“Maddening”: Smithsonian Employees Warn Trump’s Plan Will Cause Chaos

The Trump administration’s heavy-handed revision of U.S. history has put fear into Smithsonian employees, eliciting comparisons among staffers to 1930s Germany. 

Workers at the government-created museums are censoring historical content that they believe could upset the president. Tensions have gotten so high that staffers have been warned against putting any complaints about the current climate at the institution in writing, while volunteers are considering quitting, HuffPost reported Thursday.

On Tuesday, White House officials laid out detailed plans to eliminate exhibits that they determined represented “improper ideology,” sparking alarm and panic among staffers. The memo challenged the application of educational lenses on race, gender, and oppression in U.S. history and accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” 

The administration’s critiques also veered toward eugenics, torching a specific Smithsonian exhibit for describing race as “not a biological reality but a social construct” and underscoring that “race is a human invention.”

But the memo wasn’t a suggestion: failure to comply will turn the faucet off on funding for the world’s largest educational institution, effectively crippling the Smithsonian and nixing two-thirds of the organization’s revenue.

“Everyone is so scared,” one longtime Smithsonian worker told HuffPost.

“It’s an impossible position to put us in,” they continued. “We can’t be political with our content, but they have politicized everything. We need to prove we’re not partisan by following this very partisan directive. What are we supposed to do? It’s like up is down. It’s maddening.”

Employees have quietly conceded to the White House’s demands in an effort to save Smithsonian head Lonnie Bunch from losing his job. Staffers described Bunch as “loved” and “respected.” But kowtowing to Donald Trump has not yet proved to be a winning strategy for the Smithsonian.

Earlier this month, the Smithsonian removed Trump from its exhibit on impeachments, under direct pressure from the White House. That left the exhibit focusing on Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, effectively returning the exhibit to the way it looked in 2008. The “American Presidency” wing’s revised signage explained that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history.  The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review in the wake of an art director’s ousting.

The Smithsonian has since re-added Trump to the impeachment exhibit, but with some changes to how the proceedings against him are described.

Donald Trump was caught once again moving the goal posts for Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of their summit in Alaska Friday.

During an interview on Fox News Radio Thursday, Trump bragged that his “relationship” with Putin had been the deciding factor in the autocrat’s pending decision to resolve his country’s invasion of Ukraine. But the U.S. president didn’t sound all that certain.

“Because of a certain relationship that he has with me running this country, he’s, he really, I believe now he’s convinced that he’s going to make a deal. He’s gonna make a deal—I think he’s going to, and we’re gonna find out,” Trump said.

“The second meeting is going to be very, very important. This meeting sets up—like a chess game—this meeting sets up the second meeting. But there is a 25 percent chance that this meeting will not be a successful meeting.”

Trump has repeatedly downplayed the historic contact between the two superpowers, a move that has frustrated European leaders. In an explosive phone call Wednesday, European leaders claimed Trump was leveraging his time with Putin to coordinate a ceasefire in Ukraine without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s input, and pressed Trump on the significance of offering a meeting to Putin.

Ahead of the meeting, Putin praised Trump for making “quite vigorous and sincere efforts” toward ending the conflict in Ukraine and “to create long-term conditions of peace between our countries and in Europe, and in the world as a whole.”

A fake story from a Brazilian fugitive accusing former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr of colluding with Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis and Armstrong Williams to indict President Trump swept through MAGA world this summer. 

How did a lie from a Brazilian woman being actively pursued by the FBI dominate the right’s media landscape and turn them against a longtime Trump ally? The Bulwark reports that it originated from Patrícia Lélis, a woman who was indicted last year in a wire fraud case after stealing around $700,000 and using it for her house’s down payment and credit card bill, among other things. She fled the country before serving any time and was last seen in Mexico.  

In Brazil, Lélis is infamous for a false rape accusation against Brazilian pastor and politician Marco Feliciano, which led to her being arrested, with Brazilian law enforcement ultimately releasing a report that claimed she had a mental condition that caused her to lie impulsively. In 2021, she claimed that then-President Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo threatened to kill her over text. Police determined she forged the messages and arrested her instead once again. She was kicked out of the Brazilian Workers’ Party for being extremely transphobic, and even made posts falsely claiming she was pregnant. 

Lélis is essentially a professional international charlatan. How did she become the point person for the accusations of treason against Barr? 

It’s all Armstrong Williams’s fault. The Black conservative talking head hired Lélis without verifying anything about her background or history, as she claimed to be an immigration lawyer to get the job with Williams. She worked for him for two years, 2021 to 2023, stealing money from his organization in the process.  

Lélis concocted a story based on her time working for Armstrong, in which she alleges that, while sitting in as a notetaker during meetings, she witnessed Armstrong, Barr, and Willis coordinating Trump’s prosecutions, which doesn’t make much sense given that Barr was not attorney general while Lélis was working for Armstrong. 

None of the conservative pundits who took up Lélis’s story seemed to care. And neither did Project Veritas, which featured Lélis multiple times as a brave whistleblower whose life was in danger as Barr was trying to silence her.  

“One thing that I understood very well is like Bill Barr and Armstrong and all the politicians too, they’re very focused like in how they go to stop Trump,” Lélis said in a Project Veritas article. 

Brazilians tried to warn Project Veritas. Now no one knows where Lélis is. Let this be  a lesson to at least google someone before you platform their allegations of plots against the president.

Not all House Republicans are so keen on Donald Trump’s latest play to keep control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

House GOP leadership have reportedly advised rank-and-file party members to keep their concerns about Trump’s blatant mid-decade gerrymandering scheme in Texas to themselves, Politico reported Tuesday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leadership won’t put any bill on the floor that would contradict the Trump-driven efforts, despite some urging from party members, two people with direct knowledge of the matter told Politico. Johnson has publicly said that redistricting should be left up to the states.

But some Republican lawmakers, particularly those from blue states, have been more open about their distaste for Trump’s gerrymandering scheme.

New York Representative Mike Lawler, a swing-district Republican, said earlier this month that Trump’s redistricting campaign in Texas was “wrong,” and that gerrymandering needed to be banned altogether. Another New York Republican, Nicole Malliotakis, said that she was “not somebody who’s supportive of any type of gerrymandering.”

California Representative Doug LaMalfa warned that redistricting in Texas would “start a grass fire across the country.” Republicans in vulnerable seats should be concerned that redistricting elsewhere could come back to bite them, as voters attempt to even the score.

California-based GOP strategist Rob Stutzman told Politico that among vulnerable Republicans, there was a “growing private sentiment of ‘is this really worth it?’”

Other Republicans appeared reluctant to get on board with redrawing the maps at this particular moment. House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris warned that Republicans should “shy away from mid-cycle redistricting,” and Florida’s newest Representative Randy Fine questioned whether it was even legal to redraw the maps in the Sunshine State (it’s not).

The world stage is not happy with Donald Trump.

European leaders reportedly torched the U.S. president during a virtual call ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Friday trip to Alaska, two sources familiar with the call told Axios.

Trump downplayed the historic contact between the two superpowers as a “feel-out” meeting, though the Europeans disagreed, claiming in the Wednesday call that Trump was leveraging his time with Putin to coordinate a ceasefire arrangement in Ukraine without that country’s leader, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, at the negotiating table.

The call lasted for more than an hour and featured several snipes at Trump from French President Emmanuel Macron, who took a “very tough” position on the meeting, according to a source on the call that spoke with Axios. Macron emphasized that “a meeting is a very big thing to give to Putin.” But Trump “didn’t like that,” the source said.

Zelenskiy offered his own blunt warning to Trump, underscoring to the U.S. leader that “Putin cannot be trusted.”

Polish President Karol Nawrocki “reminded Trump of the Battle of Warsaw, exactly 105 years ago, when Poland fought together with Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks in Russia,” reported Axios.

Putin’s visit will be the first time that the Russian leader has stepped foot on U.S. soil in more than a decade—but what sort of new ground Trump will be able to gain is not clear. Putin has remained adamant that any peace deal would require “international legal recognition” of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine, along with four regions it has claimed in the three years since it first invaded Ukraine.

After the call with Trump, Zelenskiy appeared alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, telling reporters in Berlin that the world needed to put more “pressure” on Russia. Zelenskiy said that he believed Russia was bluffing about the regional economic impact of more international sanctions.

At the same press conference, Merz claimed that Trump had “largely agreed” that Russia could not be granted legal recognition of the territories it had claimed during the war.

When pressed by reporters during a press conference later Wednesday as to whether he believed that he could use the meeting to convince Putin to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine, Trump responded in the negative.

“I guess the answer to that is no,” he said, “because I’ve had this conversation [with Putin].”

A common left-wing slogan—which pithily summarizes the “imperial boomerang” thesis—is that fascism is imperialism “at home” or “turned inward.” This is typically stated with an implied negative view of both of those things.

In an appearance on Newsmax, Republican Representative James Comer of Kentucky advanced—and endorsed—his own positive twist on that concept. Following Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Comer said the military should be sent to Democratic-run cities to “reduce crime,” leveraging experiences from America’s numerous foreign entanglements since the 2000s.

“We’re gonna support doing this in other cities, if it works out in Washington, D.C.,” Comer said. “And, again, it’s unfortunate, but we spend a lot on our military. Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets, trying to reduce crime in other countries. We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that’s what the president is doing.”

“I think this is an experiment that’s probably needed in a lot of the Democrat-run cities in America,” Comer later added. The sentiment echoes Trump’s description of the capital as a testing ground for crackdowns on more cities.

Comer also expressed confidence that President Trump will garner the votes in Congress needed to extend the 30-day takeover. The president has vowed to do so with or without the legislative branch’s approval, but Comer dubiously predicted that Trump’s action in D.C. will be so popular that enough Senate Democrats will be swayed to extend it.

“I think people that represent big cities, which are the Democrats in Congress, they’re going to probably hear from their constituents: ‘Look, that worked in Washington, D.C. Why don’t you vote to allow President Trump to come into Chicago or New York City or Philadelphia and try to combat the criminal activity in their city?’”

On the eve of what President Trump calls a “feel-out meeting” in Alaska with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president seems well aware of a no-cost way to curry favor with Trump.

On Thursday, per the AFP, Putin said the United States is making “quite vigorous and sincere efforts to halt hostilities, end the crisis, and reach agreements that serve the interests of all parties involved in this conflict.” He also dangled the possibility of “long-term conditions for peace … if we reach agreements on strategic offensive arms control.”

Max Seddon of the Financial Times observed that, in buttering up Trump, Putin was seemingly appealing to the president’s long-standing yearning for a Nobel Peace Prize. Last month, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said a Trump Nobel Prize is “well past time,” while citing misleading claims about the president’s foreign policy. On Thursday, the influential Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv reported that Trump recently called Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, “out of the blue” to say “he wanted the Nobel Prize—and to discuss tariffs.”

Lately, several world leaders have played to Trump’s apparent hankering for a Nobel. Leaders of countries such as Pakistan, Israel, Guinea-Bissau, Gabon, Azerbaijan, and Armenia have seemingly caught onto this easy route to the president’s heart.

At the Alaskan summit, Trump is hoping to set a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in motion—though he’s managed expectations, saying, “I think it’ll be good, but it might be bad.” (The president’s promise to end the war on “day one” is now broken by nearly seven months.)

While, as Seddon noted, Putin appears to be dangling a gold Nobel medal before the president, Trump reportedly may offer rare earth minerals in return.

The Telegraph reports that, among other economic incentives, the president is considering giving Russia access to mineral deposits in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, which houses a sizable portion of Europe’s lithium supply. He is also weighing giving Russia opportunities to exploit Alaska’s natural resources, namely in the oil- and gas-rich Bering Strait.

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants attending immigration court violates their due process rights.

In a scathing opinion released Thursday, Judge Dale E. Ho wrote that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in immigration court had turned the procedure into “detention roulette.”

Over the span of 31 pages, Ho wrote that Carlos Javier Lopez Benitez, a 27-year-old from Paraguay, had his constitutional rights violated when he attended court on July 16 in pursuit of asylum.

“Mr. Lopez Benitez appears to be far from alone,” Ho wrote. “His counsel assert that his treatment is part of a ‘nationwide campaign,’ as set forth in an ICE internal memo that has been described in various media reports, which suggests that millions could be swept up in the same way.”

Since May, ICE agents have been arresting immigrants immediately after their immigration court hearings. The strategy has gained nationwide attention in the wake of two high-profile consequences: the indictment of a judge in Wisconsin who allegedly helped an immigrant evade authorities outside her courtroom, and the detention of New York City Comptroller and then–mayoral hopeful Brad Lander, who was attempting to escort an immigrant out of the courthouse.

Ho noted that while the government could not confirm or deny the existence of that policy, they “appear to maintain that they must categorically detain all undocumented immigrants who they believe have entered the United States unlawfully—no matter how long they have been residing in the country since.”

Citing Velasco Lopez v. Decker, Ho further argued that the “suggestion that government agents may sweep up any person they wish” for no reason whatsoever, “so long as the person will, at some unknown point in time, be allowed to ask some other official for his or her release offends the ordered system of liberty that is the pillar of the Fifth Amendment.”

Lopez Benitez’s case may be the new normal in Trump’s America, but it is far from the historical standard. Immigration authorities used to stay away from courthouses, fearing that their presence could disengage people from following procedure and navigating the legal system. But White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s agenda has effectively unrooted that, tasking federal agents with arresting 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—a quota so astronomical that it has forced the agency to find unconventional subjects of detention, including legal residents and even U.S. citizens.

Senator Markwayne Mullin revealed that he actually has no idea who the mayor of Washington even is.

During an interview on Fox News Wednesday, the Oklahoma Republican attempted to excoriate D.C.’s “very racist mayor” for making Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the nation’s capital about race.

“And people may get eyebrows when I raise that, but he is the one that brings in race into the conversation, so he’s the one that’s pointing the fingers at it, and when you point one finger you got three pointing back at ya,” Mullin said. “But for him to say that, and flat out lie to the American people, he knows exactly what’s happening.”

But Mayor Muriel Bowser isn’t a “he” or a “him.” She’s a woman. And she didn’t suggest Trump’s takeover was about race—she’s just Black.

Several people online, including CNN senior reporter Edward Isaac-Dovere, suggested that Mullin might be referring to comments from Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March 2024. Scott accused his critics at the time of being racist. (Spoiler alert, calling someone the “DEI mayor” is racist.)

Clearly, not only do guests on Fox News not have to be experts on the people they want to complain about, but they don’t even have to know what city they’re talking about.

“Crime is not down, the lack of prosecution is down,” Mullin continued. “They don’t allow the prosecuting attorneys to actually prosecute, they’ve taken all the felonies, and they’ve dropped them down to dang near misdemeanors.”

On Monday, Bowser called Trump’s executive action “unsettling and unprecedented,” adding that she wasn’t surprised given Trump’s past rhetoric. It’s unclear whether she meant his echoing of racist narratives about urban areas, or his specific grievances about Washington, of which he has many.

On Tuesday, Bowser struck a stronger tone. “This is a time where community needs to jump in and we all need to, to do what we can in our space, in our lane, to protect our city and to protect our autonomy, to protect our home rule, and get to the other side of this guy, and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push,” she said.

The most recent producer price index numbers directly contradict two of Trump’s favorite narratives: that his tariffs won’t lead to significant price increases and that other countries will foot the bill if they do. 

If that was true, the PPI numbers, which track inflation on the producer side, would be dropping. But Trump was lying. The U.S. economy just experienced its largest PPI rise in three years, with a 0.9 percent increase in July. Inflation is rising, and it’s Trump’s fault. 

“So much for foreigners paying tariffs. If they did, PPI would be falling,” RSM chief economist Joseph Brusuelas wrote Thursday on X. “Wholesale prices up 3.3% from a year ago & 3.7% in the core. The temperature is definitely rising in the core. This implies a hot PCE reading lies ahead.”

Prices on fresh and dry vegetables have also risen 38.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Prices on meats, diesel fuel, jet fuel, and eggs are also up. 

Last time Trump got a bad economic report, he fired the BLS commissioner. How will he hide the negative impacts this time? What will the spin be?

“The projected number was 0.2%,” wrote Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Virginia Representative Don Beyer, referring to the 0.9 percent rise. “This isn’t just a huge inflationary increase, it’s an order of magnitude larger than what was expected. And no question at all that it’s being driven by Trump’s tariffs.”

Companies won’t be volunteering to eat this price increase as Trump has wrongly suggested in the past, and other countries certainly won’t either. American consumers should expect the president to lie his way through this obvious economic failure.