From vanity to insanity

We’re deep in the insanity phase of the progression, and it’s obvious. A report has been released that exposes the way Trump hijacked the 250th anniversary celebration for his own personal profit and to promote an ugly ideology, much beloved of the right wing, but contrary to to history of the US.

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday.

The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects.”

I remember the 200th anniversary celebration. You may recall that Gerald Ford was the president then, but he didn’t issue bicentennial coins with his face on them, or hire a religious organization to lead the event, or appear prominently in any of the celebrations that were going on — it was generally non-partisan. It was also a weird political era, since we’d just chased Nixon out of office in 1974 for his criminal chicanery. May I suggest that we do something similar to celebrate the semiquincentennial? That would be a lovely tradition to continue.

As we’ve come to expect from the Trump crime family, it was all about the money, funneling it into their personal pockets. This is an outrageous level of corruption.

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

There is one phrase you hear repeated over and over again, from TPUSA and PragerU and the White House: our rights are not given to us by the government, but by God. I always thought those rights were derived from the people, but that slogan is being pushed everywhere in the Freedom250 propaganda train.

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.

A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the Revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.

For a thorough breakdown of all the ways Freedom250 is lying to us, and in particular an analysis of the “Freedom Trucks” that PragerU was paid $14 million to deliver, I recommend the following video. That $14 million was stolen from public libraries and museums. It’s 45 minutes long, well worth it for the righteous anger and disgust it will generate.

It ends with a call to action: visit the American Library Association for things you can do to save our libraries and the propagation of a truer history.

Also, fuck Dennis Prager, Erica Kirk, and every member of the Trump family.

I am so pessimistic

Yesterday, the Supreme Court affirmed birthright citizenship. Good. Let’s celebrate. Except, this was a decision that should have been a no-brainer — it’s explicitly written in the Constitution, and there’s no ambiguity at all — and the Court had a 5-4 split, with Clarence Thomas writing a 90 page dissent. This was a case that barely broke through to a just decision.

On the same day, the Court unanimously ruled against transgender rights. You can pretty much be certain that it will rule against principles of democracy and inclusion whenever it gets the opportunity.

The only optimistic news I’ve seen is that Mitch McConnell, one of the architects of the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court, may be dying.

Several reputable news media outlets reported that the 84-year-old — who is among the oldest sitting senators in government, as of this writing — was admitted to a hospital on June 14. At the time of publication, his condition was unknown, leading to rumors about whether or not he was alive.

People online claimed the senator was either dead or close to death and that his staff were hiding it from the public. One post stated: “Is there a law that requires the Senate to disclose the death of a Senator within a certain number of days? #WhereIsMitch”

So maybe a slow, miserable death…but not too painful, since his mind is probably mostly gone. We’ve got time to get some champagne and caviar before his demise! The most generous thing I can say is that I wish he’d retired to the happy bosom of his family and a life of relaxation a decade or two ago. As it is, he overstayed his tenure, and to what end? The poisoning of his beloved Republican party.

The Temu State Fair

It’s the great American humiliation: Donald Trump wanted to put on an ambitious demonstration of America’s success over the past 250 years, but all he could do was put up some cheesy cardboard cutouts and hire some third-rate musicians (many of whom bailed out when they learned how they were being used), and now nobody is showing up. It was all a grift, where he undermined a sincere bipartisan effort to celebrate American history, and instead he substituted this phony demonstration and sucked $126 million out of the budget.

Donald Trump and his allies have seized control of the bipartisan 250th anniversary celebration and substituted it with a Trumpified series of events, at the public’s expense. Our analysis of federal contracts and corporate sponsorship deals related to the 250th anniversary reveals that:

  • The Trump administration has awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants for the 250th anniversary celebrations to a network of politicized entities under the control of Trump administration officials and political allies.
  • The recipients include entities controlled or influenced by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, as well as Chris LaCivita (Trump’s former campaign manager) and Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s former presidential campaign finance director.
  • These grants represent the vast majority (about 80%) of the nearly $126 million in federal contracts awarded since October 2025 to fund this summer’s 250th-anniversary celebrations, which have devolved into a celebration of Trump himself.
  • Private funding has also flooded the anniversary celebration, often from corporations with regulatory issues before the Trump administration. As of June 11, 20 corporate sponsors are funding the Trump administration’s preferred anniversary organization, Freedom 250, compared with the 62 sponsoring the original, bipartisan celebration, dubbed America 250 (12 companies sponsor both).

For example, take a closer look at Trump’s Arch, sitting in the middle of an empty grassy field. It looks cheap. It’s badly assembled. It’s fate after this affair is to be chopped up and burned in a landfill (foreshadowing the fate of our country.)

I’m confident that Trump initiated this abomination with the goal of being “classy”…but he has such poor taste and lacks focus and is so incompetent at the execution that all we get is this embarrassing shitshow to join the reflecting pool debacle, the defeat in an Iran war that shouldn’t have happened, and all the corruption surrounding this presidency.

You call that a fair?

I have never attended the Minnesota State Fair, which is a real shame. It has a tremendous reputation, and every year I hear raves about the weird food, the entertainment, the fun atmosphere. I’m afraid, though, that the huge crowds intimidate me. I’d struggle to get parking, would have to deal with the congestion, and it’s a 3 hour drive each way to get there.

The Great American State Fair in Washington DC has no such problem.

Photos and video of the small crowds, a lack of seating and near empty food booths were widely mocked on social media, while the Daily Beast called the event “virtually deserted” and The Atlantic noted in a headline: “The Great American State Fair isn’t very great.”

Maybe I should go? Except I don’t think there’s much to see.

The Great American State Fair is underway at the National Mall to mark the United States’ 250th birthday. But not everything is off to such a great start.

The event has quickly faced problems including power outages, melting ice cream – and a lack of representation from states that declined to send delegations.

While organizers assured visitors all parts of the nation would be represented, at least 10 states and territories refused to participate, with many citing the price tag to send staff to the 16-day event as their reason for opting out.

As usual, everything Trump touches turns to shit.

We don’t think enough about what comes after

Trump is obviously sick and grossly impaired, as everything he touches turns into a disaster and he flails about while incapable of fixing his own catastrophes. I wake up every day hoping that this is the day he finally drops dead or is so brain damaged that he has to be institutionalized, but I don’t know what happens next…President JD Vance? Republicans panicking and getting more extreme in locking in their power? Screaming mobs of MAGA fanatics? Maybe we should hope he lives a few more years in declining effectiveness and then we have a clean transition to an elected, and hopefully Democratic, majority.

There may also be some real advantages to imprisoning the Trump administration in a lame duck presidency for a few more years.

We might have a vision of what comes after in New York: the Democratic Socialists swept the primaries, led by Mamdani’s endorsements.

The mayor-turned-kingmaker had said it was a question of electing “better Democrats” who would “put working people back at the heart of politics”. All three victors are expected to win their safely blue districts, which would send three Mamdani allies into Congress next January.

The outcome was also a recognition of some wider trends in US politics: socialism is no longer a dirty word, criticism of Israel is no longer taboo and dissatisfaction with Democratic leaders in the Donald Trump era runs deep. Voters are thirsty for energy, fight and fresh ideas.

They ask: if Republicans can draw up a Project 2025 and pursue it ruthlessly, why can’t Democrats come up with a Project 2029 that promises universal healthcare, supreme court reform, massive climate investments, a war on the oligarchs and a clear-eyed approach to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu?

That’s a vision I could support. Much better than prayer.

Did you know you can join the DSA right now? I predict there is going to be an enrollment surge.

I’ve got to avoid Ed Zitron in the morning

I don’t think I can take much more of this. As someone on the edge of retirement, I have to hear the Republicans scheming to kill social security, which is bad enough, but here’s Ed Zitron predicting the complete obliteration of retirement funds thanks to the imminent detonation of the AI bubble.

Unfortunately, it all makes sense. Our economy seems to be dedicated to pumping up the fortunes of about a dozen people, and I’m not one of them.

A succinct summary of our situation

I thought this was insightful.

The reality is we keep electing shitlibs to “stop fascism” and those shitlibs take that as a mandate to pretend it’s 1994 again and go full Blairite/Clintonism/neoliberalism while purging its own left flank. And it predictably has failed with catastrophic consequences EVERYWHERE this has happened.

How about if we stop doing that?

It’s always someone else’s fault

I’ve avoided bringing up the reflecting pool debacle, because it’s just too ridiculous. Trump wasted $16 million in a no-bid contract to one of his cronies, who drained the reflecting pool, painted it badly a dark blue, which then led to an algal bloom, that they tried to correct with buckets of hydrogen peroxide, and then the paint started to peel. None of this is Trump’s fault, he’s now blaming everyone else.

Of the MANY Statues and Fountains that we rebuilt, renovated, cleaned, and fixed, the only one that was Vandalized was the Reflecting Pool, which is being taken care of, ASAP! It has been given a 300 foot long gash, chemicals have been illegally placed in the water, and the beautiful new grass field has been destroyed with a gigantic 86 47 chemically carved into it (Probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey!). Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things – Which will be fully enforced!

Don’t worry, Jeanine Pirro has put everyone ON NOTICE!

Weird, isn’t it, how the pool has been there since 1922, and this is when suddenly the whole thing starts falling apart, right after the president puts this guy in charge.

If they’re going to start handing prison sentences, maybe they should start with the sleazy cigar-chomping clown with the silly haircut. Or the creep who is obsessed with redecorating the US Capitol badly.

Minnesota pride

Not to confuse anyone — we also have gay pride events all across the state — but I’m talking about general pride in one’s state, which seems to be doing a lot of right things, in addition to being a regular rainbow state.

Even our ‘criminals’ are heroic.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota on Tuesday announced that 15 Antifa members have been indicted for their alleged roles in conspiring to hinder federal immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis earlier this year.

The suspects, 12 of whom are in custody, are all charged with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, according to a 94-page criminal complaint, and some are charged with further crimes. Federal prosecutors allege that each suspect took part in a conspiracy to obstruct federal immigration enforcement officers, including ICE personnel, through force, intimidation and threats.

The suspects are alleged members of the Antifa cell Direct Action Minnesota Network (DAMN), a radical far-left group accused of coordinating operations against federal immigration officers.

Hah, “radical far-left”. Those are just normal Minnesotans resisting the real criminals, the fascist state. Spread the news: most of us are antifa to some degree. There are almost 6 million citizens here, they better be prepared to arrest 3 million.

Anyway, Minnesotans are disgracefully and arrogantly proud of our state for many reasons, including our generally progressive politics. There’s a song about it.

Now if only we could be so unashamedly proud of our whole dang country, but it’s going to take a lot of work to change that course.