Trump Seems to Want to Turn D.C. Into a Resort

President Donald Trump doesn’t just want federal control of Washington, D.C., he wants aesthetic control as well—and knowing the president’s garish style, it probably won’t be pretty.

On Friday, Trump said the administration was “looking at doing something very exciting” to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a part of the White House campus that was constructed in the late 1800s. “It’s such a beautiful building, but it doesn’t look it,” Trump said. “I think it’s just incredible, but you have to get past the color, because the stone they used was a really bad color.”

And it won’t stop at the White House: Trump also said that he’s giving out a contract to “beautify” the city, repaving streets and updating lampposts within a three-mile radius of the Capitol Building. “It’s gonna be beautiful, all those lightbulbs—you see the poles, they’re rusting and they’ve got different lenses on top, if you look.… We’re going to have this place beautified,” he said.

This redecoration would require about $2 billion from Congress, according to the president.

Meanwhile, House Republicans still haven’t restored the $1 billion in city funding they blocked earlier this year, holding taxpayer dollars hostage unless the new bill prohibits D.C. residents from spending their own money on things that don’t align with the conservative agenda, like abortion services or reparations.

But gold lampposts (which, if the past is any evidence, could conceivably be part of Trump’s plan) are definitely worth the money! On Thursday, as well, Trump said he wants D.C.’s parks to look like his golf courses.

“I’m very good at grass because I have a lot of golf courses all over the place,” he bragged. “I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world, and we’re going to be re-grassing all of your parks … it’ll look like Augusta. It’ll look like, more importantly, Trump National Golf Club—that’s even better,” he said, referring to Augusta, Georgia, where the Masters Tournament is held.

It seems that the president won’t stop until the whole District has been transformed into Mar-a-Lago.

The Justice Department released transcripts of its interviews with Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell on Friday, the Associated Press reported.

The DOJ interviewed Maxwell as part of its scramble to regain the public’s trust after botching the rollout of the Epstein files. After Attorney General Pam Bondi promised the release of Epstein’s so-called “client list,” she then went on to say the list did not exist.

In the interview, Maxwell reportedly recalled meeting Donald Trump in the early 1990s, when her father, Robert Maxwell, owned the New York Daily News.

“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript.

In the interview, Maxwell did not incriminate anyone, including former President Bill Clinton, Trump, or any other high-level officials. She also maintained that Epstein’s so-called “client list” did not exist.

“There is no list. We’ll start with that,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell’s interview aligns with what Bondi and the Trump administration have claimed about the list, but may disappoint those who expected a bombshell about Epstein’s supposed ties to influential politicians and decision-makers.

Maxwell also took the opportunity to heap praise on Trump. “President Trump was always very cordial and kind to me,” she said. “I just want to say that I find—I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve liked him.”

She also said she “loved going” to Mar-a-Lago.

Of Trump’s relationship with Epstein, she described it as mainly a social one, saying she’d never seen Trump at Epstein’s home or in a private setting. And certainly not getting a massage.

“I actually never saw the president in any sort of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody,” she said.

Maxwell also said she had never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago, contrary to what Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers, said about how she was trafficked by Maxwell in 2000. At 16, Giuffre worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, where she was approached by Maxwell to work as a traveling masseuse, which led to her abuse by Epstein, Maxwell, and their associates, she said. Giuffre died by suicide this year.

Trump, however, has told a different story. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One last month, Trump claimed that Epstein “stole” several of the president’s underage resort employees—including Giuffre.

Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping Epstein traffic underage girls, isn’t necessarily the most trustworthy of sources. She’s angling for a pardon from the president and so would have every reason to downplay any ties between Trump and Epstein, who had a documented multidecade relationship.

It’s yet to be seen whether the transcripts will quiet MAGA’s uproar about the administration’s lack of transparency on the infamous sex trafficker.

This story has been updated.

In Portland, Oregon, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s use of chemical weapons has chased away a K-8 school just weeks before the start of the academic year, Rolling Stone reports.

The Cottonwood School, a publicly funded charter school, was, until this month, located adjacent to the city’s ICE facility. But in recent months, as protests against Trump’s mass deportations ramped up around the facility, ICE agents began to deploy tear gas against demonstrators.

According to the school’s executive director, Laura Cartwright, chemical munitions began to stray onto school grounds.

“At the end of the school year, we started noticing more activity at the ICE building, and there were chemicals being used on a regular basis and munitions being found on our playground,” she told local NBC affiliate KGW.

Cartwright also told Portland’s ABC affiliate that they were finding the munitions on a daily basis.“We were getting footage in the evenings of green gases, and gases being used near our gardens and enveloping our area,” she said.

As Rolling Stone reported, in June, the fence of the school’s play area displayed a laminated message. Its reported content, which matches a statement Cottonwood posted to Facebook, denounced the “harm being inflicted on our neighbors, ecosystem, students and school” and called on ICE to cease using weapons such as tear gas, “‘green’ gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets reported near our campus.”

This isn’t the first time they’ve experienced this, Cartwright told Rolling Stone. The school, after all, weathered protests against police brutality in Portland in 2020. (Per KGW, the school emerged from that summer relatively unscathed.)

Historically, the Cottonwood School has operated “harmoniously with the protesters,” Cartwright explained to Rolling Stone. “Our issue is the chemical weapons being used against them that were impacting our space.… We can’t have children picking up a plastic tear-gas ball that’s going to pop.”

As enrollment began to take a hit and it became clear that remaining in place was untenable, the school ultimately decamped to another Portland neighborhood.

Alina Habba is whining that federal judges aren’t respecting the president after one ruled that she’d been unlawfully serving as acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey for over a month.

“I am the pick of the president, I am the pick of Pam Bondi our attorney general, and I will serve this country like I have for the last several years in any capacity,” Habba said about the challenges to her appointment during an appearance on Fox News Thursday night.

“It’s disturbing what we’re seeing. It’s not surprising, but it’s disturbing,” she continued. “They think they have a voice for five minutes, they try to be activists.

“And Pam Bondi called it like it is. The attorney general said it today: We will not fall to rogue judges. We will not fall to people trying to be political when they should just be doing their job, respecting the president,” Trump’s former lawyer said.

But what Habba and Bondi don’t seem to get is that a judge’s job is to uphold the law, not bend to the president’s every whim.

Last month, New Jersey federal judges ousted Habba, refusing to vote to extend her 120-day appointment as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. But the Trump administration found a loophole to keep its thoughtless foot soldier in place without Senate confirmation. After Bondi fired the first assistant U.S. attorney who was approved to replace her, and then appointed Habba to that position, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer found herself as acting U.S. attorney once again.

A federal judge Thursday ruled that Habba had been illegally serving as U.S. attorney for New Jersey since July 1 and blocked her from prosecuting two criminal cases where defendants had challenged her appointment.

The combination of tariff-driven inflation and a downturn in hiring has posed a “challenging situation” for the U.S. economy, according to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Delivering an annual address in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Friday morning, Powell underscored that the economy was engaged in a “curious kind of balance” from a slowdown in both the supply and demand for workers.

“This unusual situation suggests that downside risks to employment are rising. And if those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment,” Powell warned.

Powell pointed to the July jobs report, which revised employment data from the previous two months. The updated numbers moved the three-month growth average to 35,000, the lowest three-month period since 2010 (other than the pandemic). It was a stark contrast from the growth felt during 2024, when the measure showed an increase of 168,000 jobs per month. The July report’s downsizing also suggested that while some sectors, such as health care and social assistance, gained jobs, the vast majority of the market lost employment.

“This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago, as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially,” Powell continued. “But it does not appear that the slowdown in job growth has opened up a large margin of slack in the labor market—an outcome we want to avoid.

“Indeed, labor force growth has slowed considerably this year with the sharp falloff in immigration, and the labor force participation rate has edged down in recent months,” Powell said.

The Federal Reserve chair also noted that the effects of Trump’s tariffs on consumer prices are “now clearly visible,” and that the country’s central bank expects the price increases to “accumulate over the coming months.”