President Donald Trump said Giorgia Meloni did not let the U.S. use Italy's landing strips in its war against Iran and rejected being friends with her.
Vice President JD Vance said Saturday afternoon the “nuclear issue” and renewed ceasefire between Israel and Iranian proxy terrorist organization Hezbollah are the two primary subjects of negotiation he will “be focused on” during a first round of negotiations between the United States and Iran on Sunday in Switzerland. Vance told reporters at Joint Base […]
Mary Trump has spent years telling anyone who will listen that her uncle cannot bear to be seen losing. This week she pointed to a tarp draped over the Kennedy Center as her latest exhibit.In the newest edition of her newsletter, the segment she calls "Trump Trolls Trump," the clinical psychologist and niece of the president argued that the covering left over the building's facade was not about construction logistics. It was about ego. Crews began stripping Donald Trump's name off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after a federal judge ruled the renaming illegal, and Mary Trump claimed the tarp stayed up for a revealing reason. Because he is "such an insecure, thin skinned baby," she wrote, "they left the tarp up so we cannot actually watch Donald's letters being removed."It is the kind of read that lands differently coming from her than from an ordinary commentator. As the president's niece and the author of a bestselling book diagnosing the psychology of her own family, Mary Trump has built her public profile on the argument that her uncle's behavior is driven by a fragile need to never appear weak. The tarp, in her telling, is that need made physical.The underlying events are not in dispute. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper determined that the president's name had been illegally added to the center, after a board stacked with Trump loyalists voted in December 2025 to rebrand it. The court ordered the name removed and blocked the administration's plan to close the venue for a lengthy renovation. After a last-minute scramble of appeals and a requested extension blamed on thunderstorms, workers began prying the lettering off the facade in the early hours of June 13, with scaffolding and tarp covering the wall.Mary Trump found the cover-up almost too fitting. The same tarp meant to spare her uncle the indignity of watching his own name come down, she noted, also blocks the public from seeing the name of the man the building was actually built to honor. "We cannot see the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy," she wrote, "the man for whom the Kennedy Center was actually named."She returned to the theme that animates her entire project: a man who treats every loss as something to be hidden, spun, or blamed on someone else. Throughout the newsletter she refers to him only as "Donald," a small but deliberate choice that keeps the family relationship in the frame and strips away the deference of his title.Her broader point was not subtle. The week, she argued, was a parade of self-inflicted embarrassments dressed up as strength, "corruption masquerading as governance" and "incompetence disguised as confidence." The Kennedy Center tarp simply gave her the cleanest image for it.The claim that the tarp was kept up to shield Trump's feelings is Mary Trump's interpretation, not a stated explanation from the administration, which has cited the appeals process and the building's condition.
One of Trump's own cabinet members compared him to his liberal nemesis, according to a new report.In the book Regime Change, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is revealed to say that Trump is the same as billionaire liberal donor George Soros, according to reporting by The Guardian."Trump reminded him...of his old boss, the legendary investor and major Democratic donor George Soros," reads a passage of the book shared by The Guardian in which Bessent speaks to his associates. "'They are the same animal,' Bessent said."Soros is a constant target of MAGA and Trump, who even threatened to investigate him for racketeering in Truth Social posts. Bessent worked as the chief investment officer at the Soros Fund Management and reportedly played a big role in building the fortune that has fueled Soros’ political and charitable donations, according to previous reporting.Last year, Bessent reportedly told a room full of billionaires that both Trump and Soros are "impatient," according to reporting by Bloomberg.The Regime Change passage highlighted in The Guardian reporting details how negotiations between Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy stalled because Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick fought over how a minerals deal should be worded. Trump reportedly went around Bessent and Lutnick and "asked J.D. Vance's wife, Usha, also a Yale Law School graduate, to review the Ukrainian edits to the minerals deal," according to a passage from the book published by The Guardian. "She declared the document 'awful,' and [took] a heavy pencil to it."
Of all the people Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could have compared Donald Trump to, he reportedly landed on the one name engineered to make a Republican flinch: George Soros.According to "Regime Change," the new account of Trump's second term by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Bessent told associates that Trump reminded him of his old boss, the billionaire investor and Democratic megadonor the right has spent two decades casting as its all-purpose supervillain. "They are the same animal," Bessent said, per the book.That is a striking thing for any sitting Trump official to put into words, and it lands even harder coming from Bessent, who built part of his Wall Street career working for Soros before he ran the Treasury. When he went looking for something to capture Trump, in other words, he picked the man whose name conservative fundraising emails use as shorthand for everything they claim to be fighting. The comparison is, by the book's account, his private assessment of the president he serves.The Soros line is the most quietly damaging revelation, but it is not the only one. "Regime Change," set for worldwide release Tuesday, also reports that Bessent had blunt and unkind things to say about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the run-up to the infamous February 2025 Oval Office meeting.Bessent, the authors write, had strongly urged Trump not to even let Zelenskyy into the White House until he had signed a minerals deal the treasury secretary had drafted. Behind closed doors, his language about the wartime leader was harsher still. "I've dealt with this little f------," Bessent reportedly told associates, calling Zelenskyy "tricky," describing him as "the special-needs child for the Europeans," and saying he was "acting like Mr Bean on crack."Zelenskyy came anyway, and the meeting collapsed in real time as Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated him for insufficient gratitude and for not wearing a suit. Bessent was also in the room. Afterward he told Bloomberg that Zelenskyy had scored "one of the great diplomatic own goals," professing himself "shocked, shocked" at the visitor's conduct.
President Trump claims the problems with the Reflecting Pool in Washington are due to vandalism.
President Donald Trump says the U.S. Park Police have rounded up a ring of vandals who sabotaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The actual arrest record tells a much smaller story: one 67-year-old cyclist who says he reached into the water to touch a piece of paint that had already fallen off.In a Truth Social post Saturday, Trump escalated his days-long insistence that his troubled $14 million renovation was the victim of a crime rather than a botched paint job. "The United States Park Police have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll," he wrote, misspelling "Pool." "Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair."According to The Washington Post, Park Police arrested a single person on Friday: David Hearn, a 67-year-old man from Bethesda and a three-time Olympic canoe slalom athlete, on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property.Hearn's account bears no resemblance to a coordinated assault on a national landmark. He told the Post he had just finished a 52-mile bike ride, including a loop around Hains Point, and swung by the Lincoln Memorial to see the refurbished pool for himself. Noticing a chunk of the new "American flag blue" liner that had partially detached from the bottom, he reached into the water to feel it. Moments later, as he was getting ready to leave, officers put him in handcuffs."I didn't vandalize anything," Hearn told the paper. "I didn't destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs."The footage that fueled the arrest came from conservative journalist Emily Miller, who posted video online and claimed Hearn had grabbed a hose used by cleanup crews. Hearn said he only reached for the loose sealant. Either way, the charge is a misdemeanor, not the felony-grade "destruction of National Monuments" the president invoked, and it carries nothing resembling the "years in jail" he promised.We will report on additional details if more evidence surfaces.
Vance pointed to what he described as a record-breaking amount of oil moving through the critical trading corridor over the last 24 hours, suggesting that the strait was not closed.
A former GOP congressman is calling out a failed Trump administration investigation into voter fraud.Adam Kinzinger described how Trump set out to prove "stolen elections," specifically by looking at voting machines. Ultimately, the investigation failed to dig up any instances of fraud, Kinzinger said.He was referring to a probe that stemmed from a Trump executive order from last year, according to Reuters, which broke the exclusive. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence produced the report, but Reuters reported that it found no evidence that machines that will be used in the midterms caused votes to flip."They found that not a single vote was switched anywhere," Kinzinger said. "They have this report, but what are they doing? They're delaying the release of the report."He blasted that, "instead of being grown-ups and admitting it, they are not releasing the report. It's been delayed," and lamented, "They're going to lie, and when they find out they lied, they'll never admit it."