All Trump Wants for Christmas Is a “Triumphal Arc”

At a White House Christmas reception on Sunday, President Donald Trump made clear what he wants from Santa this year.

“We’re building an arc, like the Arc de Triomphe,” he said during a rambling speech, after spending 10 minutes talking about golf. “And we’re building it by the Arlington Bridge … opposite the Lincoln Memorial.”

Trump’s “triumphal arc” (yes, “arc”) is the latest construction project on his list, which also includes the 90,000-square-foot, $250 million ballroom he’s tearing down the East Wing of the White House for, and his Rose Garden renovation, in which he paved paradise and put up a parking lot—sorry, a “club.”

“I put Vince in charge of the triumphal arc,” Trump said, referring to his former speechwriter and the current director of the Domestic Policy Council, Vince Haley. “Vince came in one day, and his eyes were teeming. He couldn’t believe how beautiful. He saw it, and he wanted to do that,” the president continued, intelligibly.

“It will be like the one in Paris, but to be honest, maybe it blows it away—it blows it away, in every way,” Trump said.

But the president wasn’t quite finished gushing about his plans. He called Memorial Circle, the site across from Lincoln Memorial right on the border with Virginia, “a circle that’s been waiting to have the arc built on it.” Apparently, Memorial Circle was asking for it.

Trump then asked Vince to show the plans to the National Trust. “I’ve always gotten really along well with the National Trust, so take a look, show it to them, maybe they’ve got some good ideas.” (The National Trust is currently suing the president to block construction of his ballroom.)

While Trump gilds the Oval Office and plans his next vanity project, Americans are struggling to pay for necessities like groceries and doctors’ visits. Trump’s legacy will be one of staggering economic inequality—but at least we’ll have an “arc” to remember him by.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday intended to stop states from regulating AI—an idea that had received a lot of pushback from members of his base.

The order didn’t emerge out of a vacuum, of course. MAGA Republicans and Silicon Valley leaders have been locked in a battle for influence over the White House on tech policy for some time, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

Trump’s tech advisers seem to be winning.

Let’s back up a few months: over the summer, the Senate killed a bill that would have imposed a 10-year moratorium on AI laws from states. Then, when a draft version of the just-signed executive order leaked last month, many Republicans, who traditionally support states’ rights, tried to stop the president from going forward with it.

GOP members including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene decried the idea, writing on X that “states must retain the right to regulate and make laws on AI and anything else for the benefit of their state. Federalism must be preserved.”

Conservative groups, members of Congress, and governors all reportedly reached out to the White House to raise the alarm about the draft as well.

The Post spoke to more than a dozen people familiar with the administration’s AI policies and White House officials and concluded that this moment was emblematic of a wider struggle between Trump’s base and his tech advisers and industry leaders who used their money and sway to help put him in office.

“It feels like millions of votes across the country just got traded for thousands of [venture capitalist] and tech rich votes in regions Republicans will never win,” one source said.

Compromises were made to the draft to bring Republicans on board, and silence critics, the Post reported, and Trump ended up signing the order this week.

The tension between what Big Tech and the president’s populist supporters want isn’t likely to disappear overnight, though. And as the midterm elections loom, more and more cracks are appearing among Trump’s MAGA base.

President Donald Trump’s support is starting to waver, even among his staunchest supporters, a new poll shows.

Don’t get it twisted—Trump’s approval rating among adults has been in the red for months, and is still falling, with now close to 60 percent of Americans saying they disapprove of the president. But according to an NBC News Decision Desk poll that surveyed 20,252 adults online, the two groups that show the largest drop in support for the president since April are Republicans and MAGA Republicans.

For people who identified themselves as Republicans rather than part of MAGA, the percentage who “strongly approve” of the president has dropped to 35 percent, from 38 percent in April.

Among MAGA Republicans, there’s a much higher percentage of people who strongly approve of Trump: 70 percent. But that’s down eight percentage points since April.

Plus, fewer Republicans report being part of MAGA today than did earlier this year. In April, 57 percent of Republicans identified as MAGA, but today the two sides of the party are equally split at 50–50.

These are small shifts, but they belie Trump’s fracturing base of support. From Marjorie Taylor Greene’s split from the president and abrupt resignation to the botched rollout of the Epstein files, to Trump’s tariffs and inability to bring down prices, there are some issues that even die-hard MAGA adherents can’t overlook.

Chocolate, vanilla, coffee, cinnamon: The ingredients for your favorite holiday foods are becoming increasingly harder to grow because of climate change.

For example, cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, which has been facing more days of extreme heat and drought, according to a recent report from the Weather Channel. “The crop doesn’t like it,” meteorologist Jennifer Gray explained.

And when cocoa production falls, consumers also feel the heat: Prices for chocolate have shot up over the last year and were four times as high at the end of 2024 as they were in 2022.

Vanilla and cinnamon, key ingredients for holiday baking that are largely grown in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, are also under threat. “Because we rely on just a handful of islands to produce basically our world’s cinnamon, it is extremely vulnerable. These are also places that are facing climate extremes,” Gray said.

And for something like coffee, climate change is drastically shrinking the land where it can grow. Suitable locations could decrease by 50 percent by 2050, according to a 2014 study. Plus, the Trump administration’s on-again-off-again tariffs have shocked the coffee market, one that’s already reeling from landslides and floods in Vietnam.

That festive mocha latte looks like it’ll be getting a lot more expensive. Luckily, we’ll have a lot more heat waves, fires, and floods to deal with to distract us.

To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, President Donald Trump is commemorating the most important person in the country’s history: himself.

Back in 2021—days after the January 6 riots—Trump signed an act to authorize the creation of new coins to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. The act specified that one coin be focused on women’s contribution to U.S. history.

In response, a bipartisan committee came up with some recommendations: a coin featuring Frederick Douglass to represent abolition, one with a “Votes for Women” flag to honor women’s suffrage, and a coin featuring 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, who helped desegregate her school in 1960.

But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has ultimate say, did not follow these recommendations, reported The New York Times.

Instead, the new coins will feature a Pilgrim couple on the Mayflower, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln. (The Trump administration, apparently, was not satisfied with the already significant coin representation of three out of four of these historic American men.)

And then, the collection’s pièce de résistance: a Trump dollar coin, featuring the president’s likeness on both sides.

It’s worth pointing out that it is incredibly abnormal—and some would argue, anti-American—to have a sitting president on a coin. Washington refused to have his likeness on a coin while he was president, as it felt too king-like for the leader of the newly free United States, according to the Times. Trump, apparently, has no such qualms.