Trail Notes
Trump fog alert / D.C. human cockfight / Suck-up scorecard / Ex judges nix slush fund / More petty Kash / Trump buck / Don Jr.'s Vulcan grip / Charlie Kirk payback
Trump fog alert
Donald Trump sure loves to talk about his blue paint job at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. During Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, he rambled on about it for nine unrelenting minutes. As with any 80-year-old suffering from mental decline, he got confused about some things and made up some others. For example:
He described it as “a very long lake'‘ and said, “We call it the reflecting lake.” No, for more than 100 years, it’s been known as the Reflecting Pool.
He placed it “between the Lincoln Monument.” Actually, it’s between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
Then he added, “Nobody has ever seen anything like it. Longer than the tallest building in the world.” Wrong again. The Reflecting Pool is 2,030 feet long. The tallest building in the world, in Dubai, is 2,717 feet tall.
Okay, so maybe you can attribute those comments to a combination of brain fog and a lifetime fact-fabrication disorder, but the president, of course, didn’t stop there. He hadn’t trashed Barack Obama and Joe Biden yet, so he once again spun out the fantasy that together they spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix the pool. That is nowhere close to true.
Finally, it turns out—according to The New York Times—that Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which got a no-bid contract for the job, was awarded a profit margin of 20 percent, more than double what federal construction contractors usually get.
D.C. human cockfight
Meanwhile, not far from the Reflecting Lake, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is coming to town. You may have seen the photos of the giant metal scaffolding now towering over the White House. Huge video screens suspended from it will provide mixed martial arts fans a close-up look at guys pounding each other inside an eight-sided metal cage on Flag Day, June 14, which also happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday. But before they grapple, the fighters will first weigh in on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
When reminded during an NPR interview that the late Sen. John McCain called cage matches “human cockfighting,” Dana White, who runs the UFC, replied, “That’s where we were then. Now we’re on the South Lawn of the White House.”
Suck-up scorecard
Thanks to an analysis by The New York Times updated this week, we now know that during their marathon televised meetings with the president, members of his cabinet praised him, gave him credit, or attacked his political enemies an average of once every six sentences.
Responding to the Times’ findings, a White House spokesperson said the cabinet uses the meetings to “highlight the exhaustive list of accomplishments delivered on behalf of the American people,” but did not comment on the unprecedented display of brown-nosing.
At Wednesday’s suck-up session, Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration, knew that as an endangered species—a woman in Trump’s cabinet—she had to gush madly about the president. And she came through. “You are leading us to the greatest economy that the world has ever known,” she told Trump. “I hear it everywhere I go: ‘Please thank the president.’ They love you.”
Ex judges nix slush fund
The Trump administration’s $1.776 billion retribution slush fund took another hit Wednesday when nearly three dozen retired federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties asked a judge in Miami to reverse her decision to dismiss Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. They argued that Trump’s suit, which ultimately led to the settlement that created the slush fund when the Justice Department dropped the case, “is itself a fraud against the court” because Trump was both a plaintiff and the person overseeing the agency being sued. The settlement, the judges wrote, “was not, and never will be, legally justified.”
More petty Kash
FBI Director Kash Patel fired Emily Morales, one of his agency’s longtime senior intelligence analysts, who was involved in the investigation of a 2017 shooting at a House Republican baseball practice. The FBI initially classified the attack, which badly injured House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, as “suicide by cop” and not as domestic terrorism, which angered GOP legislators. Patel reclassified the shooting as domestic terrorism last year. Then, on Friday, he wrapped up this part of his retribution campaign against FBI agents who displeased Republicans or Donald Trump by firing Morales, who was told to turn in her badge as she was walking out of the building.
Trump buck
Two top political appointees at the Treasury Department have been pushing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to design a prototype of a $250 bill featuring Donald Trump’s mug and signature. Although federal law prohibits living people from appearing on currency, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser Mike Brown insisted that the agency prepare prototypes of the bill. After Patty Solimene, director of the printing bureau, pointed out the legal and procedural hurdles to creating the new currency in time for America’s 250th birthday, she was assigned to another position, according to The Washington Post. Legislation permitting Trump’s face on the $250 bill was introduced in Congress last year, but it hasn’t gone anywhere.
Don Jr.’s Vulcan grip
Pro Publica reported this week that White House adviser Peter Navarro helped a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. land a $620 million loan from the Pentagon. Officials at Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth magnets company, said the president’s son played no role in securing the loan. But three months before it was approved, Donald Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, took a stake of undisclosed size in Vulcan Elements. Then Navarro reportedly put in a request to the Pentagon to move ahead with the Vulcan loan and do it quickly. “The call came from the White House,” a source told ProPublica. “We have to get this done.”
Charlie Kirk payback
Another person who lost a job because of a comment on social media following Charlie Kirk’s shooting death has received a large financial settlement. Suzanne Swierc will get $225,000 from Ball State University, which fired her in response to a post she made on Facebook. An administrator at the school, Swierc referred to Kirk’s death as a “tragedy,” but she also called it a “reflection of the violence, fear and hatred he sowed.”
Swierc did not intend her comment to be accessible to the general public, but someone took a photo of the post and shared it widely, prompting a flood of outraged calls and emails and threats to cancel donations to the university. Soon afterward, the school pushed her out the door.
Paxton goes low
Trump got his wish in Texas Tuesday night when the sleazy but loyal Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, trounced incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a Republican primary runoff. But some believe that outcome improves the chances of Democrats winning one of the state’s Senate seats when Paxton, an impeached serial adulterer who’s been indicted for fraud, faces Rep. James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, this fall.
True to his reputation, Paxton is already going low. “He’s a threat to our very way of life,” Paxton said of Talarico in his victory speech. “I mean, he’s a vegan who thinks God is nonbinary.” (In fact, Talarico is not a vegan—and who ever said God has genitalia?)
Wrongly sited statue
Oh, the irony, As part of its campaign to dress up Washington, D.C., for the nation’s 250th birthday, the Trump administration is erecting 13 bronze statues of Revolutionary War heroes in a small urban park on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. Among those being celebrated is Caesar Rodney, who cast Delaware’s deciding vote for American independence. Rodney also owned hundreds of enslaved people. The park where he’s being honored is called Freedom Plaza.
The Big Lie hits 100
According to the latest count by Reuters news service, Donald Trump has claimed at least 107 times during the past six months that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
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