I Had to Draw Trump In Swim Trunks

And more news

He’s ready to swim in the Reflecting Pool that he plans to throw money at, money that Americans could use. For fun, I hand-held my iPhone to film the drawing emerge—it’s a really rough brush ink and watercolor sketch. It’s at the bottom of this post.

Trump is going to China to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the first such visit by a president in about a decade. It’s not a friendly visit, rather it has the feeling of a show-down of two very stubborn leaders. According to Jonathan Karl of ABC, they plan to discuss Taiwan, Artificial Intelligence and Iran. Trump wants China to cut off Iranian trade. China wants the Strait of Hormuz to open.

After waiting for Iran’s response for a week, Trump has “firmly” rejected Iran’s response to the US plan to end the war, calling it “completely unacceptable.” With Trump going to China today, it’s not clear what will happen but I really do not have any faith in Trump’s negotiation abilities. He’d rather Putin take care of it all.

Trump is now moving forward with plans for an “election integrity army” that would reportedly operate across all 50 states ahead of the midterms. This is worrisome.

Democrats are scheming ways to void last week’s shocking ruling by Virigina’s Supreme Courty, nullifying the will of the people that threw out the voting distict map they approved. From a Talking Point Memo report, quoting The Downballot: Send the entire court into early retirement. If the legislature could use the law on the books to lower the retirement age (and it seems possible according to this report), then the entire court would have to retire, a new one installed and they would revisit the recent case that is so controversial. Read about this plan here. I say, why not try. But the Dems might not have the stomach for such an aggressive tactic, and Governor Spanburger (D) would have to sign off on it.

Trump’s plan to clean up and paint the Capitol’s Mall reflecting pool (which does not need cleaning up nor painting) will cost $13.1 million. He says it is urgent, for saftey reasons. The government awarded that firm a no-bid contract last month, bypassing the requirement to seek competing offers by saying that the situation was so urgent that any delay would cause “serious injury” to the government. This is much more expensive than Trump previously said, and the urgency is that he wants it done before the nation’s 250th birthday. A nonprofit dedicated to landscape architecture filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington seeking to halt the paint job. The Cultural Landscape Foundation said that “the Trump administration had ignored a law requiring advance scrutiny of projects that alter historic landmarks.”

The foundation said in its lawsuit that “every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered.”

SOMEONE STOP HIM.

I guess that’s us.

Thanks for being here! Have a good Monday and I will see you tomorrow.