DOJ Declares Trump Has Right to Bulldoze Statue of Liberty

Why in the world did the Department of Justice just declare that President Donald Trump has the right to demolish the Statue of Liberty?

During oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington Friday, lawyers for the DOJ presented the government’s case for continuing construction on Trump’s increasingly expensive White House ballroom without the approval of Congress.

In order to demonstrate Trump’s supposedly far-reaching power to destroy and alter national monuments at whim, the DOJ lawyers claimed that if the president wanted to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty in New York, there would be no one with the standing to challenge him.

“If the government decides very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, the people whose ancestors—that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast—nothing can be done?” Judge Patricia Millett asked, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

“I think that’s right, yes,” the government responded.

The Statue of Liberty, like the White House, is managed by the National Park Service. Demolishing it would require legislative approval and rigorous public and regulatory review under the National Historic Preservation Act.

This argument features in the DOJ’s primary claim that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the group behind the lawsuit, has no standing to challenge the construction. The DOJ also argued that construction on the ballroom can’t actually be stopped by the courts, and could only be stopped by Congress.

All of this further illustrates just how powerful the Trump administration believes itself to be: Its modus operandi is simply to break our nation’s laws with such speed that no one can stop it.

It was always pretty naive to think the ultrarich individuals donating to Donald Trump’s $400 million ballroom project were doing so out of the goodness of their hearts.

A new report from the nonprofit government watchdog Public Citizen has calculated that 14 ballroom donors have raked in more than $50 billion combined in government contracts over the last six months. For reference, that’s more than the GDP of countries such as Iceland and Senegal.

Not only is the federal government enriching ballroom donors like Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Nvidia, but it is also actively getting them out of legal trouble. Sixteen of the 27 donors, including the companies listed above, are presently involved in some form of federal litigation, including antitrust reviews, securities charges, and labor disputes.

But, since you can essentially just bribe the federal government right now, some donors’ charges have now been dropped or reduced by Trump’s Department of Justice.

“This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it,” Democratic Representative Mike Levin wrote on X Thursday. “You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed he needs a new ballroom for security purposes, and has also tried to allocate at least $220 million in taxpayer dollars to the project. (Senate Republicans, likely realizing the unpopularity of the project, eventually scrapped the idea.)

Still, the Trump administration continues to lash out at unbelievers. “The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests, would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told The Washington Post. “The donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.”

If that’s the case, though, why not name these upstanding individuals and corporations? The White House has a fundraising contract that allows for the names of donors to be censored. Trump’s team publicly announced only 21 corporate donors; journalists have since uncovered six more.

“The White House won’t even release the full donor list,” Levin concluded. “They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive.”

House Republicans, joined by four Democrats, voted Thursday to cut food aid for pregnant women and children.

The House passed a bill 213–210 that reduced funding for the Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies. The bill includes a $141 million cut to food and vegetable benefits in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which help pregnant and postpartum women and children.

Five Republicans voted against the bill, while Democratic Representatives Donald Davis, Adam Gray, Vicente Gonzalez, and Marie Glusenkamp Perez voted for it, ensuring it passed the chamber. The Senate still has to pass the appropriations measure before it heads to President Trump’s desk.

The $141 million cut estimate comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Another organization, the National WIC Association, estimates that fruit and vegetable benefits would drop from $52 to $13 for nursing mothers and from $26 to $10 for young children.

House Republicans attempted to justify the move, with Representative Andy Harris, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, saying that there’s more than enough agriculture funding left over for the WIC program, claiming that data “clearly shows” that participation in WIC has gone down this fiscal year.

“With lowered participation estimates and increased carryover funding, $8 billion will fully fund the program,” Harris told The Washington Post. “Let me say it one more time.… WIC is fully funded. No woman or their children will lose or be denied coverage.”

Three of the Democrats who voted for the cuts, Gray, Gonzalez, and Perez, are members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, and Perez has a reputation for often voting against her party. But it’s puzzling why fruit and vegetable assistance for mothers and children was deemed acceptable to cut, especially during an economic crunch. It’s highly likely that WIC enrollment will go up in the coming months, and now, fruits and vegetables will be more expensive.

The Trump administration had plans to falsely declare 2.7 million people dead as part of the president’s cruel mass deportation efforts, The Washington Post reported Friday.

A 49-page whistleblower disclosure reviewed by the Post detailed how the White House plotted to add the names and Social Security numbers of millions of living, breathing people to the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, or DMF, which is used to track when a person has died and should stop receiving government benefits.

Whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at the Social Security Administration for 25 years before leaving in October, told the Post that he’d refused to implement the plan. Schofield said that when he pulled a sample from the 2.7 million names, he found that all of the people marked for death were still alive. Agency lawyers had warned that falsely marking someone as dead could violate federal law, and Schofield realized that the plan’s purpose was to terrorize immigrants.

Schofield described one meeting in which a DOGE official revealed the goal of such a cruel plan: to make immigrants so miserable that they would self-deport or try to visit a Social Security office, where they could be arrested.

“That call was one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” Schofield told the Post. “I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

The Trump administration previously moved more than 6,000 immigrants to the DMF last year.

Being wrongly moved to the DMF can have far-ranging effects, as people will no longer be able to access their bank accounts or use their credit cards. The SSA’s website says that the effects of being wrongly included in the DMF can be “devastating to the individual, spouse, and dependent children.”

John Fetterman has once again handed President Trump and Republicans a victory, as the embattled Democratic senator allowed Trump’s pick for a Pennsylvania federal judge to move along in the nomination process—waiving his right to block the nomination through the blue slip process.

Now former federal prosecutor Antonio Pozos will likely be the judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania until he dies. This is the first time in Trump’s second term that a Senate Democrat has turned in a “blue slip” and given up their right to oppose one of Trump’s judicial picks.

“These are not normal times, and any senator who thinks that this is standard operating procedure and that any of these nominations are normal course of operations is deluding themselves,” Demand Justice president Josh Orton told Punchbowl News. “If Democrats truly believe that we have to stand up to Trump’s attacks on the rule of law, they have to do so in every room—not just on Twitter and not just on TV.”

Fetterman has made it his M.O. to do the opposite of what progressive Democrats are doing any chance he gets. He’s been one of the most outspoken advocates for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, wants the deadly and expensive war on Iran and Lebanon to continue, and voted to confirm Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.