- How Trump has quietly withdrawn National Guard troops from various cities;
- Adam-Troy Castro predicts that the ballroom, the Kennedy Center overhaul, and the arch, will never happen;
- John Pavlovitz on how Bad Bunny reminds MAGA that they’re losing;
- Amanda Marcotte on why evangelicals will never dump Trump;
- Paul Krugman on the banality of MAGA evil: Howard Lutnick.
Let’s note this first.
Washington Post, today: National Guard troops were quietly withdrawn from some U.S. cities, subtitled “The deployments encountered repeated legal setbacks that stymied President Donald Trump’s desire for a show of force in Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon.”
The Trump administration has withdrawn all federalized National Guard troops from U.S. cities, after its repeated attempts to surge forces into Democratic-run states encountered judicial roadblocks.
The pullout was completed last month with no public acknowledgment from the White House or the Pentagon other than a social media post weeks earlier in which President Donald Trump announced the troops’ removal. It was a remarkable turnabout after Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had insisted the mobilizations were necessary to combat what they claimed was unchecked violence and to support enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.
I think this kind of thing happens more often than we notice. That’s the point; they hope we won’t notice. The Trump administration makes a lot of noise about rampant crime and marauding illegal immigrants and sending in the troops, whether National Guard or ICE, which trigger protests that the administration claims is evidence of that rampant crime, until everything settles down, crime is the same as it ever was (declining in recent years despite anything the Trump administration has done), and the advantage of publicity about fighting crime has worn its course to the MAGA folk, and it can all just go away. Most people have short attention spans. Whatever happened to the Wall? Whatever happened to the Ballroom intended to replace the torn-down East Wing of the White House? Suddenly you don’t hear about them anymore.
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Savvy political commentator (and science fiction writer) Adam-Troy Castro said this on Facebook six days ago. I’ll quote a bit.
Just saw a thread to the effect that the next Democratic President should tear down the Ballroom.
My response: what ballroom?
Any effort to construct one has been halted. But the project was already stopped, the supposed funds from private investors already unaccounted-for.
Nearly half a billion dollars, ghosted. Maybe it was pledged. Maybe it was already given. Maybe it was trucked in on pallets. Maybe he just imagined something that never existed. It’s unclear. But now it’s a case of, “What money?”
…
Look. This guy has reverted to form. As a developer, his deal was to pay for the current project with the next project, each more grandiose than the last, each saddled with debt, each abandoned as soon as something shinier popped into his head.
…
[T]here’s a long history of rising fascist dictators tearing down national performance centers. Because first, it is the illusion of doing something, and second, because these guys hate culture. They know that artists skew to the left, and this cannot be allowed. Art, they think, needs to be stone advocacy, propaganda to the cause.
“Tear down the ballroom?”
There will be no ballroom.
The Kennedy Center will not reopen.
There will be no groundbreaking of the arch.
Sounds right to me. Let’s check back in a year.
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Another item about Bad Bunny and conservatives.
John Pavlovitz, today: MAGAs Hate Bad Bunny Because He Reminds Them That They’re Losing
Opening:
MAGA Americans have a Bunny living rent-free in their heads. (We’ll just call it BDS: Bunny Derangement Syndrome.)
Here’s the key paragraph:
They hate him because he is a symbol of their greatest fears coming to life: a nation that is outgrowing them, a culture that is evolving past them, a war against progress that they know they’re losing.
This is the big picture.
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Supporting my thesis from a few days ago.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 11 Feb 2026: Evangelicals won’t dump Trump over his racist Obama video, subtitled “A few spoke out, but most right-wing Christians quietly support the president’s ugly views”
Have white evangelicals finally been embarrassed enough by Donald Trump? There were some glimmers of hope that many in the community hit their limit when the president posted a video to Truth Social that included a clip portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times argued that no one should be surprised, as Trump’s entire career has been centered around “his bitter, deep-seated racism.” But even after a decade of pretending not to see it, even some stalwart Trump supporters couldn’t deny the video was the visual equivalent of saying the N-word in public.
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And this, on the theme of the current administration’s incompetence.
Paul Krugman, today: The Banality of MAGA Evil, subtitled “Instead of criminal masterminds we got amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick”
There’s a longstanding tradition in American politics of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style – a way of thinking that sees conspiracies lurking everywhere. MAGA-world is particularly riddled with conspiracy thinking – from George Soros and Jewish space lasers, QAnon and the Great Replacement Theory, to Italian satellites hacking into voting machines to deliver the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
But these are far-fetched fantasies. The truth is far more banal and shocking.
There are people in positions of great power in the U.S. government engaged in evil conspiracies against everything that is good and decent. Their conspiracies are far more extensive and damaging than almost anyone imagined. But there are no evil masterminds behind this. Only amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick.
It all fits a pattern.
