Veterans are standing in the middle of D.C.’s Memorial Circle at rush hour with banners denouncing plans for Trump’s arch. Their continuing protest, which started on Memorial Day, features a replica arch and urgent plea to “protect and defend the solemnity and honor of this hallowed ground.”

A man with a third grader’s intellect says all we need to regulate AI is a smart president. The same guy who will bark “hoax! hoax! hoax!” at climate change while Mar a Lago takes on water now insists that efforts to regulate AI are also a hoax. If Americans listen to this barking clown instead of scientists, engineers, and AI developers, we truly have entered Idiocracy, and we will get the killer robots we deserve.

On Trump’s social media posts, he keeps depicting himself in fantasy roles: Superman, Jesus, the Pope, Sci-Fi leader of dystopian death machines & a larger than life military commander. His fantasies are sometimes “official,” communicated to the American public directly under White House insignia, and they frequently come in waves of multiple fantasies at one time. Over Labor Day he indulged and made it public 37 times.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis, former Senate Armed Services Committee member, has accused Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth of mismanaging the Pentagon, and is recommending Trump fire him. Tillis wrote on X that Hegseth is “intimidated by competence” and “retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force.”

Have you ever woken in the morning steeped in a sense of nonspecific dread? It’s undefined, and even though you have no idea what it’s about, it’s palpable. You recognize that it’s just a feeling, not a fact, yet the heaviness presses. You scan the night’s memories for a bad dream… nothing in jackboots chased you through a field, the mean girls didn’t take your coat.

Last week, on an emergency basis, Trump asked the Supreme Court to rescue the centerpiece of his “capital improvement campaign.” Trump now calls his ballroom — a 90,000 ft.2 gilded party palace where donors in haute couture can eat wagyu beef and dance the night away — an “urgent matter of national security.” On Friday, the Court let Trump have his way.