Trump Accidentally Damages Monument in Renovation Rampage

It looks like President Donald Trump’s sweeping construction projects have damaged yet another national monument.

A fountain in the German-American Friendship Garden on the National Mall is in bad shape after a contractor vehicle drove over it, Newsweek reported Thursday.

The center of the fountain has collapsed into the ground, and stones surrounding it were severely cracked, according to recent photographs captured by photojournalist Andrew Leyden. Repairs are reportedly underway.

This recent damage to a national monument comes amid Trump’s sweeping renovation efforts around Washington, D.C. This isn’t the first time that federal contractors hired by the Trump administration have damaged a historic landmark.

Just a few hundred yards away from the cracked fountain, renovations on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool have been disastrous. Shortly after construction was completed, large sections of the pool’s new blue lining began to peel off. Experts have suggested the peeling was the result of shoddy application—not shadowy vandals, as administration officials have suggested. 

Trump’s disastrous renovations on the Reflecting Pool have already cost taxpayers more than $16 million. The iconic monument has been left drained, surrounded by chain-link fences, and under strict surveillance. 

A short walk away, the $69 million worth of renovations on the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft have also had issues. The National Parks Service has struggled to maintain safe conditions to display historical documents, leading them to be removed from the brand-new exhibit last week.  

Newly minted Senator Darline Graham, stepping in for her recently deceased brother Lindsey, only has one political donation on record—and it was to a South Carolina state senator who helped kill an abortion ban. 

The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday that Graham in 2020 donated $100 to state Senator Katrina Shealy, who is perhaps best known for filibustering the state’s near-total abortion ban in 2023. 

Shealy was part of South Carolina’s “sister senators,” a group of five female state lawmakers—two Republicans, a Democrat, and an independent— who were in staunch opposition to the ban. Shealy lost her primary the next year, largely due to this vote. 

Graham tried to bury the news of her ties to Shealy, writing in a statement on X on Wednesday that she believed in “protecting the sanctity of human life at every stage.”

“For years, I’ve committed my life to fighting for vulnerable populations, and no one is more vulnerable than an unborn child who cannot speak for themselves,” she wrote. “As a mother, I know that welcoming children into this world is God’s greatest gift. I’m proud to be pro-life and to stand up for the unborn and expecting moms. I will not waver in my support for life, pregnant women, and families.”

The MAGA-verse doesn’t seem to buy it. 

“Darline Graham Nordone is good friends with Katrina Shealy, the disgraced former South Carolina state senator who is PRO-ABORTION and OPPOSED the Heartbeat bill,” one conservative X account commented. “Darline even donated money to her campaign.”

“I’m going to ask @LIFEforSC to not consider her for the coveted ‘incumbent endorsement.’ She is fully unproven. She backed pro-abortion Senator Katrina Shealy. Vote @RalphNorman,” said another, referring to the representative who announced last week that he’d be running for Lindsey Graham’s seat in the August 11 special election. 

“You donated to Healy who is pro abortion and was against the heartbeat bill.  So either you are NOT pro life or you dont know who you are supporting,” wrote yet another. “Both are disqualifying.”

Graham has not fully explained her donation to Shealy. PBS reported that the two women are in fact good friends and often share wine on each other’s porches. 

And while Graham cast herself as a hard-line conservative in the same mold as her brother, this recent revelation may lead to more problems for her in the future as she runs for her own six-year term after finishing his current one. 

Four Republicans joined every Democrat in the House of Representatives Thursday to pass a war powers resolution to rein in President Trump on the Iran war. 

The resolution passed 214-208, with Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Tom Barrett of Michigan voting yes. 

It joins a concurrent resolution in the Senate proposed by Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen on Thursday which would block Trump from military action in Iran without congressional approval. Van Hollen’s resolution only needs a simple majority to pass in the Senate, which could be likely with Republican absences, such as Mitch McConnell, who has been hospitalized for over a month. 

The resolutions have heightened importance due to the reignition of hostilities with Iran in recent weeks, with the U.S. resuming airstrikes against the country while Iran launches missiles at oil refineries and U.S. military targets around the Middle East. On Thursday, Trump threatened to expand the war to Yemen after the country’s Houthi militia began carrying out attacks in the Red Sea. 

This is the second time the House has passed a war powers resolution, following a June 3 vote where the same four Republican representatives joined Democrats to curtail the Iran war. The Senate joined them three weeks later, but then reversed its vote following pressure from Donald Trump.   

Will the Senate join the House in trying to rein in Trump, or will they allow more civilian deaths and economic damage from the renewed war? 

This story has been updated. 

A Republican state delegate and teacher from West Virginia has been charged with seducing a 15-year-old girl who is a student at his school.

Investigators have accused David Elliott Pritt of using Snapchat and the multiplayer game Roblox to start talking to the girl outside of school during the 2024–2025 school year, when she was in eighth grade. At the end of that year, he allegedly told the child that he “loved her,” and sent her a picture of himself in pajama pants and asked for pictures of her in return. When the girl replied with normal pictures, Pritt requested more explicit ones, and she obliged. Pritt eventually enticed the girl to repeatedly have sex with him in the classroom, and they continued to exchange explicit photographs up until just this month.

Pritt was reported to police by the girl’s family on July 9, and calls for his resignation were raised immediately from both sides of the aisle.

“The West Virginia House of Delegates simply will not tolerate conduct that even approaches what is alleged in the public filings released by federal law enforcement today,” West Virginia House Speaker Roger Hanshaw said. “I urge Elliott Pritt, for the benefit of his family and the people of his District, to spare his students and his colleagues at every level the continued embarrassments and distractions and to resign from elected office as soon as he is able.”

The West Virginia GOP also said Pritt should resign, calling the allegations “shocking, sickening, and deeply disturbing.” What makes this horrific matter even worse is that in his legislative career, Pritt has earned political capital from his supposed opposition to the sexual abuse of minors. He offered perhaps the most spirited, emotional defense of Raylee’s Law, a bill that would force the state to stop removing students who are the subjects of child abuse investigations from school, stating then that “we have an opportunity here tonight to do something to protect children.” And when Pritt won his delegate seat in 2022, he beat an incumbent, Austin Haynes, who was accused of sexual harassment—saying that Haynes’s loss was a “moral decision” that West Virginia voters made.

“No one is perfect, but there are some mistakes and lapses in character and judgment that just cannot be overlooked or ‘go away,’” Pritt said about Haynes at the time.

House Republicans are trying to file criminal charges against former special counsel Jack Smith.

Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a criminal referral for Smith to the Department of Justice Wednesday, urging the department to investigate Smith for making false statements to Congress during congressional testimony in December.

At issue is a line of questioning in which Smith was asked whether he sought a search warrant for the content of text messages from members of Congress, to which Smith replied that he did not. Last week, Senator Chuck Grassley posted on X that he had “received records [from] DOJ confirming Jack Smith’s investigative team reviewed the contents of text msgs sent by 44 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS.”

But Grassley’s post and the questions Smith was asked were two different categories of documents, as legal experts such as Lawfare’s Anna Bower and Politico’s Kyle Cheney pointed out on X. Smith requested information from Congress on toll records, which concerned the time and date of text messages, not their content.

There was a separate instance in which Smith’s team gathered text messages from the National Archives from White House phones. Some of those records included exchanges with members of Congress. But Republicans never asked about that.

“[T]here’s zero ambiguity here,” Bower said. “Nothing in the Grassley docs raises any real question of perjury.”

House Democrats quickly responded to Jordan’s letter Wednesday. Representative Jamie Raskin called Jordan’s letter a “baseless and vindictive criminal referral” that “deliberately distorts and misstates the facts, including what questions the Republicans actually asked at Mr. Smith’s interview.”

Smith’s lawyers have also responded to Jordan’s letter with one of their own, saying his accusations are based on a “spurious claim.”

“The referral is made not because Mr. Smith made a false statement, which the letter concedes, but because he did not proactively disclose information that was not responsive to a question asked,” Smith’s lawyers wrote. “During his testimony, Mr. Smith provided truthful, responsive answers and candidly discussed his work.”