What the Hell Was Trump Doing on the White House Roof?

Donald Trump had an interesting morning on Tuesday. At 8 a.m., he took to the airwaves, where he spun a web of lies to justify firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ commissioner for a report indicating a fragile labor market.

He then spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as Trump’s deadline for Russia to take steps toward peace in Ukraine approaches. (The president’s promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office has been broken by nearly 200 days.)

Then Trump took a stroll on the roof of the White House, to the bafflement of reporters below.

Asked what he was doing, Trump said, “Just taking a little walk. It’s good for your health.” Asked what he’s building “up there,” he made a vague gesture that clarified little, possibly in the shape of a dome, and said, “Something beautiful.”

Trump was joined by James McCrery, the architect for the president’s plan to add a $200 million ballroom to the White House, suggesting the possibility of more plans to introduce the president’s “dictator chic” design taste to the People’s House—which has traditionally been modest by design, symbolizing “civic republicanism,” notes scholar Andy Craig.

USA Today suggested Trump’s Tuesday trip to the roof could “be a first for a president.” But this isn’t true. President Carter, for instance, recounts taking visitors up to the White House roof to stargaze and enjoy full privacy in his book A Full Life.

Carter wrote a meditative poem about one such experience, in which he observed geese flying through the dimming sky over Washington. It begins:

I recall one winter night
going to the White House roof
to study the Orion nebulae,
but we could barely see the stars,
their images so paled by city lights.

Unlike Carter, Trump was sure to make himself the center of attention during his visit. His reflections on his experience up there were also less elevated than Carter’s. After disappearing from view for a few minutes Tuesday morning, the president returned, joked that he was building “nuclear missiles,” dodged a question about Gaza, and headed back inside.

The White House has apparently decided that some of the administration’s DOGE-directed firings were a mistake.

The National Weather Service has received permission to hire hundreds of employees, CNN reported Tuesday. That includes 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians to replace the ones that were let go from the agency at the behest of former DOGE chief Elon Musk.

The order also includes 126 openings for “front-line mission critical” personnel that had been previously approved, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official who spoke with CNN.

The agency’s recent shortcomings have come under scrutiny in the aftermath of the Texas floods, which killed at least 120 people, including 35 children.*

Cuts to the department had severed contracts for more than 550 people, dropping the weather service’s staffing levels to below 4,000 total employees and sparking fears that the country could find itself terribly ill prepared amid peak hurricane season. It’s possible that some of the new hires could be former employees brought back to the agency.

NWS employees have been cautiously receptive to the news, which was first announced at an all-hands meeting on Monday, according to CNN. Exhausted staffers who had been tasked with working additional hours with added responsibilities due to the abrupt layoffs are reportedly irate at the realization that their peers’ job loss was pointless.

“How much time/money is it going to cost to train a bunch of new people when we had already-trained people in place?” an unidentified NOAA official told CNN.

It’s not the only recent rescission of Musk’s efforts atop the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management released a memo to employees Tuesday announcing the end of Musk’s extremely controversial email initiative requiring federal employees to document their weekly accomplishments to the department.

Musk and Trump were practically inseparable until the pair fell out over Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which included funds to undo some of DOGE’s work. The world’s richest man—and Trump’s biggest financier—accused the tax plan of being “pork-filled” while promising to torpedo Republicans’ midterm success by funding their opponents’ campaigns. (He failed to sway any Republican votes.)

In the aftermath of the bill, Trump and the tech billionaire unloaded on one another on each of their respective social media platforms, accusing each other of being unlikable, untrustworthy, and even unreal.

* This post originally mischaracterized the NWS response to the Texas flooding.

Donald Trump said that undocumented workers are “naturally” better at farm labor than other people, in an interview on CNBC Tuesday.

“These people—you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work,” Trump said. “These people do it naturally, naturally.”

Trump appeared to acknowledge in the interview that his ruthless mass deportation campaign is hurting farms, which rely on undocumented immigrants as an easily exploitable labor force. He said that he’s planning to release new immigration rules and regulations, claiming, “We’re taking care of our farmers. We can’t let our farmers not have anybody.”

But what about taking care of the workers? No need, as far as Trump is concerned. They’re “naturally” predisposed to backbreaking labor.

“I said … to a farmer the other day, ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back they die.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting isn’t it?’” Trump continued.

“These are, in many ways, very special people.”

It is true that undocumented workers often take unwanted, difficult jobs—but that is not due to being “special” but to a lack of options and a vulnerability to exploitation. Trump’s comments traffic in the exact type of centuries-old racist myths that, by advancing the idea that certain races are made to labor and others are made to rule, promote white supremacy.

This time last year, Donald Trump was swearing through his teeth that he wasn’t affiliated with Project 2025. But little more than half a year into his second administration, the initiative is reportedly already 47 percent complete.

The Project 2025 Tracker, which labels itself as a “comprehensive, community-driven initiative” to follow the implementation of the 900-page far-right manifesto, has counted the progression of 115 “complete” proposals out of the project’s 317 total. Some federal agencies—such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and USAID—have already been entirely reworked according to Project 2025’s goals. Project 2025 had six goals for USAID.

The White House, for which Project 2025 had 13 listed objectives, is currently 92 percent complete, according to the tracker.

Another 64 proposals are currently “in progress,” according to the tracker, including initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the Energy Department, and the Department of Commerce. They include policies that would require federally funded schools to administer military entrance tests to all students, adding citizenship questions to the census, rescinding elements of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, phasing out federal funding for low-income children in schools, classifying K-12 studies relating to “gender ideology” as sexual offenses, allowing companies to skirt overtime pay, and abolishing the Federal Reserve, among dozens of others.

Trump faced enormous blowback from conservatives last summer after he was accused of being tied in with the Heritage Foundation, the christo-nationalist group that drafted the manifesto. But he managed to change the opinion of American voters by lying repeatedly.

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in July 2024. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Since Inauguration Day, Trump has packed his administration with Project 2025 appointees, including its architect, Russell Vought, whom Trump tapped to run the Office of Management and Budget.

The Department of Justice says it wants to release transcripts of grand jury testimony from Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trials. But Maxwell and her legal team, who have been meeting with the Trump administration and are angling for a pardon, filed a response Tuesday opposing the release.

“Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is not,” the court filing begins. “Whatever interest the public may have in Epstein, that interest cannot justify a broad intrusion into grand jury secrecy in a case where the defendant is alive, her legal options are viable, and her due process rights remain.”

According to the filing, Trump’s DOJ said that Maxwell could review the transcripts of her trial’s testimony before they were published but “the Court denied that request.” Because of this, the testimony might contain information that could damage Maxwell’s ongoing legal case, and should be kept secret, the filing argues.

Last month, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Maxwell in an attempt to gain more information about the Epstein case. Those who are skeptical of Trump’s motives worried that Maxwell might lie to clear his name in exchange for a pardon. The administration is still deciding whether it will release the audio of these meetings.

Maxwell is currently petitioning to appeal her case before the Supreme Court and overturn her conviction, arguing that a non-prosecution agreement Epstein made with federal prosecutors in Florida should apply to her conviction.

A new CNN report reveals that the Trump administration possesses recordings of the Justice Department’s much-scrutinized closed-door meetings with Ghislaine Maxwell.

The recordings, per CNN, are now being transcribed and digitized, and “discussions over potential publication of the transcripts and audio” are ongoing. If the transcript is released, portions “that could reveal sensitive details like victim names” will likely be redacted.

Last month, Trump’s former personal attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls.

Blanche said the point of the meeting—an apparent attempt to quell the furor over Trump’s lack of transparency on Epstein—was to ask Maxwell, “What do you know?”

After day one of the interview, which stretched over two days, Blanche wrote on X that the DOJ “will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.” Maxwell’s attorney called it a “productive day.”

But many critics saw the meetings as a breeding ground for corruption, as Maxwell may have been incentivized to clear the name of the president—a former friend of Epstein whose name reportedly appears multiple times within the files—in exchange for clemency or a pardon.

Trump, meanwhile, distanced himself from Blanche’s meetings with Maxwell.

“I don’t know anything about it. They’re going to, what? Meet her?” Trump said when asked about the meeting late last month. “I don’t know about it, but I think it’s something that be—sounds appropriate to do, yeah.… I didn’t know that they were going to do it. I don’t really follow that too much.”

Trump has done little to dispel concerns that he may use Maxwell as a way out of the Epstein scandal, repeatedly reminding reporters that he’s “allowed” to grant her a pardon.

Releasing the Maxwell interviews might be a good first step for the self-proclaimed “most transparent” presidential administration to resolve the ongoing controversy.

But it would still fall far short of persistent demands to simply release the Epstein files in full. To do so, the president could waive his privacy rights to allow the mentions of him in the files to be unredacted—though I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Laura Loomer’s conspiratorial followers are already cannibalizing her for participating in “the swamp.”

Just a day after reports emerged that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had tapped the far-right “9/11 truther” to help identify leakers among his staff, Loomer has now herself become the subject of intense scrutiny. Some conspiracists are accusing her of being a “plant” for pharmaceutical companies concerned about administration policies that could cut into their bottom dollar, reported The Bulwark.

The self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” has had enormous success influencing the Trump administration from the safety of her X account: An analysis by The Daily Beast found that at least 16 individuals were fired from the federal government after Loomer singled them out as covert Democratic agents.

But now her intraparty success is coming back to bite her. At issue is the recent firing of Dr. Vinay Prasad, who until last week was in charge of the Food and Drug Administration division that oversees vaccines and gene therapies. Prasad resigned from his position after Loomer accused him of being disloyal to the president, alleging he owned a Trump voodoo doll. (The claim is a mischaracterization of a rhetorical anecdote Prasad spelled out in a podcast episode.)

Of note for far-right influencers: Prasad was in the midst of duking it out with Massachusetts-based drug manufacturer Sarepta over the company’s drug Elevidys, which treats Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The FDA put Elevidys’s clinical trials on hold last month after two patients died while taking the drug, and after another individual passed away while taking a related treatment. All three people died from acute liver toxicity.

Shortly before Prasad resigned, the FDA reversed course on its decision, deciding that some patients who still had the ability to walk could receive the drug.

Loomer’s peers considered the connection between her attacks on Prasad, the new FDA decision, and Prasad’s firing fairly obvious.

Right-wing Big Pharma critic Kevin Bass accused Loomer of being a “plant” to “oust FDA official Vinay Prasad.” American Majority CEO Ned Ryun wrote that Loomer was “funded by Sarepta Therapeutics to take Vinay out,” referring to the influencer as “completely nuts.”

“The reason I find this and you so loathsome is that this behavior is the antithesis of the MAGA and MAHA movements,” Ryun added.

Loomer has rejected the claims, writing to her 1.7 million followers on X that she hasn’t accepted any money from Big Pharma.

Last week, Representative Delia Ramirez, a Guatemalan American representing Illinois’s 3rd district, spoke at the second Panamerican Congress in Mexico City. A snippet of her remarks has infuriated MAGA commentators, lawmakers, and even the Department of Homeland Security.

But the outrage stems from an apparent mistranslation by right-wing news site The Blaze, which reported that Ramirez said: “I’m a proud Guatemalan, before I’m an American.”

A video of the event shows Ramirez, who began her speech in English, saying she wanted to conclude her remarks with a few words in Spanish (“...quiero terminar diciendo unas palabras en español…”), because she is “very proudly Guatemalan” (“...porque yo soy guatemalteca con mucho orgullo…”). But, she continues, “Primero que soy americana”—which translates roughly to “First, I am American.”

While the latter statement is oddly worded, making a direct translation difficult and leaving some ambiguity in Ramirez’s meaning, The Blaze’s version is evidently quite a leap (and also strips the remark of its context).

But, as Mark Twain is often falsely quoted as saying: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” The Blaze’s snippet and translation was shared far and wide in the MAGA-sphere.

Fox News published a story on it. Senator Mike Lee asked his followers on X, “Are you comfortable with this?” Representative Andy Ogles demanded that Ramirez be denaturalized, deported, and removed from the House Committee on Homeland Security, posting, “We know where her allegiances lie.” The DHS’s official X account shared the snippet with a Theodore Roosevelt quote about there being “no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”

As the bad-faith right-wing firestorm blazed, Ramirez issued a statement calling the attacks “a weak attempt to silence my dissent and invalidate my patriotic criticism of the nativist, white supremacist, authoritarians in government.”

“Anyone who denies our claim on this country simply because we dare to honor our diverse heritage and immigrant roots only exposes how fragile and small-minded their own idea of America really is,” Ramirez said.

This story has been updated.

There’s only one person who Americans hate more than Benjamin Netanyahu: Elon Musk.

In a Gallup favorability poll on 14 U.S. and global figures released Tuesday, Musk came in with the lowest net favorability rating at -28 points. Benjamin Netanyahu, the far-right prime minister of Israel and champion of the country’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, is slightly less hated at -23 points.

Multiple officials in Donald Trump’s administration, including Trump, have fallen in popularity: JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Marco Rubio, Musk, and Trump himself have all lost favorability since January’s poll.

Rubio is down 24 points, from a positive eight-point net favorability in January to -16 in the latest poll, which Gallup suggests could be linked to his key role in shutting down USAID. Musk, who is also precipitously down 24 points, now has a nearly two-to-one negative image: 33 percent of people surveyed view Trump’s ex-BFF favorably, and 61 percent view him unfavorably.

Trump, Kennedy, and Vance have all experienced declines of 13 or 14 points since January. Biden, who also has a negative net favorability (tied with Vance for -11), is actually slightly up in favorability since January—likely due to the fact he’s not president anymore.

At the top of the list? The Chicago pope himself, Pope Leo XIV. The pope has a +46 net favorability, far ahead of the second- and third-most-favorable figures, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Bernie Sanders, who come in at 18 and 11 points, respectively.

The writing’s on the wall: The American public doesn’t look kindly upon mass starvation, but there is no sin greater than the Tesla Diner.

The Republican-led House on Tuesday issued subpoenas to the Justice Department and high-ranking officials for files related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. But there was one notable name missing from the list of subpoenas: President Donald Trump.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer issued 11 subpoenas in total, including some to prominent politicians from Republican and Democratic administrations: Bill and Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, multiple former attorneys general including Merrick Garland and William Barr, and former special counsel Robert Mueller, according to The Washington Post.

But Trump himself is notably absent from that list.

The subpoenas are a result of a bipartisan effort on behalf of the House to release the files. On July 23, Democratic Representative Summer Lee of Pennsylvania brought a motion to subpoena the DOJ, which passed in the House Oversight Federal Law Enforcement subcommittee with three Republicans joining Democrats in the vote.

Trump’s former Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta is also missing from the list of subpoenas. In 2008, as U.S. attorney in Miami, Acosta gave Epstein a secret plea deal for soliciting a minor for prostitution—a crime that, if charges had been brought federally, could have resulted in a life sentence. Acosta resigned from the Trump administration in 2019 amid scrutiny during Epstein’s sex-trafficking case.

Despite the public’s overwhelming interest in transparency regarding Epstein, Trump has denied and deflected, blaming the controversy on a Democratic hoax and belittling members of his base who are still interested in seeing the files. Before the Justice Department issued a “case-closed” memo last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump that his name was in the files, which isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s seen the mountain of evidence that Trump and Epstein were friends.

This story has been updated.