Now’s the Time to Prepare for the Great Post-Trump Renewal
INSIDE: Stephen Miller ... James McDonald ... Andrew Boutros
The Work of Our Lifetimes
In typically shitty Trump fashion, he mounted a late bid to fight the removal of his name from D.C.’s Kennedy Center, blew the court-ordered deadline Friday for taking it down, and mostly shielded his loss from public view with a tarp. But before the new deadline of noon Saturday, the center notified the court that the work was completed.
Make no mistake: This was the first step in what will be a decades-long effort to strip Trump from American public life and repair the damage he has done. It will be slow, pain-staking, halting, and thankless work — and perhaps most frustratingly it will have to overcome the inertia of faux reconciliation and indifference.
The political dynamics of this renewal, America’s reconstruction history suggests, will be brutal.
Each effort to undo what Trump has done will be met with howls of outrage, real or not, to maximize the political price exacted. Elected officials will have to decide whether to expend political capital to pay that price. If the 2008 financial crisis and Trump I are any indication, the stomach will not be there to engage in these fights even in the immediate aftermath of Trump II, let alone for the decades it will take to finish the work.
The destruction of state capacity is the biggest and hardest thing to reverse. But the cosmetic and structural changes Trump has wrought without legal authority, in D.C., national parks, and the White House itself will carry symbolic weight that is likely to trigger the kind of backlash past Democratic administrations have avoided. If we don’t begin to confront now the scale and scope of the work ahead, we, too, will wilt when the times comes.
It won’t be easy for all the obvious reasons but also for a particularly Trumpy one: He hasn’t just broken things. He’s replaced them with crap. Trump’s own track record across decades in business and his first term in the White House strongly suggests that we will face the additional friction point of projects done poorly, on the cheap, and not built to last.
Shoddy work is a direct product of two Trump mainstays: corruption and performative spectacle. If it’s all just a grift, it doesn’t need to last. It just needs to wow the audience and produce the opportunity to cash in. The suckers are stuck with the aftermath.
Everything Trump manages to accomplish creates a double whammy of burdens for those who to seek to undo it: the actual cost of demolishing, repairing, rebuilding, and replacing plus the opportunity cost of what else could have been done instead.
That’s why blocking Trump at every turn now has double the benefits.
Federal Courts Need to Step Up the Pace
It’s been obvious from the get-go that President Trump was going to rush to make his vanity ballroom a fact on the ground before the federal courts could stop him.
From the earliest hearing in the case, Judge Richard J. Leon tried to head off this possibility, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals did not back him up and let construction continue, with predictable results, as the Wall Street Journal reports:
The interim period has given the administration a reprieve it was able to drive an army of flatbed trucks through.
Now the same judges who gave the administration that breathing room are fretting over whether they effectively tied their own hands.
It is a repeated pattern that even 18 months into Trump’s second term, the federal courts have been reluctant to confront. “Even when litigants file cases quickly, the deliberative speed of the legal system is little match for Trump’s alacrity,” the WSJ notes.
Breaking: Trump Weighed Suspending Habeas Corpus
Just out this morning from the NYT: Early last year, Stephen Miller pushed President Trump to suspend habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants in order to turbocharge the mass deportation operation.
Judge Blocks $1.776B Slush Fund
I was in court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Friday when U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled from the bench that the Trump administration’s assurances that the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is dead weren’t enough and blocked it from moving forward with the fund.
The legal challenge to the fund will continue unless the judge receives within two weeks a sworn declaration, under penalty of perjury, from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr., and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Here’s my report from court.
Meanwhile, in the underlying Trump v. IRS lawsuit in Florida — the collusive settlement of which spawned the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — Trump’s lawyers were largely non-responsive to the three questions that the federal judge in Miami had ordered them to answer about whether a fraud had been perpetrated against the court. Instead, they argued that the judge was acting beyond her jurisdiction in scrutinizing what had transpired.
Trump DOJ Watch
Manhattan: President Trump said over the weekend that he wants to make Sullivan & Cromwell partner James McDonald, one of his former personal lawyers, the new U.S. attorney in Manhattan — though it remains unclear if he intends to nominate McDonald to the Senate-confirmed post or to appoint him to the acting role. McDonald, unlike the outgoing U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, has some experience as a federal prosecutor. Before that, he was a clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and worked in the Bush II White House Counsel’s Office.
Chicago: A federal judge repeatedly called out U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros for not showing up in court personally for a Friday hearing on the dismissal of a fraud case because of prosecutorial misconduct in front of the grand jury: “Is Mr. Boutros here? I didn’t think so. This is serious … but he’s not here … ”
Ohio: The FBI searched an office of the progressive group Ohio Organizing Collaborative on Thursday as part of a Trump DOJ investigation into its voter registration efforts.
Trump’s Crusade Against Trans Americans
The super knowledgeable Chris Geidner of Law Dork joined me Friday afternoon for a fast-paced rundown of the Trump administration’s multi-prong attack on transgender Americans:
Good Read
Following on TPM’s Josh Kovensky’s 2024 report on the secretive, far-right, all-male Society for American Civic Renewal, Politico tags along with SACR member Josh Abbotoy, who aspires to build conservative Christian “charter communities” throughout Appalachia.
The Destruction: National Parks Edition
U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley of Boston on Friday temporarily blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signs, films and other materials at national parks across the country — and gave it three weeks to restore any exhibits that it had already been dismantled or altered under the Trump executive order with the Orwellian title “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
The Destruction: Measles Edition
The United States is on the verge of losing its status as a country that has eliminated measles. A Utah measles outbreak is nearing the one-year mark, which is a key public health metric for whether measles has been eliminated. The United States has enjoyed the status since 2000.
Is It Really a Mystery?
The Guardian: “An expansive US military campaign that has so far killed nearly 200 people across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September 2025 appears to have reached the fishing fleets of Ecuador and left eight men missing and presumed dead. But the Trump administration insists it had no part in these particular operations …”
Today’s Meditation
Kilauea erupted again over the weekend, the 49th episode of fountaining lava since the current eruption sequence began in December 2024. At one point during the 7.5-hour event, a whirlwind developed in the superheated air rising from the hot lava and advanced on one of the remote cameras along the crater rim:
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Your beautifully written "The Work of Our Lifetimes" resonates with me. During the corrupt Nixon era, as a teen, I was aware, but not cognizant of the political and historical ramifications. But NOW our country is enduring a decadent era of complete, utter corruption, the destruction of voting rights, the frontal attack on the justice - the rule of law. The Kennedy Center court decision - one small step. ***"This was the first step in what will be a decades-long effort to strip Trump from American public life and repair the damage"*** I hope to be around for such a time!
You really nailed it this morning David with your opening remarks.
In state legislatures there are term limits.
I think that should apply to both house and senate. Some of these people have been there way too long.
Judges are getting their act together. Yes, it's about time, but I applaud each and every one that holds the line for the rule of law, the Constitution and democracy.