Deception, Distortion, and Destruction

March 24, 2026. This morning, economist Paul Krugman came right out and said it. People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets. Another word for that, he said, is treason. The evidence for such a claim is the sudden and isolated jump in trading volume in S&P and oil futures about 15 minutes before Trump suddenly announced that the U.S. and Iran were in negotiations to end the war. An announcement that turned out to be false. The oil futures trade alone was worth about $580 million, the Financial Times estimated. As Krugman notes, exploiting confidential information for financial gain, otherwise known as insider trading, is illegal. But exploiting confidential information about national security for private financial gain is something else again. It puts profit-making above Americans' safety. I'd very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning, Krugman wrote. Were they people directly in the know or billionaires, traders, who paid people in the know for tips? There certainly are signs that Trump considers the government his to do with as he wishes to keep himself in wealth and power. In the Washington Post Monday, architecture critic Philip Kennecott examined how Trump is smashing the historic lines and architecture of the national capital. Trump's plan for a gargantuan 90,000 square foot ballroom will dominate the original White House and cut into the lines of the driveway designed a century ago by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. His proposed 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery would be the largest triumphal arch in the world, overshadowing the nearby Lincoln Memorial. His proposed National Garden of American Heroes, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Tidal Basin, would take the park near monuments dedicated to Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delana Roosevelt and to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and fill it with hastily made statues to show biz stars, folk heroes, and sports celebrities. By stuffing oversight panels with his own cronies, Trump has destroyed the process of design review intended to preserve Washington as a city whose layout and design reflects the simplicity, dignity, and majesty of the American people. Yesterday, the White House began the process of ripping the beige Tennessee flagstone pavers out of the West Colonnade that connects the Oval Office and West Wing to the executive residence. Trump wants to replace them with black granite, which will contrast more effectively with the gold dudads and the gold-framed portraits in the presidential walk of fame Trump has installed along the walk. Trump's vision of the U.S. is one tied to fossil fuels, leading the administration to declare war on renewable energy. On Monday, it announced it will pay $928 million in taxpayer money to the large French energy company Total Energies to buy back leases it acquired under the Biden administration to build two wind farms, one off New York and the other off North Carolina. Total Energies will then invest that money in U.S. oil and gas projects, including one in Texas that will export liquefied natural gas. The era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable, and unsecure energy is officially over, and the era of affordable, reliable, and secure energy is here to stay, said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, told Maxine Jocelyn and Brad Plummer of the New York Times, Our state has the offshore wind potential to power millions of homes with renewable American-made energy. It's ludicrous and wasteful that the Trump administration is spending a billion dollars in taxpayer money to pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need. Meanwhile, as airport lines grow because of the ongoing shutdown that means transportation security administration or TSA agents aren't getting paid, Trump yesterday sent in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE agents, to 14 airports in 11 cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Phoenix, Cleveland, Fort Myers, New Orleans, and New York City. While CNN's Brian Stelter speculated that Trump got the idea for putting ICE agents in the airports from Linda from Arizona, who called in to the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show last Friday, Trump ally Steve Bannon suggested on his podcast War Room yesterday that we can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE's involvement in the 2026 midterms. Jacob Knotson of Democracy Docket noted that Trump's deployment of ICE agents to airports showed both that he sees them as his own personal law enforcement agents and that he is willing to deploy them in situations that are not related to their actual job description. Democratic senators have tried repeatedly to get Senate Republicans to agree to fund all the Department of Homeland Security except ICE, the agency responsible for the violence in Minnesota that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretty. For those, Democrats have demanded reforms. But Trump has kept pressure on Republican leaders not to pass such a measure, instead demanding that Senate Majority Leader John Thune kill the filibuster to pass legislation without the votes of Democrats. On Sunday, Trump posted that he would not agree to any funding proposal unless Democrats also agreed to support the so-called Save America Act, which would require voters to show not just ID but also proof of citizenship, would end mail-in voting, and would attack the rights of transgender Americans. After the Senate confirmed former Senator Mark Wayne Mullen late yesterday as Secretary of Homeland Security, replacing former Secretary Kristi Noem, Republicans offered to Democrats a measure that funded DHS without funding ICE but made no reforms to the agency. To fund ICE and perhaps to pass pieces of the Save America Act, they plan to use the process of budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered and thus can be used to pass measures without any Democratic support. Democrats rejected the Republicans' offer, noting that Republicans have blocked eight different Democratic attempts to fund everything in the Department of Homeland Security other than ICE and Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, the parent agency for Border Patrol. The Democrats will make another offer. Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington, who has vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is central to the talks, said Trump's demands have made negotiations difficult and added, We've been very clear that if we're talking about funding any part of ICE and CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in. The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that. Reforms must make it into law. The Save America Act Trump wants is pretty openly a voter suppression measure. Being by undocumented immigrants is already virtually non-existent and it is already illegal. And the Brookings Institution reported in 2025 that only about four cases of mail fraud occur per 10 million mail-in ballots, or .00043% of total mail ballots cast. Republicans are using the idea of voter fraud to argue for measures that could toss more than 21 million Americans off the voter rolls. There is a special irony in Trump attacking mail-in voting as fraudulent. Bill Barrow of the Associated Press reported today that Trump voted by mail in Tuesday's elections in Florida. State House spokesperson Olivia Wales explained Trump's position, saying that, The Save America Act has common sense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel. But universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it's highly susceptible to fraud. In today's special legislative elections in Florida, Democrat Emily Gregory flipped the House District in which the Trump organization's Mar-a-Lago sits. The district went for Trump by 11% in 2024. Gregory, a business owner and a military spouse, defeated a Republican who received Trump's complete and total endorsement in January. At an election night party, Gregory told her supporters, When we started this, nobody thought it was possible. They thought we were crazy. I knew my community. I knew we deserved better. We deserve a leader who will fight for us. Gregory told CNN's Erin Burnett that she did not focus on Trump, but focused on her Republican opponent and the issues that matter most to Florida families. Everyone is feeling that affordability crisis, and the last thing that Florida families needed when they're struggling, is $4 gas, she explained. Trump's niece, psychologist Mary Trump, posted, The Democrats just flipped a statehouse seat in the district where Donald committed voter fraud by casting his ballot illegally by mail. Tonight, Eric Schmidt of the New York Times reported that the Pentagon has ordered to the Middle East about 2,000 military personnel from the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division, trained to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. About 2,500 Marines from the 31st Expeditionary Unit will arrive in the region later this week. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.