Trump’s Next Major Project Shows Where His Real Priorities Are

Donald Trump’s next Washington vanity project will be going up sooner rather than later.

The president told Politico Wednesday that he expects construction to break ground on his highly teased “Triumphal Arc” (yes, “arc”) within the next two months.

“It hasn’t started yet. It starts sometime in the next two months. It’ll be great. Everyone loves it,” Trump said. “They love the ballroom too. But they love the Triumphal Arc.”

The “Arc de Trump” will be erected near the Arlington Bridge, opposite the Lincoln Memorial, according to the president. It will be modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the historic monument that commemorates those who fought and died for France during the country’s revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

Earlier this month, Trump claimed that early models for his arc were so evocative that his former speechwriter, Vince Haley, cried at their beauty.

“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 said at a White House Christmas reception.

The president’s arc campaign is the latest in a string of high-profile projects that he has pitched ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. He’s already hard at work on a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the construction of which apparently required the complete demolition of the White House East Wing, despite the fact that Trump pledged months earlier that the project would be “near but not touching” the presidential mansion.

Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise; gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transforming it from Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite office into a marble-slathered eyesore; and swapped the historic Palm Room’s lush green tones and tall ferns for white paint and framed photos of plants.

Meanwhile, his administration is doing some demolition of its own, reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

The president is thrusting some of the blame for Minnesota’s day care scandal onto Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.

State officials have come under fire since right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley reported Friday that empty or abandoned day care facilities were still receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

The Department of Health and Human Services paused $185 million in aid to the state in light of the video, despite the fact that elements of Shirley’s report were incorrect or inadequately reported. At least two of the centers featured in Shirley’s video had been closed for several years, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families told NewsNation.

But the nitty gritty of the situation didn’t matter to Donald Trump, who baselessly asserted on Truth Social Wednesday that Omar was one of the scammers sucking up undue funds.

“Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90 percent, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia,” Trump posted. “‘Congresswoman’ Omar, an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers.”

More than a dozen schemes have popped up in Minnesota’s safety net programs in recent years, many of them involving members of the state’s Somali population. They haven’t gone unchecked: More than 90 Minnesotans were charged in federal fraud investigations that began under the Biden administration, at least 60 of which have resulted in convictions.

But Omar, the first Somali American lawmaker and one of the first Muslim women in Congress, doesn’t have any connection to the fraudsters beyond her heritage.

Instead, it was clear that Trump was singularly interested in attacking Omar’s ethnicity, dredging up an old right-wing conspiracy that the lawmaker had married her brother.

“Did she really marry her brother?” Trump asked rhetorically in his post. “Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother to bring him into the U.S. The conspiracy first emerged during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.

Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. At the time, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother as “absurd and offensive.”

President Donald Trump has vetoed a bill that would expand the territory of a small Native American tribe in the Everglades because they didn’t support his “Alligator Alcatraz” plans.

“Despite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected. My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding projects for special interests, especially those that are unaligned with my Administration’s policy of removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the country,” Trump wrote in a message to Congress Tuesday night.

“It is not the Federal Government’s responsibility to pay to fix problems in an area that the Tribe has never been authorized to occupy. For these reasons, I cannot support the Miccosukee Reserved Amendments Act.”

The Miccosukee Tribe was part of a lawsuit along with two environmental groups—Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity—that argued that the Trump administration and Florida state government hadn’t carried out the required environmental review for the construction of the detention center deep in the cherished Southern Florida wetlands.

Now Trump is denying their effort to regain just a portion of the land that was taken from them in the First and Second Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century.

The Miccosukee weren’t the only ones hit with a spiteful veto from a most spiteful president. In Colorado, Trump shot down a massive clean water project that was years in the making because MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert refused to cave to his pressure to stay mum on the Epstein files. She voted for their release, and now 39 communities may have to go back to the drawing board for their clean water.

Border Patrol has been arresting U.S. citizens, according to the agency’s leader.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News Tuesday that his underlings had in fact arrested American citizens, claiming that they had cuffed U.S. nationals for assaulting border patrol agents.

“As far as American citizens, the vast majority of American citizens, especially that the U.S. Border patrol has arrested, many of those citizens assaulted federal officers, assaulted border patrol agents, in the performance of our duties,” Bovino said. “Anyone that assaults a federal officer, you’re gonna go to jail.”

The Homeland Security Department released a memo in November claiming that assaults on DHS agents had risen by 1,150 percent since 2024. They blamed the supposed rise on the rhetoric of sanctuary city politicians, alleging that political opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda—such as condemning ICE and Border Patrol agents as “Nazis” and “slave patrols”—had inspired the unprecedented violence.

“Our law enforcement officers have had Molotov cocktails and rocks thrown at them, been shot at, had cars used as weapons against them, and been physically assaulted,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in the memo.

Meanwhile, the tactics utilized by ICE agents to arrest and detain the undocumented population have been nothing short of appalling. ICE agents have violently ripped families apart, beaten suspects, and even detained elected officials attempting to visit their facilities or escort immigrants to and from scheduled immigration court dates.

But the agents have also masked their faces and intentionally tried to hide their identities, making the government officials practically indiscernible from violent laypeople as they invade homes, hijack cars, or assault people on the street.

Bovino himself is no stranger to violent behavior. In late November, the Border Patrol chief was slammed by a U.S. district judge after he semantically dodged questions related to his and his agents’ excessive use of force against protesters in Chicago. At the time, Bovino split hairs about how many canisters of tear gas he threw into a crowd as well as other alleged misconduct by officers under his command during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

Colorado MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert is claiming that President Donald Trump killed a massive clean water project in her district as punishment for her voting to release the Epstein files, even after Trump pressed her not to. 

The Arkansas Valley Conduit was a project decades in the making that was supposed to grant safe drinking water to 39 communities across the region, and received bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. Trump ended all of that on Tuesday. 

“My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies,” he said in a statement justifying his veto of the bill. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the Nation.”

Boebert was incensed. 

“President Trump decided to veto a completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously. Why? Because nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado, many of whom enthusiastically voted for him in all three elections,” she wrote in a statement. “I thought the campaign was about lowering costs and cutting red tape. But hey, if this administration wants to make its legacy blocking projects that deliver water to rural Americans; that’s on them.”

“And I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability. Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics,” she continued. 

Boebert is clearly alluding to Trump’s aforementioned phone call to demand that she remove her name from the petition to release the Epstein files.  

Boebert also argued that the veto would have been reasonable if it targeted more liberal voters in Colorado, but not people in her region who “overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections.” 

“These are not the people that should be attacked,” she said in a video message. 

The bill’s unanimous passage—and the bipartisan disapproval around its veto—suggest that this fight may not be over.