Is Donald Trump Shrinking? An Investigation.

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Donald Trump’s presence loomed large over FIFA’s World Cup Finals on Sunday—but footage from the event has sparked speculation that the president’s actual stature may be smaller than he claims.

For years, Trump has claimed to be six feet, three inches tall. His past two annual physical reports, published in April 2025 and April 2026, confirmed this, asserting that the president is 75 inches tall—equal to six feet, three inches.

But a video shared Sunday on social media by the White House showed Rodrigo Hernández Cascante, the six-foot-three captain of Spain’s national football team known as Rodri, towering over Trump. If both men are supposedly the same height, why does Trump appear so much shorter?

Considering soccer cleats only add about an inch maximum of height, it seems unlikely Rodri’s footwear is responsible for the difference. In the video, Trump appears much closer in height to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who is reportedly only five feet, 11 inches tall.

The debate about Trump’s height has been going on for decades. In 1999, Trump told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times that his seemingly diminutive stature was merely a trick of the camera. “I photograph short. I’m six foot three,” he said.

As recently as last month, the president appeared much shorter than Republican Senator John Thune, who is widely reported to be six feet, four inches tall. In response to those photographs, The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles suggested that Trump was actually getting shorter. “He’s shrinking into the giant shrimp that Steve Bannon said that he was,” Coles said. “I think that Donald Trump is literally shrinking as we see him.”

It’s certainly not impossible. It’s a scientific fact that people can get shorter as they age, and last month, Trump officially became an octogenarian. Still, the president clearly feels the need to lie about his height, when Americans can see for themselves that the president just doesn’t measure up.

The Trump administration’s case against the former Olympic canoeist accused of damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is about to fall apart.

Following the draining of the Reflecting Pool last week, David Hearn filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictment against him. In his motion, Hearn argued that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia failed to preserve the physical evidence against him: the lining of the pool that he is accused of damaging.

Hearn’s attorneys said in their motion that they had made a written request for federal prosecutors to preserve the evidence, but the pool has repeatedly been drained more than once since his arrest, and large sections of the liner are missing.

The case against Hearn has always been weak, considering that other people have noticed sections of the pool’s paint and lining, applied on President Trump’s orders, coming apart and peeling. Hearn is accused of “forcefully and violently” tearing two square feet of the pool’s newly added blue paint, and he maintains that he merely touched an already peeling piece of paint.

Trump has blamed vandalism for the sorry state of the pool, when in reality the addition of hydrogen peroxide to the water in a futile attempt to kill algae probably led to the paint and liner peeling away. The judge in the case, D.C. Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean, rebuffed the government’s attempt to bar Hearn from the pool earlier this month, in effect recognizing the case’s weakness.

Meanwhile, the White House has enlisted the FBI to bolster the case, but considering that the pool has been repeatedly drained, they’re not likely to come up with any new evidence, wasting even more tax dollars. Over $14 million has already been spent on the Reflecting Pool, and that number can only be growing as it seems to get worse every day.

President Trump has installed yet another statue in the Rose Garden as part of his massive overhaul of the White House grounds.

Anonymous sources told The Washington Post that a life-size bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson last week joined Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and a “Freedom’s Charge” statue depicting the Revolutionary War. The Jefferson statue, which was sculpted by George Lundeen and shows the former president seated next to the Declaration of Independence, has yet to be announced.

The Franklin, Hamilton, and “Freedom’s Charge” statues were loaned by conservative activist, billionaire real estate mogul, and Republican donor Harlan Crow. The White House has only said the statues come from “generous private American patriots.”

Trump reportedly privately called Lundeen to thank him for the new addition to the Rose Garden. “When you’re a farm boy from the middle of Nebraska, it’s kind of neat to get a call from the president,” said Lundeen, who also built a seven-foot statue of Trump for his West Palm Beach golf club based on his “fight, fight, fight” moment after his assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “You get a call like that, and you don’t know if it is one of your buddies playing a trick on you. If it’s a hoax, it’s a really good one.”

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the president’s recent statuary efforts.

“All told, the statues dating to his second term are of negligible artistic value,” Maxwell Anderson, the former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, told the Post. “President Trump’s embrace of an official classicizing style in art and architecture finds its closest equivalent in authoritarian regimes.”

From the entire East Wing of the White House to the Reflecting Pool disaster, to these pointless statues that no regular people will ever see, it’s clear that the president’s priorities lie more in decor than in governance.

The Food and Drug Administration was wrong about the culprit of the diarrhea outbreak that has swept the country.

The FDA initially announced Friday that iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms had tested positive for cyclospora, a parasite that can cause explosive bowel movements. Within 24 hours, however, the agency walked back its determination, claiming that the original lettuce sample was a false positive.

“FDA has notified Taylor Farms and continues working with the firm to ensure product implicated in this outbreak has been removed from the market,” the FDA stated on its website.

In their own statement Sunday, Taylor Farms said that the FDA had “apologized” for the error and that the agency “has not identified a single positive product test result for cyclospora” from its offerings. But on Monday, the FDA denied that it had offered the company any such apology.

But the damage had already been done: Taco Bell, one of Taylor Farms biggest clients, said in a statement Friday that it would move away from using the brand due to public health concerns.

Taylor Farms is one of the largest fresh-produce suppliers in the country, providing products to Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger, SYSCO, Aldi, Target, and Dollar General. It also sells food for private label brands such as Whole Foods’ “365” line, and offers assembly-line products for a slew of fast food chains including McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Subway, and more.

Taylor Farms said that it had recalled all of the shredded iceberg  lettuce that had been grown and processed in central Mexico out of an “abundance of caution.”

“While the FDA traceback is indicating a specific independent farm, which represents less than 1% of the U.S.’s iceberg lettuce supply, as the potential source of the outbreak, we have removed all iceberg lettuce from the region indefinitely,” the company said Friday in a statement. 

Yet Taylor Farms de Mexico—a direct subsidiary of the company—is still implicated in the cyclospora outbreak, according to FoodFix newsletter writer Helena Bottomiller Eviche. Eviche noted that the FDA’s false positive had stemmed from lettuce that came over the border from Mexico and that was not a part of the original recall.

“If that positive had been accurate, it would have meant more lettuce needed to be recalled,” Eviche wrote on X, adding that the whole situation was a “public health communications nightmare.”

Since the beginning of May, the CDC has confirmed 1,645 cases of cyclosporiasis and is investigating 5,100 more, though the agency noted that most cases have likely gone unreported. Still, both totals are substantially higher than normal: this time last year, just 249 cases had been reported. So far, 141 cases have been hospitalized, and no one has died from the disease.

This story has been updated.

Forget writing a check you can’t cash; President Donald Trump is escalating a war that the U.S. military can’t wage.

Trump has made it more than clear that he’s done negotiating with Tehran, after the U.S. military launched yet another wave of strikes against Iran Saturday in retribution for the deaths of at least two U.S. military service members in Jordan. (A third service member is missing after the strikes.) Clearly, the ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. is over—and there’s no sign that the U.S. plans to turn back.

“The U.S. is planning for a wider war,” one U.S. official familiar with the matter told The Washington Post Monday. The official warned that U.S. military operations would be kneecapped by dwindling stockpiles of air defense and long-range munitions, as well as widespread damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

“We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” the official added.

A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published in May estimated it will take until at least 2030 to restore the U.S. missile stockpile to prewar levels, leaving a multiyear “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts.

Since that study was published, the United States has only continued to execute military strikes, and Trump’s war against Iran has racked up a total estimated bill of more than $100 billion. U.S. Central Command said that the latest series of strikes had “successfully hit Iranian military coastal surveillance and air defense facilities, maritime capabilities, and missile and drone storage sites.” Iran also claimed that the U.S. attacked a nuclear power plant in a “dangerous assault on Iran’s peaceful infrastructure.”

So far, at least 17 American service members have been killed in the war.