What the Hell Was Trump Doing on the White House Roof?

Donald Trump had an interesting morning on Tuesday. At 8 a.m., he took to the airwaves, where he spun a web of lies to justify firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ commissioner for a report indicating a fragile labor market.

He then spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as Trump’s deadline for Russia to take steps toward peace in Ukraine approaches. (The president’s promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office has been broken by nearly 200 days.)

Then Trump took a stroll on the roof of the White House, to the bafflement of reporters below.

Asked what he was doing, Trump said, “Just taking a little walk. It’s good for your health.” Asked what he’s building “up there,” he made a vague gesture that clarified little, possibly in the shape of a dome, and said, “Something beautiful.”

Trump was joined by James McCrery, the architect for the president’s plan to add a $200 million ballroom to the White House, suggesting the possibility of more plans to introduce the president’s “dictator chic” design taste to the People’s House—which has traditionally been modest by design, symbolizing “civic republicanism,” notes scholar Andy Craig.

USA Today suggested Trump’s Tuesday trip to the roof could “be a first for a president.” But this isn’t true. President Carter, for instance, recounts taking visitors up to the White House roof to stargaze and enjoy full privacy in his book A Full Life.

Carter wrote a meditative poem about one such experience, in which he observed geese flying through the dimming sky over Washington. It begins:

I recall one winter night
going to the White House roof
to study the Orion nebulae,
but we could barely see the stars,
their images so paled by city lights.

Unlike Carter, Trump was sure to make himself the center of attention during his visit. His reflections on his experience up there were also less elevated than Carter’s. After disappearing from view for a few minutes Tuesday morning, the president returned, joked that he was building “nuclear missiles,” dodged a question about Gaza, and headed back inside.

The White House has apparently decided that some of the administration’s DOGE-directed firings were a mistake.

The National Weather Service has received permission to hire hundreds of employees, CNN reported Tuesday. That includes 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians to replace the ones that were let go from the agency at the behest of former DOGE chief Elon Musk.

The order also includes 126 openings for “front-line mission critical” personnel that had been previously approved, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official who spoke with CNN.

The agency’s recent shortcomings have come under scrutiny in the aftermath of the Texas floods, which killed at least 120 people, including 35 children.*

Cuts to the department had severed contracts for more than 550 people, dropping the weather service’s staffing levels to below 4,000 total employees and sparking fears that the country could find itself terribly ill prepared amid peak hurricane season. It’s possible that some of the new hires could be former employees brought back to the agency.

NWS employees have been cautiously receptive to the news, which was first announced at an all-hands meeting on Monday, according to CNN. Exhausted staffers who had been tasked with working additional hours with added responsibilities due to the abrupt layoffs are reportedly irate at the realization that their peers’ job loss was pointless.

“How much time/money is it going to cost to train a bunch of new people when we had already-trained people in place?” an unidentified NOAA official told CNN.

It’s not the only recent rescission of Musk’s efforts atop the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management released a memo to employees Tuesday announcing the end of Musk’s extremely controversial email initiative requiring federal employees to document their weekly accomplishments to the department.

Musk and Trump were practically inseparable until the pair fell out over Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which included funds to undo some of DOGE’s work. The world’s richest man—and Trump’s biggest financier—accused the tax plan of being “pork-filled” while promising to torpedo Republicans’ midterm success by funding their opponents’ campaigns. (He failed to sway any Republican votes.)

In the aftermath of the bill, Trump and the tech billionaire unloaded on one another on each of their respective social media platforms, accusing each other of being unlikable, untrustworthy, and even unreal.

* This post originally mischaracterized the NWS response to the Texas flooding.

Donald Trump said that undocumented workers are “naturally” better at farm labor than other people, in an interview on CNBC Tuesday.

“These people—you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work,” Trump said. “These people do it naturally, naturally.”

Trump appeared to acknowledge in the interview that his ruthless mass deportation campaign is hurting farms, which rely on undocumented immigrants as an easily exploitable labor force. He said that he’s planning to release new immigration rules and regulations, claiming, “We’re taking care of our farmers. We can’t let our farmers not have anybody.”

But what about taking care of the workers? No need, as far as Trump is concerned. They’re “naturally” predisposed to backbreaking labor.

“I said … to a farmer the other day, ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back they die.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting isn’t it?’” Trump continued.

“These are, in many ways, very special people.”

It is true that undocumented workers often take unwanted, difficult jobs—but that is not due to being “special” but to a lack of options and a vulnerability to exploitation. Trump’s comments traffic in the exact type of centuries-old racist myths that, by advancing the idea that certain races are made to labor and others are made to rule, promote white supremacy.

This time last year, Donald Trump was swearing through his teeth that he wasn’t affiliated with Project 2025. But little more than half a year into his second administration, the initiative is reportedly already 47 percent complete.

The Project 2025 Tracker, which labels itself as a “comprehensive, community-driven initiative” to follow the implementation of the 900-page far-right manifesto, has counted the progression of 115 “complete” proposals out of the project’s 317 total. Some federal agencies—such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and USAID—have already been entirely reworked according to Project 2025’s goals. Project 2025 had six goals for USAID.

The White House, for which Project 2025 had 13 listed objectives, is currently 92 percent complete, according to the tracker.

Another 64 proposals are currently “in progress,” according to the tracker, including initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the Energy Department, and the Department of Commerce. They include policies that would require federally funded schools to administer military entrance tests to all students, adding citizenship questions to the census, rescinding elements of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, phasing out federal funding for low-income children in schools, classifying K-12 studies relating to “gender ideology” as sexual offenses, allowing companies to skirt overtime pay, and abolishing the Federal Reserve, among dozens of others.

Trump faced enormous blowback from conservatives last summer after he was accused of being tied in with the Heritage Foundation, the christo-nationalist group that drafted the manifesto. But he managed to change the opinion of American voters by lying repeatedly.

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in July 2024. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Since Inauguration Day, Trump has packed his administration with Project 2025 appointees, including its architect, Russell Vought, whom Trump tapped to run the Office of Management and Budget.

The Department of Justice says it wants to release transcripts of grand jury testimony from Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trials. But Maxwell and her legal team, who have been meeting with the Trump administration and are angling for a pardon, filed a response Tuesday opposing the release.

“Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is not,” the court filing begins. “Whatever interest the public may have in Epstein, that interest cannot justify a broad intrusion into grand jury secrecy in a case where the defendant is alive, her legal options are viable, and her due process rights remain.”

According to the filing, Trump’s DOJ said that Maxwell could review the transcripts of her trial’s testimony before they were published but “the Court denied that request.” Because of this, the testimony might contain information that could damage Maxwell’s ongoing legal case, and should be kept secret, the filing argues.

Last month, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Maxwell in an attempt to gain more information about the Epstein case. Those who are skeptical of Trump’s motives worried that Maxwell might lie to clear his name in exchange for a pardon. The administration is still deciding whether it will release the audio of these meetings.

Maxwell is currently petitioning to appeal her case before the Supreme Court and overturn her conviction, arguing that a non-prosecution agreement Epstein made with federal prosecutors in Florida should apply to her conviction.