don’t care about representing their constituents, would want to hold national office. Perhaps they want to hobble the federal government to enable wealthy businessmen to gain even more control over the country. Perhaps they want to enable the rise of a theocracy. Perhaps they are hoping to make money off their offices. Perhaps they simply want the prestige of a federal office.

But the extreme gerrymandering of states at the hands of Republican lawmakers that made their candidates shoo-ins in the past also means those Republican candidates are weak. New scrutiny of those candidates as Democrats challenges them is revealing just how weak they are.

In Texas, for example, Republicans are running Trump’s hand-picked candidate for the U.S. Senate, state attorney general Ken Paxton, a stunningly corrupt man who has recently been revealed to have spent New Year’s Eve 2024 partying in Dubai with a mistress and two men who are fugitives from U.S. law. In Kansas the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate is incumbent senator Roger Marshall, a man who has been revealed as having sued more than 700 of his obstetrical patients for unpaid bills, resulting in 81 arrests.

In North Carolina, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley has little to recommend him other than Trump’s endorsement; the same could be said of the Republican candidate for Senate from South Carolina, Darline Graham, whose main qualification is that she is former South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. The story is the same across the country as Republicans field subpar candidates. Even in Maine, where Senator Susan Collins should have been a strong candidate for the party, stories of apparent corruption are undermining her candidacy.

As Paul Waldman noted in Public Notice on October 15, these stories and others are “just the Senate candidates. Up and down the ballot, the [Republican Party] has nominated crackpots and nitwits, none more colorful than Victor Marx, their nominee for governor in Colorado. Marx refuses to say how many people he has killed (though he says his stepfather forced him to commit his first murder at age 7), hunts demons, claims he can call in US airstrikes, and boasts of being a seventh-degree black belt in a martial art he invented. Normal stuff!”

In contrast to the Republicans hoping to coast to election, the Democrats running for office are holding town halls, listening to the people of their districts, needling their opponents who refuse to debate, and using the word “mission.”

The contrast between the two is a snapshot of a dying party that is no longer bothering to compete, and a rising party whose candidates are eager for the job and willing to work for it. It reminds me of the 1850s, when the Democrats, who were so accustomed to holding office that they assumed they were entitled to their posts, met the rising Republicans, whom Democrats considered too uncouth to hold office, but who ended up dominating the political system for the next seventy years.

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

"The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant"

 

Yesterday, Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. 

Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. 

Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war.

And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect. Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”

Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” 

This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”

Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine.

He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” 

And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”

Until now, Nichols wrote, “[a] world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.

The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader's abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.

And yet, here we are.  But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.

-Heather Cox Richardson

 

The MAGA Crackup Has Begun

Trump’s lawlessness, incoherence, cruelty, and desperation are increasing as we approach a blue wave election that appears increasingly likely to sweep out Republican majorities in the House and Senate, flip numerous governorships, and deliver significant blows to Republicans in state races. Trump has tried everything in his playbook: attempting to sabotage mail-in voting, effectively bribing voters with a ludicrous promise of a $5,000 check if they keep Republicans in power, and traveling to red states to deliver rants intended to pump up his base. 

And yet, his own conduct further undercuts Republicans’ already-dismal election prospects, with Republican candidates straining to run from policies in which they have been complicit (e.g. tariffs, the war, ICE’s reckless blitz).

In the latest Washington Post-ABC poll, his approval hit a new low of 33 percent, with a dismal 22 percent among independents. His handling of the economy has plunged to 28 percent and all the way to 21 percent on affordability (which he says is a hoax). Under Trump, “the Republican Party is worse at 28 points underwater (35% favorable and 63% unfavorable),” while large majorities “call Trump and the Republican Party ‘too extreme’ — 66% and 55%, respectively” (vs. just 36 percent for the Democratic Party). And a key finding: “By a wide margin, Americans prefer that the next Congress be controlled by Democrats, to act as a check on Trump (59%) than by Republicans, to support Trump’s agenda (35%).”

Democrats, understandably, are therefore thrilled Trump keeps insisting voters pretend he is on the ballot. In just the past week, his total capitulation to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on sanctions relief and his psychotic ramblings out on the stump might instead convince voters Democratic majorities are urgently needed to keep him on a short leash. 

(His treacherous betrayal of Ukraine and unabashed cheerleading for Putin triggered an unusual bipartisan backlash, demands for investigation, proposals to countermand the diesel bailout, and further questions about his personal and financial motives.)

Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail has only intensified the sense that the country is rudderless, careening from one disaster to another without a sentient leader. “Trump, 80, has used his appearances to muse about animals’ opposition to the second amendment, to call one Republican candidate ‘nerdy,’ and to demonstrate a hitherto unexpressed fascination with ‘asses’ — men’s and babies’, in particular,” The Guardian reported. “Along the way Trump has repeated his lie that 2020 was a rigged election, claimed, falsely, that he has secured $21T in foreign investment in the US, and issued dark warnings about Democrats.”

As happens when a regime is hurtling toward defeat and popular support plummets, the wheels seem to be coming off the already-rickety Trump regime bus. The forced resignation of grifter Kimberly Guilfoyle, revelations about the donors who forked over $330 million for the East Wing destruction/ballroom monstrosity, the firing of disastrously incompetent Katie Zacharia (replete with leaks from insiders disparaging her), and the possible ouster of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles mean the knives are out as Trump flunkies search for scapegoats. (“Staff upheaval is expected as officials brace for a blame game over Republican performance, with some distancing themselves from what they see as a fading political movement,” the Los Angeles Times confirmed.)

Most disastrous for Republicans, Trump’s policies have created the perfect storm. On the economic front, consumer and producer numbers released last week confirm that prices have soared, reminding voters that Trump’s toxic brew of tariffs and soaring energy costs resulting from his calamitous war have made ordinary life unaffordable for millions. (His fiscal trainwreck has contributed to soaring interest rates, raising the potential for stagflation like we saw in the 1970s and ’80s.) Trump’s illegal, reckless war continues to drag down Republican candidates who are forced to defend their acquiescence in this strategic, military, moral, and economic debacle.

Trump can no longer rely on his go-to issue: immigrant fearmongering. His violent, lawless assaults on immigrants have killed scores of people on the streets and in detention, separated families, inflicted economic hardship, and undermined the rule of law, alienating even Republicans. 

His latest, outrageous effort to deport a political opponent, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), laced with racism and devoid of any legal basis for violating the 60-day pre-election moratorium on political-related prosecutions, reflects white nationalists’ desperation and political tone-deafness as they make a single controversial congresswoman into a national political martyr.

While lashing about like a wounded animal, he is also getting slapped down by courts in a wide array of cases (e.g., dismissal with prejudice of the Reflecting Pool prosecution, rejecting demands for state voting roll data, stopping the Kennedy Center threatened shutdown/teardown, complete defeat in the effort to exclude certain news outlets from the White House, the vindication of smeared FEMA employee Mary Comans) as they recognize his lawlessness and express outright fury, as Judge Ana Reyes put it in the East Potomac golf course case, over the Justice Department’s frivolous filings, gamesmanship, and outright defiance of court orders.

The paranoia on the left runs deep, with many insisting Trump is “more dangerous than ever.” But they should not confuse desperation with danger, nor impulsiveness with potency. Though Trump’s nutty rhetoric may intensify and his executive edicts may multiply, democracy forces should refrain from treating him as a political colossus. 

Swinging and missing does not make Trump more powerful; it convinces his congressional allies to distance themselves, judges to forcefully rebuke him, and his former supporters to turn the page. More frequent retreats (e.g., halting public financing for ads, calling off the live-streaming of the Fort Hood murderer’s execution, resuming Starlink connection for Ukraine, firing his spokeswoman) suggest criticism is eroding his resolve.

As Trump’s losses mount and his power drains away, and as both congressional allies and courts deny him deference, Democrats must not let up. Once in power, Democrats must not only seek to reverse policy debacles (e.g., take back tariff authority, reverse Medicaid and SNAP cuts, reinstate Affordable Care Act subsidies, defund ICE) but also pursue every avenue of accountability.

In sum, we are seeing the political death spiral of a regime under the tutelage of a mentally decrepit narcissist. Decisive, overwhelming Democratic wins up and down the ballot can disabuse Republicans of the notion there is any benefit or future in continuing to align themselves with a fascist movement that has done extraordinary damage to our economy, democracy, and social fabric.

The full impact of an election loss of the magnitude we expect will play out over months as regime figures get thrown overboard or run for the hills and surviving Republicans in Congress race to create space between themselves and a failed presidency. 

For Democrats and all pro-democracy forces, it will be vital to take advantage of the disarray in MAGA ranks to begin reversing policy blunders, holding wrongdoers responsible, and erecting reforms to restore democratic institutions and place our constitutional system on firmer footing. Meanwhile, Democrats would be wise to echo Trump’s call for voters to pretend Trump is on the ballot. He certainly is — and the country is in desperate need of protection from the mad wannabe king.

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Demonstrators at an Oct. 1. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

 

A priest is crushed to death by a giant altar cross during livestreamed mass

A priest was crushed to death by a giant altar cross during a live Catholic Holy Mass broadcast in Latin America. Patricio Sanchez was leading the service when the heavy wooden crucifix on the wall behind him appeared to detach. Patricio had just adjusted his glasses when he was smashed onto the altar table in front of him.

Churchgoers rushed to help the priest who became pinned under the cross but he was killed instantly by the impact. The jaw-dropping tragedy occurred on Saturday afternoon at a church in the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil. The horror struck around 27 minutes into Patricio’s livestream at Guayaquil’s Perpetuo Socorro Church.

Overnight the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Guayaquil confirmed the priest’s death. A statement said: “We inform you that our beloved Father Patricio Alfredo Sanchez Molinari, who served as parish priest of the Perpetual Help church in the Central Vicariate, has departed for the Father’s House to enjoy his presence and glory. The Archdiocese of Guayaquil joins in prayer for the eternal rest of his soul and expresses its solidarity, affection and love to the Redemptorist family, his relatives and friends.”

- by Natalia Penza, NewsBreak

 

Nuremberg’s Warning: When Law Legitimates the Machinery of Authoritarianism by Henry Giroux

 

The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer – James Baldwin         

The legacy of Nuremberg is with us once again, less as a reminder of the power of the legal system to punish those who enabled and enacted the horrors of Nazi Germany than as a warning that the spirit of Nuremberg must be reclaimed as a moral and political imperative. That spirit matters at a time when the Supreme Court is increasingly turning the law into an instrument of reactionary concentrated power, desecrating morality, crippling the foundations of democracy, and reproducing the worst dimensions of gangster capitalism.

Nuremberg made clear that judges and other officials cannot use the authority of law to cover up and legitimate actions that are morally depraved and politically destructive. Its lesson for the present is stark: when law is emptied of justice and used to normalize cruelty, annihilate democratic rights, and place concentrated power beyond accountability, legality itself becomes a weapon in the destruction of democracy. The reactionary Court has become part of a political order whose governing ethos increasingly resembles what Jeet Heer, writing of Trump, calls being “besotted by the romance of gangsterism.”

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to expand the use of its citizenship-verification database is more than another dispute over how elections should be administered. By a 6–3 vote, the Court lifted a lower-court order blocking the Department of Homeland Security from using an expanded version of the SAVE database, now linked to Social Security records, to assist states in checking voter eligibility. The danger is hardly abstract. As Stephen Prager reports in Common Dreams, the database contains known errors, raising the possibility that “many eligible voters may be at risk of having their voter registration wrongfully cancelled just weeks before midterm” elections.

The immediate electoral consequences may nevertheless be limited: federal law generally prohibits systematic removals from voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election. That safeguard does not eliminate the risks of erroneous removals or the privacy concerns raised by the plaintiffs, but it constrains the scale of systematic voter purges in the weeks immediately preceding the election. The ruling does not require states to use the system, and the underlying legal dispute remains unresolved, though the Court signaled its preliminary view of the merits, stating that the challengers’ claims “likely lack merit” and that it would likely reverse the district court’s finding that the administration had violated federal law.

Nor has the Court simply rubber-stamped every administration effort to rewrite election rules: earlier this month, it blocked Trump’s attempt to impose sweeping new restrictions on mail voting before the midterms. The significance of the latest ruling therefore lies not in claiming that every decision moves in the same authoritarian direction, but in confronting what happens when the nation’s highest court repeatedly removes barriers to concentrated power, strengthens an increasingly authoritarian presidency, and provides legal cover for a political project that attacks voting rights, intensifies racial exclusion, and aligns the machinery of the state with white-nationalist politics. What is being placed at risk is not simply constitutional restraint, but democracy itself.

Yet the significance of these decisions cannot be grasped if they are treated simply as isolated legal disputes. Walter Benjamin’s notion of “profane illumination” offers another way of reading them: the particular can suddenly illuminate the larger social forces condensed within it. As AK Thompson, drawing on Benjamin, argues, particular events can alert us to “the broader social process from which [they] derive.” 

Read in this way, the Court’s rulings are not merely discrete constitutional decisions. They are fragments of a larger political transformation in which concentrated executive power, racial exclusion, the political power of wealth, attacks on voting rights, and the weakening of democratic restraints increasingly converge. 

The task is not to claim that every ruling is fascist, but to recognize what these decisions illuminate when viewed together: the emergence of a political order in which democratic institutions are increasingly reorganized to serve authoritarian ends. Fascism becomes visible not simply in a single spectacular act, but in the accumulation of institutional changes that make concentrated power appear lawful, ordinary, and legitimate.

The danger becomes clearer when law itself ceases to restrain authoritarian power and begins to legitimate it. That is why Germany in 1933 matters—not as a historical equivalent, but as a warning about what happens when legality itself is turned against democracy.

The  comparison with Hitler’s Enabling Act of March 1933 must therefore be made carefully. The situations are not equivalent. Passed amid intimidation, political repression, and the exclusion of Communist deputies, the Enabling Act allowed Hitler’s government to make laws without parliamentary approval, even when they violated the Weimar Constitution. It did not merely weaken German democracy. It supplied the legal machinery for destroying it.

The point lies not in equating the two moments but in recognizing a political mechanism. Fascism does not need to abolish the law to seize and weaponize its authority. The Nazis captured courts, the civil service, education, culture, and administrative institutions and bent them toward authoritarian ends. Democracy was not attacked from outside. Its own institutions were seized, emptied of their democratic substance, and turned against the people they were supposed to protect.

After visiting the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, legal scholar Kim Wehle observed fascism does not always arrive through spectacular acts of force; it can also advance “by operation of law.” The historical warning should be taken seriously. Authoritarian power becomes especially dangerous when repression no longer appears as a violation of legal authority but is enabled through it, drawing upon the legitimacy, procedures, and institutional protections of law itself.

The warning resonates in the present: in the expansion of detention and mass-deportation machinery, the military occupation of American cities, overt and dangerous attacks on free speech and the press, and the political cleansing of educational institutions. What was once unthinkable is being transformed into policy, while cruelty becomes routine and authoritarianism is woven into the everyday machinery of the state and everyday life.

German judges offer a particularly chilling example. The judiciary did not mount a serious institutional resistance to the Nazi seizure of power. Much of the legal establishment accommodated itself to the new regime. Dictatorship thereby acquired one of its most powerful weapons: the appearance of legality. Law remained in place, but its political function changed. It authorized power in the service of domination and mass destruction rather than restraining it.

But the question is not simply how authoritarian governments capture the law. It is whose interests the law protects, whose power it strengthens, and whose suffering it renders invisible. Fascism cannot be understood solely as the triumph of authoritarian leaders or the collapse of constitutional safeguards. Its history is inseparable from the relationship among political repression, class power, and the economic interests that support and benefit from authoritarian rule.

That is where the warning reaches the present. No single Supreme Court ruling is an American Enabling Act. The danger lies in accumulation: voting protections weakened, presidential power enlarged, the political power of concentrated wealth fortified, and the capacity to challenge executive power narrowed. What is being transformed is not simply constitutional doctrine but the political function of the Court itself. An institution charged with checking concentrated power is increasingly constructing the legal architecture that enables it.

Chief Justice John Roberts has rejected the charge that the Court has become a political institution, complaining that too many Americans now view the justices as “political actors.” But the deeper issue is not whether the justices behave like elected politicians. It is whether the Court is using the authority of law to make authoritarianism appear constitutionally legitimate.

When voting rights are weakened, presidential immunity expanded, concentrated wealth granted greater political power, and barriers to executive authority dismantled, the Court does more than interpret law: it alters the conditions under which democracy can survive. Law becomes a weapon of concentrated power, and constitutional authority becomes its shield. It is not merely failing democracy. It is helping to construct the legal machinery for its destruction. The abuse of law does more than legitimate a culture of cruelty; it helps make cruelty appear normal. 

As Susan Neiman argues in Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, one of the great dangers of the present moment lies in the normalization of evil, a process through which cruelty becomes ordinary, injustice appears acceptable, and the unthinkable acquires the force of common sense.

When cruelty and state violence are sanctioned by law, the terror of the unthinkable is absorbed into the language of common sense. Images of Gestapo-like ICE agents beating peaceful protesters become just another spectacle in the daily flow of violence, stripping brutality of its capacity to shock, outrage, and provoke resistance. What follows is the slow death of conscience itself.

The Court has increasingly shifted power upward, away from voters, legislatures, lower courts, and independent agencies and toward the presidency and the Court itself. In this sense, it has become a criminogenic institution: not because its justices themselves are criminals, but because its decisions can create the legal conditions under which abuses of power become harder to prevent, challenge, or punish. Under such circumstances, democracy is being strangled and the guardrails meant to protect it have become instruments for disabling it.

Citizens United v. FEC (2010) struck down restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions, vastly expanding the ability of private wealth to shape electoral politics. It did not formally declare that “corporations are people” or authorize unlimited direct corporate contributions to candidates. It did something more politically consequential: it strengthened the constitutional power of corporations and concentrated wealth to shape political speech, allowing economic power to exercise an increasingly powerful influence over politics and democratic life.

Elon Musk’s expenditure of more than a quarter-billion dollars supporting Trump and Republican candidates in 2024 offers a stark illustration of the political world that followed. There is a longer and darker history at work here. The Supreme Court has repeatedly stood not outside the history of American white supremacy but within it. Dred Scott constitutionalized Black exclusion from citizenship; the post-Reconstruction Court helped destroy federal protections for Black freedom; and Plessy gave Jim Crow the sanction of constitutional law.

The Warren Court broke decisively with important parts of that history, but the Roberts Court has driven the country backward. Representative Jamie Raskin puts the point starkly, arguing that the Court has “returned to the historic baseline of political White supremacy,” particularly through its dismantling of voting-rights protections. The language has changed, but the political work of racial domination does not require the vocabulary of Dred Scott or Plessy. It can operate through the allegedly neutral language of colorblindness, states’ rights, electoral integrity, and constitutional restraint—stripping history from the law while disabling the democratic means for confronting the racial hierarchies that history produced.

That history bears directly on the Court’s assault on voting rights. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down the coverage formula that made the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance system operative, disabling one of the law’s most powerful protections against discriminatory voting rules. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) narrowed the terrain further by making certain Section 2 challenges to voting restrictions more difficult.

In Louisiana v. Callais (2026), the Court went further, holding that Section 2 did not require Louisiana to create the additional majority-Black district at issue and that the resulting race-based district could not survive constitutional scrutiny. The decision further narrowed the legal terrain on which racial representation and voting rights can be defended.

The Court’s assault on established rights has extended beyond voting. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), it overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion that had stood for nearly half a century and returning the power to regulate abortion to the states. 

Dobbs was more than the destruction of a longstanding reproductive right. It demonstrated the willingness of the Court’s conservative majority to use its power to strip away an established constitutional protection on which generations of women had relied.

The Court has simultaneously enlarged presidential power. In Trump v. United States (2024), it created a constitutional doctrine of presidential criminal immunity: absolute immunity for actions within the president’s core constitutional authority and at least presumptive immunity for other official acts, while leaving unofficial conduct unprotected. The decision fundamentally altered presidential accountability by giving presidents new constitutional protection against criminal prosecution for exercises of official power.

The pattern has only intensified. In Trump v. CASA (2025), the Court sharply restricted the power of lower federal courts to issue universal injunctions against executive action. In Trump v. Slaughter (2026), it expanded presidential control over independent regulatory agencies. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC (2026), it struck down limits on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates.

And now, with the citizenship-database ruling, the Court has allowed the administration, while litigation continues, to expand a system that states can use to challenge voter eligibility. Different cases, different doctrines, but the same political trajectory: power concentrated in the presidency, protected for the wealthy, and increasingly insulated from democratic constraint.

The Enabling Act helped clear the way for Gleichschaltung, the coordination of German political, social, and cultural life with the Nazi state. Political parties disappeared, trade unions were abolished, state governments were subordinated, the civil service was purged, and education, law, culture, and professional life were brought under Nazi control. Within six months, Germany had ceased to be a multiparty democracy.

The question, then, is not whether the United States is Germany in 1933. History does not repeat itself on command; instead, it leaves warnings written in its ruins. Primo Levi understood this with extraordinary clarity when he warned that “every age has its own fascism,” whose signs appear wherever “the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will.” 

Fascism, in this sense, need not return wearing the uniform of the past. It emerges through the institutions, technologies, fears, and forms of power particular to its own historical moment.

The ghost of Nuremberg nevertheless hangs over this history. Among the lesser-known proceedings that followed the trials of the major Nazi leaders was the 1947 Jurists’ Trial, in which judges, prosecutors, and officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice were prosecuted for their participation in a legal system that had transformed persecution and state violence into instruments of law. The analogy must not be abused: the crimes prosecuted at Nuremberg and the decisions of the present Supreme Court are not historical equivalents.

But the principle that emerged from those proceedings remains indispensable. Judicial office does not place those who wield the law beyond questions of responsibility. The robe cannot become a sanctuary from accountability when law itself is turned into an instrument of authoritarian power.  As the judgment in the Nuremberg Jurists’ Trial put it with unforgettable force, “The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.”

The lesson for the present is not that America requires another Nuremberg tribunal. It is that democracy cannot survive if those who exercise immense judicial power are imagined to stand beyond democratic accountability simply because their decisions arrive clothed in the language of constitutional law. 

The deeper question raised by the Roberts Court is therefore not simply whether particular rulings are conservative, reactionary, or profoundly unjust. It is what forms of accountability become necessary when a nation’s highest court repeatedly uses the authority of law to dismantle the very conditions that make democratic accountability possible in the first place.

That question cannot be separated from the politics of memory. As Marcelo Rubens Paiva argued in a 2015 interview cited in Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako’s Disputed Pasts, “not having a Nuremberg trial in Brazil in the 1980s contaminated the process of democratization and our current democracy.” The warning is crucial. 

The demands of resistance must also include the work of remembrance: counting, documenting, preserving, and publicly naming the legal abuses, democratic injuries, and moral violations committed under the cover of institutional authority. The record must be kept, not for vengeance, but because democracy cannot defend itself against abuses it has been taught to forget. There can be no manufactured innocence for those who use the authority of their offices to legitimate the machinery of authoritarian power, and no political amnesty purchased through national amnesia.

That is why the struggle over law is also a struggle over memory, responsibility, and the future. When institutions created to restrain power are reorganized to serve it; when courts turn domination into doctrine; when concentrated wealth acquires constitutional protection while democratic rights are stripped away; and when authoritarian measures no longer need to violate the law because they arrive bearing its authority, silence becomes a form of complicity and forgetting becomes an invitation to normalize once again the cruelties, crimes, and authoritarian practices that memory was meant to prevent.

What is often missed in analyzing law as an instrument of domination is its role as a pedagogical force. Law does more than prohibit, punish, and exclude. It teaches people who counts as a political agent, who has access to power, and who has the right to participate in decisions that shape their lives.

When law becomes a mechanism of exclusion and disposability, it denies particular groups both political rights and access to the institutions and public spaces in which they can understand how power works, develop a critical consciousness, imagine alternatives, and create solidarities through social movements, education, and cultural work. Legalized illegalities function as forms of exclusion that weaken the conditions in which people learn to interpret their experiences, understand their place within relations of power, and act collectively to change them.

This repressive use of the law restricts political agency while also attacking the conditions necessary for its development. This is a form of pedagogical terrorism in which law is used to weaken the knowledge, social relations, and collective capacities necessary to recognize, resist, and transform oppressive relations of power.

There is an even more ominous logic at work here, one that moves beyond the politics of disposability toward what Brad Evans and I have called a politics of disappearance (forthcoming in Theory, Culture,& Society). Disposability abandons populations deemed economically or politically surplus; disappearance goes further by erasing the social, legal, historical, and moral conditions through which their lives can be publicly recognized and their suffering made visible.

 The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to temporarily allow the Trump administration to resume third-country deportations makes this distinction especially urgent. Migrants can now be sent to countries with which they have no connection, without the protections required by the lower court to contest the danger of persecution or torture. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in the Court’s earlier intervention in the same litigation that the policy could expose “thousands to the risk of torture or death.” 

This is more than a politics of expulsion. It points toward a politics of disappearance historically associated with fascist and authoritarian regimes, in which those marked as unwanted are removed from the spaces of legal protection, public visibility, and moral responsibility. They enter what might be called a “vortex of erasure,” where criminalization, surveillance, detention, bureaucratic exclusion, forced removal, and organized forgetting reinforce one another.

Recognizing how law can be turned into an instrument of authoritarian power also raises the question of what will be required to undo the damage it has sanctioned and made possible. Fascism does not always announce itself by smashing the legal order. It can advance by capturing that order, hollowing it out, and turning the machinery of democracy against democracy itself.

If democracy is ever to be rebuilt from the damage of the present, the task will not be to forgive and forget in the name of national unity, civility, or a return to normal. It will be to remember, to document, to judge, and, where the law permits, to hold accountable those responsible for abuses of power. No amnesia. No manufactured innocence. No impunity. Without truth and accountability, there can be no democratic future.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

-CounterPunch

"The Kennedy Center will outlast Donald Trump. So will the law that established it"

 

There is something almost comical about Trump attempting to shutter the Kennedy Center simply because he cannot put his name on the building. Almost. But it is no laughing matter. Donald Trump has made it clear that he would rather close the center, undermine its future, and possibly demolish it than accept that he cannot turn a national memorial for the nation’s 35th president into a monument to himself.

Congress established the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1964. The arts center belongs to the country. Trump’s appalling display of self-indulgence and his assault on the renowned cultural center reflect how he governs. He has zero respect for the limits on his power. He leaves no space for compromise or humility because both require recognizing that public office is temporary and that institutions are larger than the people who run them. Trump cannot recast the Kennedy Center as a tribute to himself, so is prepared to damage it for everyone

Here’s how we arrived at this spectacle: Trump seized control of the Kennedy Center in February 2025, claiming he was going to usher in a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” Instead, he imposed his political agenda and personal tastes. He installed sycophants on its board who voted to put his name on the building, and he drove away artists and audiences. Ticket sales and subscriptions plummeted after his takeover and nosedived further after he put his name on the building in December 2025. But neither he nor his board will acknowledge the damage their politicization of the non-political center has done.

Our organization, Democracy Defenders Action, along with Washington Litigation Group, represent Congresswoman Joyce Beatty — the lone member of the Kennedy Center board willing to stand up to Trump — in her litigation to halt his quest to permanently emblazon his name on the center. Rep. Beatty filed her initial lawsuit on December 22, 2025, four days after Trump put his name on the building. She amended her complaint two months later, after Trump announced the center would close for two years for renovations. The announced closure conveniently distracted from the embarrassment of patrons and artists rejecting Trump’s vision for the center.

U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper ruled on May 29 that Trump’s name could not be added without congressional authorization. He ordered Trump’s name removed, and he temporarily blocked the board’s then-pending closure plan.

Top of Form

But in August, the board tried again, voting to inscribe Trump’s name as the building’s restorer and to close the center for two years. Our organization and Washington Litigation Group pushed back, filing on behalf of Rep. Beatty to block that scheme. 

On September 15, Judge Cooper ruled yet again that Trump’s name could not be added to the Kennedy Center “in any shape or form.” 

Hours later, Trump’s handpicked board voted to close the center immediately. Congress already appropriated more than $250 million for Kennedy Center renovations, but Trump declared on Truth Social that they “cannot begin” until an appeals court rules in his favor and that if he loses, the renovation “will not take place.” 

After the board meeting, crews erected fencing around the building in what can only be viewed as a brazen act of defiance of a court order that remains in place — and an unpresidential middle finger to us all.

We cannot allow Trump to rewrite recent history. He did not inherit a struggling arts center and benevolently decide to renovate it. He created the crisis of mostly empty theaters and the Washington Opera company not only fleeing the center but suing it. 

Now, Trump is punishing the institution and the public for rejecting him. He and his board inexplicably insist that Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center must be part of the solution. Apparently, the same man who needlessly turned our Reflecting Pool into a swamp is somehow uniquely capable of saving a national arts center that is deteriorating under his watch.

That is a textbook “only I can fix it” authoritarian lie: undermine institutions, create or deepen a crisis, then pretend that only the leader can save us from the calamity that he caused. The Kennedy Center’s Trump-created drama reflects this precarious political moment. Under our Constitution, the president is not above the law, and the center’s legal status makes that principle clear. As Rep. Beatty said, “This is not just about the center.”

Judge Cooper’s rulings should have ended the matter.

Presidents do not own the government. And a national memorial to a slain president is not a blank slate waiting for the name of the current president to be carved into it. Authoritarians sometimes win because they exhaust us. But we remain undeterred. The Kennedy Center will outlast Donald Trump. So will the law that established it.

The public will remember precisely what happened. The 47th president seized control of a revered national arts institution, tried to turn it into a tribute to himself, presided over its deterioration, and then chose to undermine its future rather than accept a simple fact: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts does not belong to Donald Trump.

This debacle is a distraction and a critical reminder that authoritarians are never compelled to serve the people. They serve themselves.

Susan Corke is the executive director of Democracy Defenders Action, and Jenice R. Robinson is the communications director at Democracy Defenders Action.

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"It’s somehow fitting that Trump wrecked the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the same way he has soiled the office Lincoln once held"

 

An Iconic Transformation

It was dark and cold when I first spotted him, sitting serenely, bathed in soft light. The statue of Abraham Lincoln at his memorial in Washington, D.C., sits 19 feet tall and weighs 120 tons — a white marble monument dedicated to one of the nation’s most intelligent, eloquent, and moral presidents. I hadn’t come to gaze upon Lincoln but at the reflecting pool that bears his name. It’s been transformed into a different kind of landmark by the inane, inarticulate, and completely immoral man who now holds that same office Lincoln did.

Donald Trump wants to remake the landscape of Washington D.C., tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a monstrosity of a ballroom; adding his name to the Kennedy Center or demolishing it if he can’t; and installing a 250-foot-tall “Triumphal Arch” that will “house … large numbers of drones, plus snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.” This past weekend, the administration even defied a judge’s order and ripped up 430 mature trees at East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal course in southeastern Washington that Trump wants to refashion into a championship-level course, like those of his personal properties.

Trump’s rehabilitation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — planned to be complete for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4 — should have been the easiest lift of his planned remodel of the nation’s capital. But it quickly became a monument to failure.

Back in April, Trump said adding a bargain-priced “industrial-grade swimming pool topping” in “American flag blue” to the reflecting pool would leave it looking “gorgeous, beautiful” and would “last for 40 or 50 years.” Instead, the renovation — awarded via a no-bid contract and announced as America 250 festivities on the National Mall approached — started to fail within days. This was followed by a bright green algae bloom and finally a catastrophic lining failure that saw Trump’s chosen coating blister, peel, and then separate from the concrete.

When I visited, the only water in the iconic national landmark — which Martin Luther King Jr. overlooked as he made his historic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech — was a stagnant puddle that stretched out toward a mass of rotting leaves, a motley collection of plastic beverage bottles, a silver-and-blue aluminum can of RAIN spring water, and a pair of heavy-duty spray bottles often used for commercial cleaning chemicals.

Nested Failures

What I witnessed was emblematic of a White House far out of its depth and completely overwhelmed by disasters — large and small — of its own making. From Washington, D.C., to the Middle East, the Trump administration has been humiliated. It’s a disaster wrapped in fiascos inside a swirling catastrophe, to riff off Winston Churchill’s famed line. These nested failures are legion. The attack on the elementary school in Minab — which killed more than 150 people, most of them children — within the larger failure of the Iran war. The extrajudicial executions of defenseless, shipwrecked survivors within the murderous boat strike campaign. The killings of unarmed people by federal immigration agents and deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody during the larger administration project of anti-immigrant cruelty.

The brutal deportation operations have spawned endless wrongdoing: military occupations of American cities; the arrest and detention of American citizens, the heartless expulsions to third countries; the shootings and beatings of protesters and immigrants, the targeting of Kilmar Abrego Garcia; the swirl of corruption allegations around then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; and on and on.

Then there is the debasing of democracy and the undercutting of the rule of law through politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department; turning federal law enforcement into a presidential goon squad; gutting of civil rights protections; targeting of political opponents; relentless attacks on the independent judiciary; executive overreach; and the pardoning or commuting of the prison sentences of insurrectionists.

Other scandals and revelations of wrongdoing have been legion: the failure to release the full Epstein files; the settling of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS; the floating of the “anti-weaponization” fund; the cover-up of the U.S. death toll of the Iran war; Signal-gate; the $400 million Qatari jumbo jet that turned into a security liability; crypto-grifting; quid pro quo tariff reductions; brazen self-dealing; and reckless actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which could result in more than 14 million preventable deaths globally by 2030 — including approximately 4.5 million deaths of children under 5 — all to save Americans about 17 cents per day.

A Presidential Crime Scene

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — dry and barren behind a bevy of barricades — looked to me like an open-air prison. At its head, the west end by the Lincoln Memorial, several black metal crowd-control fences and a similar lone orange metal barrier guarded two layers of chain-link fencing. The rest of the perimeter was hidden behind a single layer of metal fencing supplied by National Rent-A-Fence.

Some of the fencing — which stretched a little less than a mile — was covered in a dark mesh screen that hid the waterless pool. In other areas, the fabric had fallen or was torn down and lay in unsightly heaps. Closer to the east end, one small section of fence lay on the ground — a crumpled mess of metal mesh, poles akimbo, looking like a victim at a crime scene — behind a wall of yellow tape: 27 crisscrossed strands reading “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.” Beyond that, where the water should have been reflecting the rays of the rising sun, pickup trucks rolled through and workers slowly paced, nodded their heads, and stared out on the hardscape, as if waiting for a factory whistle to sound.

In the face of this fiasco, Trump — as always playing the victim and blaming perceived enemies for his shortcomings — has repeatedly claimed knife-wielding vandals slashed the pool’s liner. Several people, including former Olympian David Hearn, were arrested and charged with felonies and misdemeanors, but those cases fell apart. The Interior Department provided documents to the U.S. attorney’s office “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings.” 

The Justice Department also called it a “rushed and botched installation” and in July dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the monument. On October 1, a judge said federal prosecutors cannot refile charges against Hearn. But just last week, Trump was still pushing the lies. “We had vandalism there,” he told the press. “Only sick people do that, and we have their pictures.” Not far from Lincoln’s statue, the administration offered up these same excuses, complete with Trump’s “filthy dirty” language and vandalism falsehoods. A lone laminated sheet of paper affixed to the fencing read:

The National Park Service staff and contractors are repairing areas damaged by vandals and completing a historic effort to clean, fix, and beautify the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Since 1922, prior administrations have neglected this iconic national landmark, evidenced most recently by more than half of the pool’s pipes being clogged and the sidewalks and granite coping stones being filthy dirty. The Reflecting Pool will remain drained while this work proceeds so that it can truly reflect the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation’s capital.

Last week, Atlantic Industrial Coatings announced on its website that: “All warranty repairs were completed Friday, 10/2/2026!” The company added: “It has been an honor to serve our great nation!” Trump followed by claiming that the reflecting pool re-do was nearly finished. “I think they’re gonna fill it up this week,” he said on October 6. “The Reflecting Pool is totally complete.”

The National Park Service did not respond to numerous detailed questions from The Intercept about the work by Atlantic Industrial Coatings and whether the pipes were completely unclogged and the granite completely clean. Atlantic Industrial Coatings also failed to respond to questions.

On Monday, a new sign appeared on the fencing as water began flowing back into pool. “The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being refilled as the National Park Service and contractors put the final touches on a historic effort to clean, repair, and beautify this iconic national landmark,” read a sign without any attribution. It also contained a caveat: “As part of the normal refilling process, the water may temporarily appear cloudy before clearing.”

Whether the Reflecting Pool will again stand as a fitting reflection of “the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation’s capital,” or suffer another catastrophe that leaves it looking like an eyesore, it is symptomatic of the larger issue of unforced errors heaped upon failures which the Trump administration is powerless to fix and can only sometimes, after multiple attempts, contain. It has become a pitiful, helpless giant, unable to achieve even its most modest goals with the power to do little more than spew out misinformation; cloak misdeeds in secrecy; undermine, sabotage, and destroy government institutions; and unleash pain on the most vulnerable and defenseless, like school children in Iran and undocumented immigrants in America.

With Malice Toward All

Trump promised to drain the “swamp” of Washington corruption but instead supercharged it and managed only to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of water and the country of any shred of decency. In late August, Trump took to Truth Social to claim he was “six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln” — a reference to a poll of present-day Republicans, of whom 53 percent said the president they most admire is Trump, compared to 8 percent who named Lincoln. That same month, he ranked himself above Lincoln and all other presidents. It’s somehow fitting that Trump wrecked the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the same way he has soiled the office Lincoln once held.

Whether Lincoln could have imagined a president as depraved as Trump is unknowable but he did fear, in his own time “something of ill-omen, amongst us … the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.” He couldn’t have anticipated the boat strikes, the term human trafficking victim, or the fact that the U.S. might kill the latter during the former, but in that same 1838 speech — when he was just 28 years old — he understood the perils of such summary executions, noting “when men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer.”

Trump is, however, content to kill without compunction and even recently appeared to invite the nuclear annihilation of Los Angeles and San Diego, although it’s increasingly impossible to divine meaning from Trump’s incoherent ramblings. (He has, though, threatened both cities in the past, deploying troops to LA and threatening to do so in San Diego.) Even Lincoln’s armies — turning to “total war” to end a long, brutal, and costly civil war — did not annihilate the South and decimate its people. And at its close, he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” with words Trump would choke on: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”

Lincoln did not believe that the U.S. could be felled by a foreign power but did foresee the possibility of America sealing its own fate. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he said in that 1838 speech. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” The reelection of a craven criminal who sought to subvert what remains of democracy in America certainly appears to be more than a mere cry for help. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855. Some 171 years later, it may well be complete.

The suffering meted out by Trump has been immense. And his penchant for failure may now be his essential quality. He may ultimately be remembered for turning a reckless military “excursion” into a forever-war failure or as the most debased reprobate to hold the office of the presidency. But Trump’s micro-mismanagement of a local construction project that turned a functioning national monument into a fenced-off blight might be his most illustrative disappointment: a small failure of epic proportions and, in some way, a sorry reflection on all Americans.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.  CounterPunch