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Most romantic reality TV would have us believe that dating is about getting married, or simply being chosen. One show knows better.

From The New Yorker 

President Donald Trump can be unpredictable. He changes his mind based on who last talked with him. He has no real interest in the day-to-day work of running the federal government.

But beneath the chaos, he does have a governing philosophy.

The ongoing debacle of the Reflecting Pool has been a helpful distillation of his approach: Make a big promise, use it to reward your allies, blame setbacks on your opponents, criminalize dissent and then attack the press.

The first three steps are fairly common in politics, especially among populists with little experience in government. But it’s the last two that turn Trump into something more than just a run-of-the-mill incompetent politician.

Authoritarianism often begins with the habit of treating ordinary problems as criminal conspiracies. A court strikes down his policy, and he calls the judge “crooked” or “corrupt.” A protest escalates, and he calls the protesters “paid agitators.”

If an authoritarian government cannot accept criticism, then it has to label critics enemies. If it cannot admit a mistake, then it has to blame sabotage. And if it cannot accept failure, then it has to find someone to punish.

The fact that Trump used these tactics on the Reflecting Pool may be comical, but it’s also ominous.

Earlier this week, federal officers arrested multiple people at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after Trump blamed “vandals” for damage to the newly renovated monument.

So far, the only one we know is facing charges is a former Olympian who says he simply stopped during a bike ride, reached down and touched a piece of blue coating that had already peeled away from the bottom of the pool.

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Olympian arrested after touching Reflecting Pool speaks out

June 22, 2026 / 09:53

The framers of the Constitution understood that those in power have a tendency to see critics as enemies. That’s precisely why they built a system designed to restrain power rather than indulge it. That concern was not theoretical then and it is not theoretical now.

That’s why this story does not end with an algae-filled Reflecting Pool. It ends with ordinary Americans in handcuffs, extra fencing around a Washington landmark and National Guard members standing nearby, as though they were protecting a target of terrorism. 

And that is the progression that should concern us all.

Once ordinary politics is treated as criminality, the machinery of government inevitably follows. It does not stop at protecting a president’s narrative. It begins policing the people who challenge it. 

We’ve already seen this administration deploy troops against protesters. We’ve seen federal law enforcement increasingly drawn into political disputes. We’ve heard journalists cast as enemies rather than watchdogs, and political opponents portrayed as criminals in need of investigation and prosecution instead of as competitors.

The Reflecting Pool is simply the latest reminder that, in Trump’s Washington, the line between politics and criminality is growing dangerously thin. That’s because the common thread is not just inflammatory rhetoric. It is the growing weaponization of government against ordinary political activity and the ordinary people who engage in it.

When a president begins treating ordinary politics as criminality, it does not stay rhetorical for long. 

Eventually, someone gets investigated. Someone gets detained. Someone gets arrested. 

Trump spent years warning Americans about the weaponization of the government. The Reflecting Pool is the latest suggestion that we should take those warnings seriously — just not in the way he intended. 

The real warning was not about the people he accused. It was about how he would act when he got back in power.

Don’t forget to subscribe to “MS NOW Presents: Clock It,” Symone Sanders Townsend’s new podcast series with Eugene Daniels on the latest political news, the catchiest cultural moments and how they converge. Listen to the latest episode here.

The post The Reflecting Pool shows Trump’s warnings of a weaponized government were really threats appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.

For half a century, Watergate has been the quintessential American scandal, so much so that we frequently affix “-gate” to new episodes of official wrongdoing in an attempt to make it sound significant and sinister. 

But what if, asked Vice President JD Vance, we consider Watergate no big deal? Or even better, why not decide that former President Richard Nixon, our pre-Trump model of corruption and abuse of office, was not the perpetrator of Watergate but its victim?

“I’m actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history,” Vance said at an appearance this week at the Nixon Library in California. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so. As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

Vance continued: “And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”

Rewriting history is a longtime hobby of American conservatives, both to absolve them of their sins and reshape the American mind to align with their values. For instance, the “Lost Cause” counternarrative of the Civil War, which portrays the Confederacy’s treasonous slavery advocates into noble men simply defending their homes, continues to this day, with the Trump administration renaming military bases and erecting statues to honor those traitors. And Trump has convinced much of his party to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the Jan. 6 insurrection was merely a largely peaceful protest carried out by true patriots.

Watergate has been part of this revisionist project since the day Nixon resigned the presidency. Nixon’s legal arguments against having to hand over Oval Office tapes to investigators, though unsuccessful at the time, became crucial to the development of the unitary executive theory, championed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Roberts court’s conservative majority holds. Most recently, prominent figures on the right, including Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Christopher Rufo, have argued that Watergate was all a set-up by the “deep state” to frame Nixon, who was innocent. Vance has now joined their number. 

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‘30 Watergates happening weekly’: Rep. Ansari blasts ‘corrupt’ Trump White House

June 26, 2026 / 08:25

Remember: Watergate was far more than just a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Washington office/apartment complex that gave the scandal its name. The burglary merely led to the exposure of the rot within the Nixon administration: a mountain of criminal acts from money laundering to obstruction of justice to multiple additional break-ins to a shocking abuse of government power.

At one point, White House counsel John Dean, who later located his conscience and told the public what he had seen and done, penned a memo for other White House officials exploring “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The White House tapes recorded Nixon personally committing criminal acts, including making a plan to order the CIA to quash the FBI’s investigation of the break-in at the Watergate (the so-called “smoking gun” recording).

In the end, dozens of people in Nixon’s administration and political orbit pled guilty or were convicted of crimes. Those sent to prison included the attorney general, the White House chief of staff and the president’s chief domestic policy adviser.

In a twisted sense, Vance is almost right about the “deep state,” since he and other MAGA figures use that term to refer to civil servants who are loyal to the country rather than to whatever corrupt scheme President Donald Trump wants to recruit them for. But they didn’t frame Nixon; they exposed him. During Watergate, the president and his top aides pressed multiple government officials, including some appointed by Nixon himself, to do things they knew were illegal or unethical. Those officials simply refused; some, like Dean, went public. 

That is similar to what happened in Trump’s first administration: Again and again, officials refused to go along with his corrupt schemes; some of them testified before Congress in his first impeachment or before the Jan. 6 committee. But in Trump’s second administration, the president and his closest advisers have ensured that no one with any integrity will be around to object. 

Congress passed a raft of post-Watergate laws and set up new systems intended to restrain the presidency and make government more transparent, less corrupt and more accountable. Trump has systematically set out to destroy them, firing inspectors general, weakening civil service protections, defying the laws he doesn’t like and turning the Department of Justice into his personal machine of political revenge. 

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WH CRIME? JD Vance’s UNHINGED Trump defense embraces NIXON’S illegal WATERGATE?! 

June 26, 2026 / 08:49

After Watergate, we were told that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” It wasn’t actually true — the cover-up was appalling, but it was preceded by a whole series of atrocious crimes.  Trump, however, decided not to even bother with the cover-up. If you don’t try to hide your corruption, lawmakers won’t be as shocked. And if your own party controls Congress, they’ll be too terrified of your voters to hold you accountable.

So when Vance says Watergate would be a one-day story today, he isn’t just observing; he’s boasting. He’s saying: Look what MAGA has done to American politics and media. Look how we have normalized corruption and degraded systems of accountability. We can do whatever we want. 

For now, they can. Which is why we’ll need a raft of post-Trump reforms beyond even what Congress passed after Nixon slinked away in disgrace. The most corrupt president in history and his contemptible cronies are trying to justify their own misdeeds by rehabilitating the image of the second-most corrupt president in history. We can’t allow it to succeed.

The post JD Vance’s stunning Watergate revisionism says the quiet part out loud appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.

The U.S. population was already aging and tilting toward decline. After the Supreme Court confirmed Trump’s power to deport hundreds of thousands of foreign migrants, population decline could accelerate.

(Image credit: Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Source: NPR.

Pochettino was the biggest name the U.S. men’s soccer team had ever hired. His rebuild was bumpy at times — but now, with the U.S. headed to the World Cup knockout stage, the players are all in.

(Image credit: Russell Lewis)

Source: NPR.

Ready to refresh your wardrobe for the season ahead? Kick off summer with the best matching linen sets—shop styles from Posse, Staud, and more.

Source: Vogue

Enjoy this roundup of the best-dressed—and hottest—men at the menswear shows.

Source: Vogue

From The Hill

The election of a trio of far-left candidates in New York’s primaries could create headaches for House Democratic leadership determined to stage a unified and effective pushback to President Trump should the party retake the chamber. Recent years under Republican leadership have shown the power a small but united group of House members can wield…

From The Hill

Oil is nearing its prewar price after the U.S. and Iran agreed to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) intended to end the conflict, but gasoline prices remain significantly elevated.  While President Trump has blamed Big Oil for price “gouging,” analysts say it’s individual gas station owners that are slow to lower fuel prices. “The public…

Labour insiders give Laura Kuenssberg their take on the man tipped to replace Keir Starmer as PM.

Source: BBC.

Labour insiders give Laura Kuenssberg their take on the man tipped to replace Keir Starmer as PM.

Source: BBC.

Six blazes caused by strikes have been dealt with by crews across Kent, East Sussex and West Sussex.

Source: BBC.