Trail Notes
Trump's vote takeover / MN prosecutors want out / Blanche's crypto conflict / Ken Cen collapse / Layoffs soar / Retribution unbound / Hammering Harvard / Wind win
Trump’s vote takeover
The Trump administration likes to boast that it’s the most transparent in history, which is largely ludicrous, but true when it comes to dispensing its own reality. It’s also true when it comes to the president making threats. Hardly a day goes by when he isn’t threatening on social media to sue someone, put someone in jail, or prove a conspiracy.
So it was Monday, and Dan Bongino, who just returned to podcasting after his stint as FBI deputy director didn’t quite work out, was interviewing Trump on his first show back. It’s still nine months before the midterms, but the president is already shifting into high gear in making his case that the Republican Party—in other words Donald Trump—should control the election.
During the interview, Trump paraded a treasured trope that Democrats have allowed immigrants to come into the country so they could vote for them illegally. The only way to combat that, he asserted, is to “nationalize” the election and “take over voting in at least 15 places.”
Now that may sound highly unconstitutional and not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind, but Trump is trying to build a case that certain places are so corrupt that their elections will need to be run differently than the rest of the country. Maybe even troops will have to be called in. As Trump himself has intimated, he’s only just begun.
Minnesota prosecutors want out
Eight more federal prosecutors resigned from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office in response to orders that came down from the Justice Department. That raises the total of resignations in that office to 14 since an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good and the subsequent decision that no one would be prosecuted. Instead, the Justice Department insisted the office’s focus would be on investigating Good’s widow.
Other attorneys in the office have objected to mandates from Washington to file criminal charges against anti-ICE protesters despite what they saw as insufficient evidence. Ironically, the loss of so many attorneys is expected to dramatically slow down the fraud investigation that was the administration’s rationale for sending thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minneapolis in the first place.
Blanche’s crypto conflict
Todd Blanche was on a roll. He went from being Donald Trump’s personal attorney when he was found guilty of 34 felony charges to being named deputy attorney general of the Justice Department. It was Blanche who had that largely amicable two-day conversation with Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, before she was transferred to a minimum security prison camp in Texas. And it was Blanche who was tasked with announcing the other day that the Justice Department’s review of the Epstein files is “over.”
But now Blanche is getting some attention he’d rather avoid. Six Democratic senators sent him a letter accusing him of having a conflict of interest when he shut down investigations into crypto companies and dealers and disbanding a Justice Department team looking into crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. The dark side of the story is that a ProPublica investigation found that Blanche had not yet divested at least $159,000 worth of crypto assets when he killed those department crypto-related initiatives.
Ken Cen collapse
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but Kennedy Center staff didn’t find out the place was shutting down for two years until Donald Trump announced it publicly on social media, You can imagine they were more than a little stunned because as recently as December, Trump was saying that while the center needed a lot of work, there was no indication he would shut it down.
On Tuesday, while trying to make the case that he’s not “ripping it down,” Trump insisted that “I’ll be using the steel” and “some of the marble,” which sure sounded like the $200 million project will be close to a teardown.
Trump maintains that a shutdown is now needed given the amount of repair required. But a source told CNN that “the Kennedy Center does not have a 2026-2027 season. There would not have been any programming to announce.”
Layoffs soar
Trump keeps calling our present era “America’s golden years,” but the economy just isn’t cooperating. Employers announced 108,435 layoffs in January, the highest total for that month since 2009. Meanwhile, U.S. companies made only 5,306 new hires, also the worst January since 2009. And finally, job openings have dropped by more than 900,000 since October.
Retribution unbound
Not long ago, it was reported that Donald Trump was increasingly upset that none of the people on his enemies list, such as James Comey, Letitia James and Jack Smith, had yet been put on trial. There were stories that he had become frustrated with Attorney General Pam Bondi, that he had described her as “ineffective.”
Well, the message got through. According to CNN, Bondi’s Weaponization Working Group will now start meeting daily with the goal of producing some results in the next few months to make the boss happy.
Hammering Harvard
It appeared that the White House had backed off its demand that Harvard University pay the government a penalty of $200 million for allegedly mishandling antisemitism on campus. That’s what multiple sources in both the Trump administration and at Harvard told The New York Times. But hours later, after the president read the Times story suggesting he had “backtracked,” he went ballistic. He not only claimed the report was wrong, but said he now wants Harvard to pay $1 billion.
Another wind win
Once again, a federal judge has shot down the Trump administration’s campaign to stop work on wind farms along the East Coast. When Judge Royce Lamberth disputed the Interior Department’s claim that the Sunrise Wind project off New York presented a national security threat, it was the fifth time a wind farm project blocked by the White House has been permitted to restart construction.
Whitewashing national park history
More national parks will be removing signs and exhibits that don’t align with the Trump administration’s campaign to restore “truth and sanity to American history.” The latest sites where National Park Service staff have been told to get rid of subject matter that Interior Department officials determined to be too negative include Grand Canyon National Park, Glacier National Park and Little Bighorn Battlefield.
At the Grand Canyon, a reference to the government pushing American Indians off the land to create the park has been deleted. At Little Bighorn, a phrase about the government breaking promises to American Indians has been removed. And at Glacier, the focus has been on taking down several displays related to climate change, never mind there are only 26 glaciers left in the park. In the late 19th century, there were 150.
We don’t need another hero
A ballroom and a giant arch aren’t enough. Now Donald Trump wants to erect a statue of Christopher Columbus near the White House. A recent statement released by the administration declared: “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” mimicking a line from Tony Soprano. It also contended that Columbus “discovered the U.S.A. in 1492,” which is quite the accomplishment 300 years before the U.S.A existed and the fact that Columbus never set foot on any land that’s now part of the United States. Trump pushed back against all that negative historical stuff about the explorer enslaving natives in the Caribbean and making them dig for gold. (For more evidence that Columbus was no hero, see Elliott Negin’s October 2025 essay “Goodbye, Columbus.”)
Schooled on the cost of cutting
The Trump administration made no secret of its desire to close down the Department of Education. But it’s been an expensive farewell. A report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that investigated the effort to shut down the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found that it ended up costing nearly $30 million. Last March, the administration tried to fire more than half of the OCR staff but was blocked by the courts. So, the Education Department had to keep paying those employees while prohibiting them from returning to their jobs. For almost nine months, about 250 staffers were paid not to work.
Immigrants pay off
A new report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that America’s immigrant population generated more income in taxes than they received in government benefits every year from 1994 to 2023.
Randy Rieland is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
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