The latest architectural horrors dictated at us by a man with no taste is the Trump Arch, which is being built real soon now with no authorization from any of the officials in charge or preserving the city and its history.

The proposed arch is one of several projects the Republican president is pursuing to leave his lasting imprint on Washington, including renaming and renovating the Kennedy Center, building a huge new White House ballroom, refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and rebuilding a golf course in East Potomac Park that could significantly reduce the public’s access to running and biking paths.

“This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote on X, “befitting the most powerful Capital in the World.”

Along with the announcement on X, Burgum posted artistic mockups of the planned 250-foot-tall (76-meter) memorial arch, which will stand between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Those capitalization choices were Burgum’s, which should put you on alert. Morons think that capitalizing Crap makes it majestic.

The administration really is just rushing ahead with Trump’s nightmare vision.

Historic preservation experts have long criticized the Trump administration for seeming to rush the arch approval process, including by moving to weaken protections for historic sites altogether. This latest development raises concerns that the White House seeks to sidestep the process, which it denies.

“Work will begin that does not require approval, but rather helps in the process,” the White House told NPR in a statement on Friday. “We will of course continue on our path of seeking final approval from all applicable entities.”

Surprise: they won’t. You know it and they know it.

Our capitol is going to be wrecked and left with cheap glittering gilt garbage, demolished historical sites, and hideous monuments to an asshole’s ego. He is going to die, eventually, and we’re all going to be left with the clean up. What shall we do?

Simple solution: BLOW IT ALL UP.

The author has been touring Germany, and seeing what the German solution to the ugly history of the Third Reich has been. Hitler’s bunker has been paved over and is a parking lot. The site of the Nuremberg rallies has been allowed to crumble and “looked like garbage.” They dynamited the Berghof and “flattened Göring’s house, Bormann’s house and the rest of the Nazi colony, hauled away the rubble and planted trees over the site.” And, of course:

Unfortunately, the latest German elections suggest that there’s more yet to be done.

Blundell has specific recommendations for what the next administration must do. Unfortunately it’s a long list.

Believe in the Directive. Not a review. Not a blue-ribbon commission on the future of the ballroom. A firm belief, stated in the campaign and executed on day one, that a monument built by a President to himself is not a public work and does not get grandfathered in as one. Germany was handed this belief at gunpoint. America has to choose it.

The arch comes down, or never goes up. If it’s excavation, fill the hole. If it’s steel, cut it. If it’s finished, do what the Seventh Army did at Nuremberg and let the cameras roll. It sits between Lincoln and the war dead. It was built for “me.” There is no version of American reconciliation that leaves it standing.

The name comes off everything. The Trump Kennedy Center reverts to the Kennedy Center before lunch on inauguration day. Any ballroom, any coin, any banner, any federal building, any portrait hung by executive fiat. Street signs came down across Germany in 1946. This is the American version, and it takes a pen.

The ballroom is the Eagle’s Nest. Ninety thousand square feet of gold leaf where the East Wing used to be, with a bunker underneath. You can raze it and rebuild the East Wing. Or you can do what Bavaria did and turn it into something so ordinary it can’t be worshipped. A visitor centre. A public cafeteria. A daycare for federal workers. Serve the pretzels in it. Either way, no one is ever allowed to say his name in that room with reverence.

Restore the referees. Reinstate an independent Commission of Fine Arts and a National Capital Planning Commission that doesn’t answer to a staff secretary. Repeal the beauty order. Write into law that no sitting President may initiate a monument to himself, ever, which is a sentence nobody thought America would need.

Preserve the evidence of the victims. The detention records ICE stopped publishing. The names of the people who died in custody. The facilities. The Germans preserved Dachau’s ovens because the alternative was letting grass grow over them. Keep the camps as museums and tear down the arch. That’s the whole formula.

Trump’s people will scream that it’s petty. That it’s revenge. That it’s erasing history. It isn’t. Germany erased Hitler’s monuments and became the country with the best memory in Europe. You erase the shrine so there’s room for the museum. Nobody in Bavaria is confused about what happened on the Obersalzberg because the Berghof is gone. They know precisely because it’s gone, and there’s a documentation centre where a tour bus used to park.

I approve. Let’s elect people who will have the stamina to implement this plan.

Fortunately, I’ve completely tuned out of television in this election season, or I’d be even more anxious right now. Minnesota is being flooded with conservative billionaire money. You know who benefits: Republicans.

The Republican nominee for governor, Lisa Demuth, has a super PAC funded mostly by a Wisconsin billionaire — Richard Uihlein, who has spent years bankrolling right-wing candidates and campaigns in other states and nationwide. In 2024, Uihlein and his wife were top Trump donors, spending $59 million to help deliver the White House back to Trump and to support other conservative candidates.

ANow they have turned their eyes to Minnesota. The Uihleins’ dark money super PAC heavily funded the Restore Sanity super PAC, which spent nearly $3 million to ensure Lisa Demuth won her primary — more than five times the amount Demuth herself raised, and about three times more than all of her Republican opponents raised combined.

In the counties where the ads paid for mostly by this single donor didn’t air (mostly outside the Twin Cities), Demuth often lost or underperformed. In the weeks leading up to the Republican primary, Demuth bragged about the work the super PAC was doing for her. She owes her campaign’s survival in large part to one man, and Minnesotans deserve to know what kind of return on investment he’s expecting.

Uihlein is not investing in Minnesota’s elections on a whim. In other states, he and his wife have used their personal wealth to fund extreme causes that they know would be rejected without their enormous outside spending. They have bankrolled efforts to restrict abortion. They have financed organizations committed to repealing the Affordable Care Act and to privatizing Social Security. They have funded efforts to undermine workers’ rights and labor unions and have fought reforms to lower prescription drug prices.

Why are billionaires intrinsically evil? How can anyone look at their agenda and fail to realize that they are not friends of humanity?

We can blame a good part of this villainy on the Supreme Court.

Going forward, the only long-term solution is to get big money out of our politics by overturning Citizens United and passing strong, nationwide campaign finance reform. Until then, Minnesotans can do their part by holding politicians accountable when they allow people like Uihlein to try and rig the system for themselves.

Whoever the next presidential candidate is, they better put a priority on purging the corruption from the Supreme Court.

If you thought Vikings were voracious plunderers, you haven’t compared them to 21st century billionaires. Apparently the thing to do when you’ve acquired a few billion dollars is to wall off historic sites for your own personal pleasure.

I know nothing about James Dyson other than that he’s a vacuum cleaner salesman, but I guess that’s a lucrative business, and he’s raked in a whole lot of money, so off he goes to buy an estate that includes an old castle and the ruins of an abbey, which is now his, never mind that it is a site that has been populated since at least the 6th century. It’s his, damn it, and you can stay off of it.

From the state of it, he’s not living there or holding parties in it — he has a grand manor nearby for that. I once made a trip all around Ireland, Dublin to Cork to Galway to Belfast and back again, and I loved stopping off at old ruins and soaking in the history. I don’t specifically remember stopping in Waterford, but I know my route passed through it. I may have left quickly, repelled by all the stinky billionaires moving in (Mark Zuckerberg bought a place near there, which would have made the stench quite thick). By what right does a man, and an English man at that, have the privilege to lock up a chunk of Irish history?

Well, money, I guess. The locals are not happy about this, but it won’t bother Master James, he wasn’t going to invite them to his house for a ball, anyway. He can just dance with Master Mark.

Fuck Google. Google Maps has caved to Trump.

I wonder how residents of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, feel about having their lakefront on Lake America?

Jesus christ.

Jesus Fucking christ.

Our president is a stupid child.

I’m torn. I think the government has gone way overboard on deportations — let the people pursue happiness! — but yeesh, it’s Milo Yiannopoulos.

Far-right political commentator and deportation advocate Milo Yiannopoulos is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody facing a final order of removal, according to U.S. officials and agency records.

Yiannopoulos, who is British, was apprehended in the New Orleans area and is being held in a Louisiana ICE holding facility, the U.S. officials said. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Yiannopoulos came to the U.S. legally in 2019 but “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”

I was feeling a twinge of sympathy, both because I hate ICE and because he sure looks down in the dumps in his mugshot, but then, I was served with some quotes…

California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally, he posted on social media in June 2025.

Total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty, he wrote in September 2025.

There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering, he wrote in June 2025. It matters a lot more than debts measured in imaginary money. We have got to deport millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.

Yeah, throw his ass out of the country.

The Roman emperor Caligula threatened to make his favorite horse, Incitatus, a consul. Historians agree he didn’t actually accomplish that, it was more of a demeaning joke against the aristocracy and a way to brag about his power, but still…that’s one of the many stupid, hateful things we remember him for. Caligula has not fared well in history. Historians can argue down to this day that Caligula was the worst Roman emperor of all time, for his capriciousness, his venality, his narcissism, his greed, his ineffectiveness as a leader.

Does that sound familiar?

At least Trump has actually done the thing he claimed he was going to do: he has signed an Executive Order declaring that Lake Ontario is to be renamed Lake America.

resident Donald Trump on Thursday signed an ‌Executive Order instructing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” ​

The change is set to take effect immediately, he said. Trump earlier in the week had floated the idea of a new moniker for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

It is absurd. Not only is it not going to happen, but it also highlights the fact that Executive Orders as a tool for governing have been corrupted and are totally useless. No one except brain-dead MAGA clowns are going to call it “Lake America”.

“The name is more than 400 years old, pre-dating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America,” said Carney on Thursday. “We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.”

Insisting that Canadians are aware of the “naming reality,” Carney rejected Trump’s directive for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has also rejected the whole idea.

History and the world are going to be laughing at our idiot president for a long time to come. You might say that at least he hasn’t put a horse in the Senate, but I think a lot of the candidates he has endorsed, and all of the nitwits in his cabinet, would serve us better if they were horses. Put Burgum in harness and run him in the Kentucky Derby, he’d be more useful there than as Secretary of the Interior.

The Mike Lindell saga in Minnesota is over. He had been throwing his familiar temper tantrum over losing the primary election, which is his right, and it was also his right to demand a recount, if he was willing to pay for it.

He was not willing to pay for it.

Lindell failed to formally request and pay for a recount by a Monday deadline. He went to the high court to seek a more-expansive recount than a state-approved plan. He objected to the structure in which only votes for him and Lisa Demuth would be counted by name and all others would be combined in a third pile.

Therefore, it is settled: Lindell lost. The election for governor in November will be between Demuth and Klobuchar. Lindell can go cry into his pillows.