Here’s One Smithsonian Painting the White House Wants to Censor

Escalating its mission to eliminate so-called “woke” content from the Smithsonian, Trump’s team has just publicly identified artwork it hopes to censor.

On Thursday, the White House’s official rapid response X account shared a post casting aspersions on a Rigoberto A. Gonzalez painting titled Refugees Crossing the Border Wall Into South Texas.

The piece depicts a family of four in Baroque style: two parents with a young boy and a baby, at a ladder leaning against the southern border wall. A finalist for the National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, the piece appeared in that Smithsonian Museum from 2022 to 2023, according to the competition’s website.

The White House social team, seemingly irked by this humanizing portrayal of people demonized by the Trump administration, accused the work of “commemorating the act of illegally crossing the ‘exclusionary’ border.”

“This is what President Trump means when he says the Smithsonian is ‘OUT OF CONTROL,’” the post says—quoting from a recent Truth Social post in which the president lamented that the Smithsonian overemphasizes negative aspects of America, such as “how bad Slavery was.”

In a Thursday press release, the White House listed Gonzalez’s painting with other supposedly damning proof that the institution is in the grip of wokeness, including an American History Museum collection on LGBTQ+ history.

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, who was previously criticized for acting like a Russian asset, is planning to gut the agency responsible for monitoring influence from foreign governments.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a fact sheet saying it would begin “refocusing functions” within the supposedly “redundant” Foreign Malign Influence Center, alleging that it had been used by the Biden administration to “justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.”

ODNI cited FMIC coordinating with Twitter, Facebook, and Google on the companies’ responses to the 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was removed from several platforms over government concerns that it was part of a Russian disinformation operation. Since it was first reported on, the laptop has been proven to be authentic, but many of Republicans’ allegations that it tied the Bidens to corrupt foreign business dealings have not been.

ODNI claimed that FMIC had developed a “hyper-focus” on election-related issues after a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “aspired” to see Donald Trump enter the White House. In the last month, Gabbard has launched a campaign to discredit this report, claiming that the Obama administration had sown a false narrative about Putin supporting Trump, even though Putin has openly admitted that he’d preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton.

ODNI’s efforts to “refocus” FMIC are particularly ironic considering that Gabbard has a history of foisting foreign misinformation on the American public herself. Gabbard previously defended Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, claiming that the U.S. had provoked Russian aggression, and that Ukraine housed U.S.-funded biolabs that were developing secret bioweapons—a piece of foreign state propaganda that earned her the reputation of being a Russian asset.

More recently, she parroted the conclusions of Russian spies during a White House press briefing, claiming that Clinton had experienced “psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,” a rumor that was based on debunked Russian intelligence.

ODNI’s fact sheet claimed that “refocusing FMIC’s mission” would save taxpayers at least $7 million per year. The massive restructuring would also refocus the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. Gabbard has announced plans to cut her department’s staff by 50 percent and reduce its annual budget by $700 million.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is boasting about—well, not doing much of anything in regard to gun seizures in Washington, D.C.

“We’ve now made a total of 630 arrests and seized 86 illegal guns in DC. 53 arrests were made yesterday, plus 24 ICE arrests and 10 guns taken off the streets. Our incredible US Marshals even helped recover a missing child,” Bondi wrote Thursday morning on X. “Our mission to make DC safe again isn’t slowing down.”

Bondi’s right about one thing: The mission isn’t “slowing down.” It’s not moving anywhere at all. Law enforcement is taking guns off the street at around the same rate it was last year, even with the increased show of force from the federal government.

“DC police records show they recovered 2,895 firearms in 2024—works out to an average of about 8 per day & ~100 over two weeks,” wrote Courthouse News’s Benjamin S. Weiss. “Federal gun seizures on track to be more or less the same in roughly that same period, per AG.”

This kind of blatant posturing has become commonplace in the past few weeks. The federal government wants so badly for us to believe that its influx of police has made the nation’s capital much safer, when in fact, it’s been a lot more show than substance.

President Donald Trump’s stance on Russia-Ukraine is as volatile and tricky to pin down as his stance on most other issues—which is to say, very.

The president took to Truth Social Thursday to chastise former President Joe Biden for, by his reckoning, holding Ukraine back in its war against Russia’s invasion.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country,” Trump wrote, likening Ukraine to a sports team that has “fantastic defense” but is “not allowed to play offense.”

“Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND,” the president continued. “How did that work out?”

The sentiment is a bit rich coming from someone who’s repeatedly threatened to withdraw support for the beleaguered U.S. ally.

The post also fails to mention Biden’s November 2024 decision to allow Ukraine to use American-made long-range ATACMS missiles to strike deeper into Russia—as well as Trump’s own response to the move: The then–president elect called it “very stupid” and “a big mistake.”

“I wouldn’t have had him do that,” Trump said during a December press conference. His eldest son, Donald Jr., accused Biden of ushering in World War III.

Last month, Trump reportedly asked President Volodymyr Zelenskiy whether he could strike Russia’s two largest cities if provided long-range weaponry by the United States. He even considered providing such munitions, according to The Washington Post. But on July 15, he told reporters he was not willing to do so.

As the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it last month, military aid to Ukraine under Trump “has been on and off, then partially on, then on again, and then increased further.” And his rhetoric has been even more erratic than his actions.

Trump concluded the post with his favorite speculative, counterfactual boast: that the war would never have happened if he were president. “Interesting times ahead!!!” he added, before signing off.

Donald Trump might not have to pay the piper after all.

A New York appeals court threw out the president’s $500 million civil fraud fine Thursday, claiming the resulting penalty for the Trump Organization’s bank fraud case was an “excessive fine.”

“The court’s disgorgement order, which directs that defendants pay nearly half a billion dollars to the State of New York, is an excessive fine that violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution,” Justice Peter Moulton wrote in one of three opinions.

The contentious decision from the five-judge panel paves the way for the case to advance to New York’s highest court.

At least two judges on the court agreed with the original ruling that found Trump and his co-defendants liable for fraud, noting that the injunctive relief ordered by the presiding judge  was “well crafted to curb defendants’ business culture.” However, the final page of the order states that “three out of the five members of this panel clearly believe that the judgment should be vacated” on the basis that the “attorney general has not yet proven her case.”

Since Trump lost the case, his attorneys have argued that the fine was “grossly disproportionate” to his offenses, which included defrauding banks, insurance companies, and investors by falsely inflating his wealth and the value of his properties.

The penalty had left Trump and his portfolio in a whopping financial pickle. The former real estate mogul tried and failed to pause growing interest on the judgment, at one point counter-offering the court a $100 million bond in lieu of the full amount. 

He also approached several brokers and upwards of 30 suretors for help in securing a bond, though his attorneys claimed he was unsuccessful in doing so as the suretors refused to accept Trump’s real estate as collateral. Instead, they would only accept cash to the tune of $1 billion, which Trump claimed last year he didn’t have.

New York Attorney General Letitia James had threatened to seize some of Trump’s largest assets—including 40 Wall Street and Trump Tower—to cover the outstanding disgorgement. 

The decision also restricted the Trump Organization from borrowing cash and barred Trump’s two eldest sons from doing business in New York for two years.

James has been a target of Trump’s retribution campaign since he returned to the White House. Earlier this month, the Justice Department opened an investigation into James and her work, accusing her of violating Trump’s constitutional rights by taking legal action against him.

This story has been updated.