In late May, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure voted 62-2 to advance the BUILD America 250 Act, a five-year surface transportation reauthorization bill that includes $580 billion in federal infrastructure investment. The bill moved out of committee with the kind of bipartisan support that has become rare in Washington. For the autonomous vehicle […]
The House of Representatives has just voted down a bill that would have extended the intelligence community's warrantless surveillance powers by three weeks.
Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power. Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script. On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them. Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can. Within forty-eight hours of the lineup announcement for what Trump’s people are calling the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels of Poison, Young MC, and Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli all put out statements saying they’d been misled, that nobody told them the event was a Trump-branded MAGA operation. Young MC told Rolling Stone it was a bait-and-switch. The Commodores said their music has always been their voice and they wouldn’t lend it to a single political party.Trump’s response was telling. He didn’t try to recruit new acts or apologize for the confusion. He went on his failing Nazi-infested social media site and demanded the whole concert series be scrapped, replaced with what he called “a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250.” Then he announced he’d personally headline the June 24 opening ceremony himself. The mask came off in about seventy-two hours. The 250th anniversary of American independence has been openly converted into a Trump fascist-fest, and only white MAGA who love to see gladiators beat each other bloody and senseless need apply.Louise and I lived in Washington during the Obama years, and we visited just about every monument the city has, sometimes more than once. We were invited to the White House, and walking up that long drive past the East Wing (which is now rubble) always felt like walking into something larger than any single president. The Lincoln Memorial at dusk, when the reflecting pool went dark and the seated figure of Lincoln doubled itself on that still water, was the kind of place where Americans of every stripe stood quietly together and remembered who we were supposed to be. That reflecting pool, finished in 1923, has held the gravity of Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert when she’d been denied the stage at Constitution Hall because she was Black, and the gravity of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and every quiet sunset visit by every family who came to the Mall to feel something solemn about this country.Trump has now had that pool painted blue at a cost he claims is around two million dollars, the same shade you’d find at the kid’s pool in a discount motel. He calls it “American flag blue.” Right. He drove his motorcade across the wet coating before it set, climbed out, and held a press conference standing in the middle of the pool with his cabinet secretaries around him, and now we’re paying to repair that damage, too. He told reporters the old gray stone was “never good.” That dark surface that turned itself into a mirror for Lincoln’s face for over a century, he claimed, was “never good.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation has sued to stop his desecration because the project skipped the federal review process that exists precisely to prevent a president from treating a national memorial like the patio renovation at one of his gaudy golf motels.The June 24 event will be Trump in front of a crowd at the National Mall, hand-picked artists who didn’t pull out, and a brand of “patriotism” carefully scrubbed of anyone who might complicate the picture. The “State Fair” will run sixteen days. Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are still on the bill.
Washington, D.C., is bracing for a weekend of road closures, security checkpoints, and heightened law enforcement presence ahead of UFC’s Freedom 250 event on the White House South Lawn. The main fight is scheduled for 8 p.m. Sunday, June 14, with President Donald Trump expected to attend as part of the festivities surrounding his 80th […]
The UFC has given a sneak peek inside “the claw,” the imposing stage set up ahead of a historic fight this weekend on the White House South Lawn. Stepping out of the White House press corridors, one is greeted with a massive, larger-than-life red, white, and blue “UFC FREEDOM 250” medallion fitting of a $60 […]
Trump isn't the first president to hold an extravaganza on his own major birthday.
Members of Congress are scrambling to jump on the growing anti-data center fervor sweeping through local communities across the country. Why it matters: Where there is this kind of intense grassroots uproar, there is also political opportunity — and lawmakers know it.The latest example is legislation from Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.) to restrict companies' ability to sue municipalities for rejecting applications to build data centers.The bill — called "the Local Control Protection Act" — would also require developers to file a legally binding "community benefit agreement" or lose out on federal tax incentives, per legislative text first shared with Axios.State of play: Growing public anxiety about the rapid growth of AI is fueling bitter fights at the local level to stop data centers from being built, Axios' Madison Mills reported.Objections include alleged environmental damage, high energy usage and resultant utility cost increases, and noise, air and water pollution.More than 350,000 people signed a petition opposing a proposed data center bordering the Nashville Zoo, according to Axios' Nate Rau.In Seattle, local officials have moved to ban new large data centers for a year, Axios' Melissa Santos wrote.By the numbers: Legislative proposals to restrict data center construction were fairly rare on Capitol Hill before this year. Now, Republicans and Democrats alike are flooding the zone.In the last three months alone, more than a dozen bills have been introduced to either investigate data centers' impacts or restrict their proliferation in some way.Between the lines: It's not just toothless bills to commission reports and studies — though there are those too, looking at resource consumption, environmental ramifications and the effects on communities of color.Several proposals aim to protect consumers from any energy cost spikes that result from data center production.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has introduced a bill to impose an outright moratorium on new data center construction "until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence."What they're saying: "We should never let billion-dollar corporations supersede the voices of those who live in the community," Bresnahan, one of Republicans' most endangered incumbents, said in statement."The people who live here, work here, and raise their families here are the ones who know what's best for our communities."Reality check: The prospect of any of these bills passing is slim — Congress has notoriously made scant progress in passing any guardrails on AI.And as Axios previously reported, AI and AI-adjacent companies are spending big through super PACs in the 2026 midterms to curry favor with sitting lawmakers and get allies elected to Congress.
A judge refused to block the Trump administration’s anti-weaponization fund, reasoning that there was no need to, but said he would take action if the effort was revived. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, shot down a watchdog’s request on the grounds that the Trump administration was no longer pursuing the […]
“I have been doing this a while,” Sen. Ron Wyden told The Intercept. “And I’ve never had this kind of bipartisan support.” The post Momentum Builds to Rein In Domestic Spying Law — Whether or Not Bill Pulte Survives as Intel Chief appeared first on The Intercept.