The Common Brief

06/04/2026

President Trump wants to build a 250-foot arch topped with a 60-foot gilded Lady Liberty figure at Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C. The Department of the Interior, which filed the application, says the purpose is "to celebrate the triumphs of the American people, inspire patriotism and love of country, and beautify our nation's capital." It would be completed in time for the country's 250th anniversary.

The National Capital Planning Commission met on June 4 to discuss the application. More than 1,696 public comments were submitted, and USA Today used AI to analyze them, finding more than 99% were negative.

That number tells you less about the arch than it does about who fills out public comment forms.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members were appointed by Trump, already voted to approve the design. The NCPC's own staff hasn't rejected it either. Instead, they recommended asking for additional analysis on the project's height under the Height of Buildings Act and flagged that the FAA needs to evaluate whether the 250-foot structure could impact air navigation, given that it would sit 3,000 feet from Reagan National Airport along landing approaches for two runways.

Those are real questions. They deserve real answers. What's happening instead is a predictable performance of outrage.

"Please don't build this monstrous vanity project to please Trump," wrote one commenter. "He is destroying the beautiful city of Washington, DC with monuments to himself."

"This preposterous arch needs Congressional approval and funding prior to any approvals by this Commission! This is another example of authoritarianism by this corrupt administration!" wrote another.

Public Citizen has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian, arguing the arch would obstruct the view between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, "a view carefully designed to symbolize the unification of the country after the Civil War."

The question of congressional authorization is legitimate and is being contested in courts. Trump has said the land is owned by the Department of the Interior and doesn't require congressional approval. Congress has not authorized construction of a memorial on the federal land managed by the National Park Service, which opponents say is a statutory requirement.

But here's what's missing from the coverage. Washington is a city built on exactly this kind of ambition. The Washington Monument was controversial. The Lincoln Memorial was controversial. The Jefferson Memorial was controversial. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was so divisive that its designer, Maya Lin, was subjected to a congressional hearing. Every significant addition to the National Mall was met with opposition from people who said it would ruin the character of the city.

One commenter captured what gets lost in the noise: "I think the arch will look fantastic. I can't think of a better way to commemorate our 250th anniversary as a country."

Whether you love the arch or hate it, the honest debate is about process, sightlines and aviation safety. The dishonest debate is the one that says a monument celebrating American independence as a personal vanity project simply because the president who proposed it is named Trump.

06/04/2026

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll to determine whether she committed perjury in her civil lawsuits against President Trump, according to Reuters.

The inquiry centers on her 2022 testimony, in which she stated under oath that she did not receive any outside financial help for her legal cases against Trump. One of those cases alleged Trump s*xually abused her in a New York department store in the 1990s. The other alleged defamation in 2019.

That testimony is now a problem, because billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman funded a nonprofit that helped pay Carroll's legal expenses. Hoffman made a grant of an unspecified amount to cover those costs, a fact the New York Times first reported in 2023. Hoffman is a prominent Democratic megadonor who has given tens of millions to Democratic candidates and causes, including nearly $700,000 to the Biden Victory Fund. He also has documented ties to convicted child s*x trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, having visited Epstein's private island in 2014, six years after Epstein pleaded guilty to related charges.

Carroll's lawyers have said they never spoke or met with anyone from the nonprofit that received Hoffman's money. But the question the DOJ is now asking isn't whether the lawyers knew. It's whether Carroll knew, and whether she lied about it under oath.

Trump was found liable for battery and defamation in the cases, though not for r**e, and was ordered to pay $5 million in the first suit and $83.3 million in the second. He maintained throughout that the cases were politically motivated interference with his 2024 presidential campaign.

The investigation is being led by the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago and may not result in charges. But the core issue it raises is straightforward. If a plaintiff testifies under oath that no one is funding her lawsuit, and it turns out a billionaire Democratic donor with ties to Jeffrey Epstein was in fact funding it, that's not a political question. That's a legal one. And the fact that it took three years for anyone to formally investigate it is its own story.

06/02/2026

On the same day Californians headed to the polls for Tuesday's primary, a federal lawsuit alleged that 873,092 inactive voter registrations are still sitting on the state's rolls, in direct violation of federal law.

The suit was filed by Judicial Watch on behalf of Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, and the American Independent Party of California. It targets incumbent Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, alleging she has failed to comply with federal requirements that inactive voter registrations be removed after two consecutive general federal elections.

According to the complaint, more than 800,000 registrations have remained inactive and on the rolls for at least three elections. Of those, 151,202 have been sitting there for at least four consecutive elections. The lawsuit also claims the state takes no effective action to require counties to address the problem.

This isn't the first time California's voter rolls have been challenged. In 2019, Judicial Watch settled with the state and Los Angeles County to remove more than 1.2 million names. Since then, according to the organization, 20 counties across the state have removed 50 or fewer inactive voters, despite census data showing hundreds of thousands of residents leaving California entirely.

"Judicial Watch's federal lawsuit confirms California has a dirty voting rolls crisis — with thousands of old names on the rolls going back at least 10 years," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. "Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections. And California and its counties must take immediate steps to clean the over 870,000 dirty names on the voting lists."

The timing of the lawsuit is hard to ignore, but so is the broader pattern. On Sunday, officials discovered a voting site had been vandalized and mail-in ballots burned inside a drop box. The same day, a Bay Area voter walked into a closed ballot center at night and found the doors unlocked and the building completely unsecured.

Over 23 million Californians are currently registered to vote. The question raised by this lawsuit isn't whether every one of those registrations is fraudulent. It's why the state can't be bothered to do the basic maintenance federal law requires to make sure its rolls are accurate.

Every state in the country manages to remove inactive voters. It's not controversial. It's not suppression. It's the legal baseline. And when California can't clear 873,000 names that have been inactive for a decade while simultaneously leaving ballot centers unlocked overnight and allowing drop boxes to be set on fire, it's fair to ask what exactly "safe and secure" means anymore.

06/01/2026

Greg Bovino was one of the most aggressive immigration enforcement officials in the Trump administration. As U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large, he was the operational face of the mass deportation effort voters demanded in 2024. He was removed from that role in January after the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens during enforcement operations in Minneapolis, reassigned to a desk job in El Centro, California, and retired in March.

Now he's talking, and what he's saying should concern anyone who voted for Trump on immigration.

Speaking at a conference in Porto, Portugal on May 31, Bovino took direct aim at White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, accusing her of "pushing to dial it back and water down mass deportations."

"Trump's team says immigration is his top issue according to the polls. Voters trust him on the border more than anyone. So why is pushing to dial it back and water down mass deportations?" Bovino wrote on X. "You don't win by running away from your strongest issue. Mass deportations are the solution to perpetual victory!"

He also went after DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem after her dismissal over spending controversies. "Mullin's a great guy, great plumber, no doubt about that; he could probably fix a leaky faucet," Bovino said. "But a hundred million illegal aliens is not a leaky faucet."

On May 31, he tagged both Wiles and top Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita in a post about the ongoing clashes outside Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey. "Day 9 of the riots and people like and are steering the president toward caving to anarchists instead of the strong immigration enforcement voters demanded," he wrote.

The numbers back up at least part of his frustration. Immigration detention numbers fell roughly 15% from an all-time high of 70,766 in January to 60,311 by early April, according to ICE data. That's a significant pullback from the peak, and it happened after the Minneapolis deaths became a political flashpoint.

There's an honest tension here that doesn't get talked about enough. The voters who put Trump in office did so in large part because of immigration. It was the issue. And Bovino's argument is straightforward: the people closest to the president are softening the very policy that got him elected because they're worried about optics.

Whether you think Bovino went too far in Minneapolis or whether you think Wiles is being pragmatic, the question he's raising is legitimate. If the administration pulls back on the signature promise that defined both campaigns, who exactly are they governing for?

05/31/2026

BuzzFeed and HuffPost enlisted body language experts and a clinical psychologist to conduct a serious analysis of Donald Trump's dance moves. This is not satire. This is what passes for political journalism now.

The article consulted Patti Wood, a body language expert, who warned that Trump's clenched fists "create tension in our central nervous system" and that "when we see a fist, our instincts also tell us that it's a weapon." Clinical psychologist Denise Dudley concluded that the dance is "super dominance-oriented" and "aggressive," and that his clenched fists are "just a power move."

They analyzed his feet. "The feet are the most honest part of the body," Wood explained, noting with concern that Trump doesn't move his feet enough while dancing. "He might lean to the left or lean to the right, but he's not picking up his feet, he's not moving through space."

They analyzed his face. Wood reported that Trump "often has a frown or grimace on his face" while dancing, "as if he's exerting enormous amounts of effort just to do this, as if he knows he has to."

They even encouraged readers to try the dance at home so they could feel the "negativity, unease and effort it takes."

This is a 79-year-old man bobbing to YMCA at a rally while his crowd cheers. That's it. That's the whole thing. And two credentialed experts were brought in to explain why it's actually a display of authoritarian dominance and psychological aggression.

Meanwhile, NFL players were doing the exact same dance in end zones all season long, and nobody called in a psychologist to decode the hidden menace behind their clenched fists. Nobody warned that their lack of footwork revealed something dark about their emotional state.

The media spent eight years trying to make people afraid of this man, and when the rallies and the dancing and the YMCA just made people laugh and join in, they sent in the body language experts to explain why you were wrong to enjoy it.

At some point you have to step back and ask: if your political opposition is so dangerous that you need a clinical psychologist to decode his dance moves, is it possible you've lost the plot entirely?

05/30/2026

Send the meteor

05/29/2026

Would love to see this happen.

This would drive liberals insane.

http://dlvr.it/TSmMsC

05/29/2026

Bye bye 👋

This is the man who cared so much about upholding the law that he ordered his police officers to actively interfere when they got the chance with ICE enforcing the law.

http://dlvr.it/TSlY8t

05/29/2026

Get it done Kentucky.

Trump has put his support behind combat veteran Ed Gallrein.

http://dlvr.it/TSbwV6

05/28/2026

We’ll help him with the arrests too if he needs it.

𝐎𝐏𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐏𝐎𝐋𝐋 - Would you support Tom Homan arresting every Mayor, Governor, or Government official who interferes with ICE?

YES or NO 👇

𝐕𝐎𝐓𝐄 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 --> https://www.dailypatrioticpolls.org/-all-pages-ai-stock-post-3-