Ballrooms and Battlefields

From regime change to reverse bathtubs, the president who can start wars, build ballrooms, and stack Big Macs, all without a permit.

Good morning! When your country is in partial shutdown, your president is publicly authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations inside another sovereign nation, and your governor is floating the word dementia over diners, you know Washington is entering a new era of absurdism. Let’s descend into it.

We’re in Week Three of the shutdown, and shockingly, no one seems eager to punch the ticket home. Republicans passed a stopgap to Nov. 21, Democrats filibustered it, and everyone’s off in private, pointing to polling and political leverage. The real crux: Democrats refuse to reopen the government without a guarantee that the enhanced ACA subsidies (set to expire) are baked into any deal. Republicans present “reopen first, talk later” as a virtue, but Democrats see it as a trap, a performance in which the White House has proven itself untrustworthy before. Meanwhile, troops are being paid, WIC is limping along with special funding, and the hit on feelings (vs. wallets) is delayed. The real pressure point is November 1, when new ACA enrollment kicks off and rates could snowball. The House and Senate are both treading water, waiting for a hail-Mary or a hand to show.

At his press conference with Kash Patel and other insiders, Wednesday, Trump publicly confirmed what many suspected in whispers: he has authorized covert action by the CIA in Venezuela. No, not just “intelligence collection.” Covert action, the kind that can include training, paramilitary support, political subversion, even lethal ops. He framed it as drug war and prison release response: “they emptied their prisons into the U.S. … a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.” He also floated that land strikes were “being looked at now.”

These admissions collapse the separation of war powers. Strikes on the seas had already raised alarm; now we’re flirting with land invasion, covert regime destabilization, and ambiguity about whether Maduro himself is a target. Congress is furious (and not just the Democrats). Buckets of bipartisan concern over legality, oversight, and strategic hubris are gathering. The vote on a War Powers resolution to rein him in failed 51–48, but that margin screams of a system strained to the breaking point. The people’s legislature is watching as the executive branch draws up maps.

Do they believe the claims? At least some do, but no one believes enough without seeing the unredacted backing. Members who sat through closed briefings complain they’re still missing target packages, legal memos, raw video, and basic justification. If this were a Tuesday afternoon raid on a meth lab, you’d have affidavits. This is regime change on top of drug war theater, and Congress is demanding the fine print. Trump’s aides? Shushing.

America’s schools keep delivering bad news: NAEP 2024 showed scores slipping in both 4th- and 8th-grade reading. Thirty-plus percent of 8th graders now fall below “Basic”, a category that used to be the floor, not the funhouse mirror. This decline began well before the shutdowns and remote schooling, but got turbocharged by them. The tragedy: we elect policy wars but can’t defend a child’s right to read at grade level. A president demanding respect for nationhood can’t utter a coherent plan to rescue the literacy of the very people he claims to serve.

Hosting a White House ballroom dinner, Trump set off declaring eight wars “stopped” (“I stopped eight wars in eight months”), five, he insisted, “because of trade.” Having apparently mastered peace through tariffs, he then pivoted seamlessly from foreign policy to floor plans. What began as a self-congratulatory victory lap quickly turned into a real-estate seminar with mood lighting.

In a donor dinner equal parts infomercial and alternate history, Trump claimed he defused the India-Pakistan crisis by threatening a 200 percent tariff, that “Russia–Ukraine would have been easy,” and that “countries that didn’t get along are now seemingly in love with each other.” The night’s big reveal wasn’t diplomatic but decorative: a glass-sheathed Presidential Ballroom rising on White House grounds, with bullet-proof panes, “classical moldings,” and space for “close to a thousand” of his closest friends. “We have zero zoning conditions,” he boasted. “You’re the president, you can start tonight.”

The pitch was pure Trump: “Carrier’s donating the air conditioning,” “a great steel company wants to donate the steel,” and “I got the excavation down from three-point-two million to two million.” Procurement, but make it Mar-a-Market. He even promised a monument across the Potomac, a kind of “golden arch” where “something was supposed to be built 150 years ago.” The site, he said, would feature “Lady Liberty on top” and “three sizes, small, medium, and large,” before concluding, with perfect inevitability, “I happen to think the large looks by far the best. Why are you shocked to hear that?”

Somewhere between the gilded statue and the glass ballroom, you could almost see it: the man who turned the presidency into a franchise, sketching his own McMonument while aides whisper about how he builds his lunch the way he builds his legacy, layered, oversized, and clinically alarming. Former Florida state senator Joe Gruters spilled that Trump’s midday ritual involves a Filet-O-Fish, a Big Mac, and an orange soda, sometimes stacked into a single Franken-burger. It’s as if he’s decided to honor the original Golden Arches by constructing one in marble and one in his digestive tract. In the end, the entire project feels less like civic architecture and more like a Happy Meal for the ego, collect all three sizes while supplies last.

What might have been an architectural briefing instead sounded like a campaign sermon on divine entitlement: zoning, oversight, and history itself are for lesser mortals. And like every sermon in this era, it ended with a fundraising flourish, million-dollar “donations” of construction materials masquerading as patriotism, all in the name of “the people’s house.” Imagine the hearings if a Democrat tried to trade federal contracts for a Carrier compressor and a stainless-steel halo.

In between, he insisted the oceans are now so safe from drug boats that even leisure fishing is basically over; that D.C. went from “very unsafe” to “extremely safe” in twelve days after deporting 1,700 people; that he won the popular vote “by a lot,” all seven swing states, and the Electoral College with 312; and that Congress just passed a single “great big beautiful bill” eliminating taxes on tips, Social Security, and overtime while locking in full expensing for a decade. If any of that sounds like it would require, you know, legislation, that’s because it would. But legislation is for mortals. Real kings pick finishes for the Lincoln Bathroom and call it governing.

The through-line is the same as the shutdown presser: maximalist claims, minimal proof, and a running theme that process is for suckers. Even the ballroom pitch framed rules as optional, “Sir, you can start tonight. You have zero zoning conditions. You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want.” Trump beamed as he recounted it, adding that he personally haggled the excavation contractor down from “three-point-two million to two million” because, naturally, “I’m very good at building things on time, on budget.”

Donors, meanwhile, weren’t so much patrons as procurement line items. “Carrier’s donating the air conditioning… a great steel company wants to donate the steel,” he bragged, describing the $37 million structural core as if it were a PTA bake-sale raffle. The pitch wasn’t subtle: buy a share of the White House ballroom, maybe buy a little influence while you’re at it. Imagine the hearings if a Democrat tried to swap procurement oversight for a handshake and a Carrier compressor.

File this under optics that write their own satire: a president who can’t articulate the legal basis for missile strikes promises a thousand-seat party hall “done under budget,” all while millions face premium shocks unless Congress extends ACA subsidies. The people’s house is getting a bigger dance floor. The people, for now, still get the bill.

In a podcast interview following Trump’s threats to Chicago, Governor J.B. Pritzker went beyond standard critique, he floated dementia, publicly asserting that aides may be manipulating Trump’s decisions and urging the family to intervene. Whether you side with caution or constitution, that’s a hell of a claim from a sitting governor, and one that’s now fueling a national discussion about fitness and influence. The White House’s response? Taunts, denial, “fake news,” and whataboutism. But the question lingers: how far do we allow the executive edge to be run like an internal coup?

The shutdown smolders. The White House just greenlit covert regime meddling. Congress demands evidence. Literacy slips further. A ballroom louder than a battlefield. A governor yells “dementia.” A president invokes prison myths and drug war delirium while possibly waging shadow war in Venezuela.

We are staring at a moment when governance is being redefined behind closed doors, when executive ambition leaps legal guardrails, and when the opposition’s leverage is no longer policy but process itself. The question for today isn’t who wins the blame war, but whether anybody wins the fight for the republic before the lights go out.

After a week like this, I have to remind myself why I love doing this work. And I do mean love, there’s something intoxicating about chasing the threads, pulling documents, reading the transcripts, and watching the seams of history come apart in real time. But love has its shadows; sometimes the research pulls you into rabbit holes that smell faintly of despair and Aqua Net. Yesterday, I decided enough was enough.

So Marz and I went walking, no screens, no transcripts, no tariffs, just October air and paw prints. We disconnected from the White House ballroom renderings and the “great big beautiful bill” and reconnected with the quiet business of being alive. It worked. Sometimes you have to step outside the data stream, remember the ground beneath your feet, and let the absurdity fade into background noise. The republic may still be teetering, but for a few miles yesterday, the world felt wide and mercifully real.