Trump Is Plundering National Parks to Pay for His Vanity Projects

America’s semiquincentennial is coming at a cost to the country’s national parks.

The Trump administration has teed up a pricey celebration for the country’s 250th anniversary, but the cost is apparently more than the White House can chew. To foot the bill, officials are diverting roughly $90 million away from the National Parks Service, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

All entry fees to some of the country’s most popular parks—such as Yellowstone and Yosemite—will be used to fund America 250–related projects, according to internal agency documents obtained by the Post. That includes a $1.6 million fireworks display (which costs more than five times Washington’s normal amount for a July 4 celebration) and $76 million for repairs to the capital’s monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

While the bulk of the diverted NPS funds are technically being spent on national park remediation, it will be at an incredible detriment to the rest of a nationwide system that suffers from a $24 billion funding backlog and needs money for “deferred maintenance” projects for park infrastructure repairs and improvements.

“That is not how it was designed to work,” Ed Stierli of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, told the Post. “It shouldn’t just be all at one park at the expense of the entire national park system.”

The reallocated expenditures also hint at a larger truth: that Donald Trump’s vanity projects are much more expensive than he has been telling the public. Trump had initially promised the restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would hover around $1.8 million. Last month, however, the Interior Department said it planned to pay $13.1 million to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based firm that Trump chose because they had previously worked on his golf club’s swimming pools. The NPS documents indicate that the price tag to repaint the Reflecting Pool has more than quintupled since, and now sits at $76 million.

The cost of Trump’s White House ballroom has similarly ballooned over time. Trump pledged last summer that the 90,000-square-foot ballroom wouldn’t cost more than $200 million, and that it would be entirely funded by private donations. That has not been true: By May, the price had doubled to $400 million. The price tag skyrocketed again after an armed gunman attempted to kill Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, with Republican lawmakers insisting that U.S. taxpayers should devote $1 billion to security at the proposed East Wing replacement.

Democratic lawmakers are hoping to force Republicans to remove Bill Pulte from his new side-gig as acting director of national intelligence.

Senator Mark Warner told Senate Majority Leader John Thune to get Pulte removed or risk Democrats withholding their votes for Donald Trump’s long-term extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Punchbowl News reported Wednesday.

FISA expires in just nine days, leaving Republicans with a short window to force Pulte out.

Democrats aren’t alone: Republican lawmakers have also expressed their concerns about Pulte. “Well, we don’t need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there,” Thune told reporters Tuesday.

Pulte has none of the military or intelligence background necessary to lead ODNI. He’s made a name for himself by being Trump’s pitbull, recklessly targeting the president’s political enemies and making himself wildly unpopular in the process.

By positioning Pulte as a dealbreaker for FISA, Democrats believe they’re doing Republicans a favor, Punchbowl News reported. If there’s one thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on, it’s hating Bill Pulte.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered a scathing dissent after the court on Tuesday allowed Alabama Republicans to eliminate one of two majority-Black districts ahead of the midterms.

“Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar. Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians,” Sotomayor wrote in a withering 17-page dissent.

She also noted that the last-minute ruling—sent down just months before midterm elections— would “require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousand[s] of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”

“Just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos,” Sotomayor concluded. “Because I choose to defend the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy, I respectfully dissent.”

The NAACP also sounded off against the decision.

“The Supreme Court continues to unleash chaos in our democratic process, and with this latest action, gives Alabama approval to use a congressional map that had previously been found to be intentionally discriminatory,” general counsel Kristen Clarke said in a statement. “This is a Court that is stripping Black voters of power and voice at a speed that would put Jim Crow jurists to shame. Our message to communities remains the same—the best way to express dissent is by showing up at the ballot box this election season.”

The Supreme Court’s decision will likely force newly elected Black Democratic Representative Shomari Figures out of his seat.

President Trump’s streak of winning primary endorsements came to an end Tuesday night in Iowa.

The president’s pick for governor for the state, Representative Randy Feenstra, narrowly lost to businessman Zach Lahn. Feenstra had been criticized by activists in Iowa for poor campaigning and failing to show up to a single debate, while Lahn had support from the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and picked up a key endorsement from Turning Point Action.

Just two days ago, Trump was bragging on Truth Social about having a “38-0” record, crowing about taking “out many bad Political ‘Leaders’ and Pundits including Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lightweight ‘Congressman’ Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, REALLY DUMB Stephen Colbert of CBS, and others.”

Lahn, a farmer, drew a lot of support in the agriculture-heavy state, and showed the growing power of MAHA among conservatives. He also had the endorsement of former Representative Steve King, a disgraced white nationalist who lost his seat to Feenstra in 2020. Democrats in Iowa, however, feel like the governorship is within reach this year, considering how badly Republicans are polling nationally.

The Democratic nominee for governor, Iowa state auditor Rob Sand, sailed through his primary unopposed, and early polling for November’s general election shows he may have a slight edge, although those polls assumed Feenstra would be the nominee. In any case, Tuesday night’s results in Iowa show that Trump’s endorsement power is limited.

Freshly fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley sounded off on CBS on Tuesday, accusing them of forcing him to report from a politically biased perspective. Pelley was fired after an explosive meeting in which he criticized CBS head Bari Weiss and newly hired executive producer Nick Bilton.

“Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos,” he wrote in a statement. “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.”

Pelley even claimed that politicians had been allowed to choose who they wanted to be interviewed by, and that “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc.”

This all comes after Pelley and Bilton’s confrontation at a staff meeting on Monday, in which Pelley questioned the new hire on firings and told him that Weiss was “murdering” the show.

“You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” Pelley asked Bilton. “Why was Tanya Simon fired? Why was Sharyn fired? Why was Cecilia fired? Why Draggan? Do you know the names of the people that were fired? … We don’t trust you.”

It hasn’t even been a year since Weiss took over CBS, and she’s already fired or alienated some of the longest-tenured reporters at one of the most lauded networks in this country’s history.