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Trump Goes Ballistic After Judge Stops Work on His Garish Ballroom

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2026 //
6

Federal Judge Richard Leon issued a decision stopping work on Trump’s Hideous Grand Obsession: the ballroom that will replace the East Wing of the White House. Trump demolished the East Wing without going through the legal requirements and permissions.

Judge Leon, appointed by President George W. Bush, opened his decision with two sentences:

The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!

Trump responded with this cry of outrage:

Trump is determined to leave his garish mark on D.C.

Not only did he tear down the East Wing of the White House, but he plans other major alterations to the White House and the city.

Of course, he added his name to the Kennedy Center, which was dedicated by Congress as a memorial to the assassinated President. After Trump took control of the Center, artists began canceling their performances and ticket sales fell. To cover his embarrassment, he is closing the Center for two years while “renovating” it. Critics fear that it will emerge as a gold-encrusted monument to Trump.

The New York Times reported that Trump is fixated on making changes to the White House:

He plans to turn the historic Treaty Room into a guest bedroom. Really! He has zero respect for history, and he thinks the White House is his personal property.

Mr. Trump already has torn down the East Wing to make room for his $400 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom; he remade the bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom in marble and gold; he paved over the Rose Garden grass; he added marble floors and a chandelier to the Palm Room; he covered the Oval Office in gold; and he has a new, 33,000-square-foot security screening center for White House visitors in the works.

His latest plans involve the more private spaces of the White House, in the second-floor presidential residence. The Treaty Room — which is separate from the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building — is one of the most historic rooms in the White House. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and William McKinley used it as a Cabinet room, and it was where the Spanish-American War peace protocol of 1898, and the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963, were signed.

This is a photograph of President John F. Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in the Treaty Room.

Trump wants to turn this historic room into a guest bedroom.

Trump’s egomania doesn’t stop there. It’s boundless. The U.S. Treasury will mint a $1 coin with his face on it to honor the 250th anniversary of the United States. It will also release a large gold coin with his image that will cost thousands of dollars. And in an unprecedented move, the U.S. Treasury will add Trump’s signature to paper currency. No other President has placed his signature on the nation’s currency. Presently, our paper currency has the signatures of the Secretary of the United States and the Treasurer of the United States. Not the President.

Trump wants to build a gigantic arch on the Virginia side of the D.C.-Virginia border. It will be the Arch of Independence, but is colloquially called the “Arc d’Trump.” It will tower over the nearby Lincoln Memorial. Some renderings show the arch slathered in gold, Trump’s favorite decoration.

The most devastating critique of Trump’s efforts to reshape the District of Columbia and the White House was written by Phillip Kennicott, the Pulitzer-Prize winning critic of art and architecture for The Washington Post. It was published before Judge Leon stopped work on the ballroom. Trump, Kennicott says, is the greatest threat to D.C. and the White House since 1812, when the British burned the Capitol and the White House to the ground.

He wrote:

A loosely circular driveway sweeps through the White House grounds, just below the beloved South Portico of the mansion. Its shape echoes a larger park, known as the Ellipse, which connects the president’s home to the National Mall. It also mirrors the curving pathways of nearby Lafayette Square, on the north side of the complex.

The simple symmetry of this modest roadway and the grace of the White House south grounds are no accident: They were the vision of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., one of the original members of the Senate Park Commission, which created the monumental core of Washington as we know it, more than a century ago.

The geometry of this driveway — a small but resonant element of Olmsted’s master plan for the White House campus — will soon be erased, now that a federal judge has allowed President Donald Trump to proceed at least temporarily with construction of his 90,000-square-foot, $400 million ballroom. The ballroom, which will be larger than the original mansion, is so gargantuan that the original curving road simply won’t fit. To make room for Trump’s entertaining and fundraising space, a large notch will be clawed out of the driveway, according to drawings released by Shalom Baranes Associates, the D.C.-based architecture firm overseeing one of the most unpopular projects of the president’s second term.

Washington has a composed geometry built up from significant details like this elliptical drive. As with the diagonal avenues that connect symbolically important circles, squares and civic landmarks, the Platonic perfection of this shape is best appreciated from the air. But it is a vital reminder of the care taken, over the past 200 years, in the design of the capital city, and the deference paid to a set of aesthetic and cultural values that came out of the Enlightenment, including a love of symmetry, repetition, iterative patterns and a fine balance between grandeur and grandiosity.

Trump is the most significant threat to the city’s architectural and design legacy since British forces burned the Capitol and White House during the War of 1812. He has already demolished the East Wing of the White House, which dates to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He will replace it with a building that makes James Hoban’s neo-Classical executive mansion a mere appendage to a space meant to function like a hotel-convention-center-entertainment venue. He has proposed (but temporarily delayed) painting the next-door Eisenhower Executive Office Building a blinding shade of white, which preservation groups argue could irreversibly damage the stone facade.

He wants to build a 250-foot-tall memorial arch near the most hallowed ground in the country, Arlington National Cemetery. His “Independence Arch,” which he has said will honor himself personally, would dwarf the largest victory arches in the world, including the arch in Pyongyang, built in 1982 to honor North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Il Sung. Only Eero Saarinen’s slender ribbon of steel, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, would be taller. Although it would be built in a traffic circle on the Virginia side of the Potomac, the Trump arch would compete with some of the tallest buildings in Washington, including the Washington Monument and Washington National Cathedral, fundamentally altering a meticulously preserved skyline.

The president’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes” would introduce a forest of quickly designed statues to the banks of the Potomac almost opposite the new triumphal arch. A sylvan space defined by monumental memorials to Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thomas Jefferson would be cluttered, wax museum-style, with hundreds of stubby tributes to showbiz stars, folk heroes and sports celebrities.

These proposals, the rush to realize them, the stacking of key oversight groups with Trump loyalists and flunkies and the collaboration of firms like Shalom Baranes Associates, have upended and effectively destroyed the process of design review — which has until now preserved Washington as a monumental, picturesque capital.

They would also manifest in stone, cement and steel a vision of the city fundamentally at odds with the democratic ideals of the city’s founders, the stewards of its expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the vigilance of its latter-day defenders against shabby development, cheapness and commercialization.

In 1806, Benjamin Latrobe, perhaps the first great architect in America, sent a letter to Congress, defending his work on the U.S. Capitol, which was then under construction. Latrobe, who also contributed to the interiors of Hoban’s White House, was a proud and difficult man, and his letter to Congress, which exercises authority over the design of the nascent city — a duty it is now shirking — was prickly and defensive. But in it, he articulated foundational principles for the aesthetics and architecture of the new republic, which recognized no kings, and no absolute authority beyond the laws and the Constitution.
“Nothing appears so clear,” he wrote, “as that a graceful and refined simplicity is the highest achievement of taste and art.” American buildings should be “chaste and simple,” and to ornament them just for the sake of surface attraction was folly.

“We find ornaments increase in proportion as art declines, or as ignorance abounds,” he maintained.

This was the common language of American architecture at the time — stately, chaste, simple, dignified — and it echoed ideas from a half-century earlier, as capitalism and representational government were together forging a new, bourgeois worldview. In Adam Smith’s 1759 “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” the Scottish philosopher and economist sometimes called the Father of Capitalism wrote that two new aesthetics were in competition as the world industrialized and broke down the old, feudal orders.

One was based on greed, power and avidity; the other on equity, justice and humility. These values would express themselves in our political systems, our economies, our ethics, our art and our architecture.

“Two different models, two different pictures, are held out to us, according to which we may fashion our own character and behaviour,” he wrote. “The one more gaudy and glittering in its colouring; the other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline; the one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the other, attracting the attention of scarce anybody but the most studious and careful observer.”

The elliptical drive at the White House, about to be disappeared by a gaudy new ballroom, was the exact sort of subtle detail that delighted the designers of early Washington, a pattern hidden in plain sight that would attract the attention of only “the most studious and careful observer.”

The ballroom itself, which Trump has promoted as spectacular and ornate, exemplifies the aesthetic — and moral value system — that Smith found both dangerous and abhorrent.
How did we get here? How have we strayed or been misled so far from the values, ideals and aesthetics that gave Washington its current form?

Trump doesn’t have a coherent or consistent aesthetic ideal. Rather, the veteran real estate developer has reflexive responses and aesthetic tics when it comes to design — and for a president, an unprecedented willingness to assert them. Three of these habits are easy to see in his plans for Washington, mirroring his style of politics and his use of rhetoric and language. He has a primitive attraction to the big, the grand, the colossal. When he speaks, he uses superlatives reflexively, and he brings the same sensibility to architecture. And just as nature abhors a vacuum, Trump abhors anything he sees as empty. There is no value in silence, no beauty in open, uncluttered spaces. Everything must be filled, branded, made busy. Finally, he has no sense of context or formal relationships, no understanding of the hierarchies of how buildings (and institutions) relate to each other, to history, to formal plans.

The design of beautiful cities, and the design of effective governments, are predicated on “gentleman’s agreements,” voluntary deference to precedents and conventions. Trump respects none of this.

But there is a fourth deficiency in his understanding of architecture and design, which arises from and amplifies his other three failures of taste and judgment: He appears utterly uninterested in basic American values, history and symbols, and so there are no guardrails, no limits, to the damage done by his other failings.

Trump’s single-minded and unwavering preference for the biggest, his equating of size with significance, has become so familiar we have started to overlook it. But the architectural consequences for Washington will be devastating. When Stanford White — whose architecture firm McKim, Mead & White designed several branches of New York’s Public Library and the original Pennsylvania Station — drafted a memorial arch, he included in an 1892 rendering the figure of a man holding a measuring stick to offer a sense of its size. The arch, built in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park to honor the nation’s first president, rose to 77 feet, a bit taller than the ancient Roman Arch of Titus on which it was loosely modeled. But while grand and imposing, it still had a relationship to human scale.

Trump’s arch will dwarf this, and all other ancient precedents. Only the monuments erected by modern governments that rule by terror and dehumanization offer any comparable examples. And it is larger than many of those, too, dwarfing the Victory Arch in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.

It will also fundamentally alter one of the essential elements of what is known as the McMillan Plan, the Senate Park Commission’s 1902 redesign of the capital city which created the National Mall and the monumental core of Washington. The McMillan Plan forged a grand, axial vision of national healing and reconciliation that symbolically reconnected the North and the South by a bridge across the Potomac, joining a city of the dead at Arlington Cemetery to the city of the living, with the Lincoln Memorial as a hinge point. Long vistas and clear views drew the eye from the memorial to the military architect of Civil War victory, Ulysses S. Grant, at the base of the U.S. Capitol, to the temple devoted to the political architect of reunification, Lincoln, more than two miles away. The men and women who sacrificed their lives for reunification were honored by the Arlington Memorial Bridge leading to the cemetery and low-lying hills of Virginia just beyond.

That open view across the Potomac River to the hallowed burial ground was essential. A winning design in an early competition for a bridge at that crossing included two massive arches over its central piers — small compared to Trump’s arch, but large enough to impede views. The leaders of the McMillan Plan not only rejected these arches, they took particular care to keep sight lines open and the design of the shallow, low-slung bridge (by McKim, Mead & White) simple and elegant. They also stripped away a complex plan for some 40 decorative sculptures. The closer they got to the final resting place of Civil War soldiers, the more the planners insisted on dignity, sobriety and simplicity.

All of Trump’s proposed designs for a victory arch that he has shared on social media would block that carefully preserved view. One would also be laden with gilded statues, eagles and other glittering ornamental forms.

To understand the true scale of Trump’s ballroom, you have to get beyond the mere size of its floor plan — at 90,000 square feet, almost twice as large as the original structure’s 55,000 square feet. Rather, you need to take into account the context of the White House grounds and the surrounding federal buildings. The scale of the addition will destroy any sense of symmetry between the East and West wings and reorient the White House campus to the east, where it faces the massive Treasury Department building, a dispiriting, fortresslike phalanx of Ionic columns that natter on like someone discoursing on the infallible wisdom of free markets. Renderings of the new structure make it look like the old White House mated with Treasury, spawning a grotesque creature that has traded the livability of a domestic space for the untrammeled power of a banking colossus.

Trump’s gilded arch, ballroom and his redesign of the Oval Office with incrustations of historically anachronistic gold ornament, introduce a fussiness and busyness into a Washington aesthetic that has generally favored the chaste and simple, at least when it comes to the profile of classical buildings. His hanging of banners — in many cases featuring gigantic portraits of himself — as well as projecting images onto the blank face of the city’s most sublime and minimalist structure, the Washington Monument, suggest a need to fill in blank space, animating planes that are meant to be spare and quiet. The ballroom isn’t simply too big, it is also too busy.

Like the news cycle, architectural and urban spaces are treated as mere voids, waiting to be filled with Trumpian noise. Once filled, he owns them, at least in his own mind. Once owned, they can be monetized, and it’s likely only a matter of time until advertising is projected onto the Washington Monument and other structures.

All of this has consequences on a deeper, symbolic level. The ballroom reorients the White House to suggest that it is fundamentally responsive to economic rather than civic power, confirming visually what is too often the case politically: The executive serves the financial class first and foremost.
The triumphal arch will be placed on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, effectively crowning the South as the victor in the Civil War. That too reaffirms in visual terms what is too often the case in civic life: That the values of the Confederacy, including its deeply entrenched racism and violence, remain extraordinarily powerful in American culture.

The gilding of the arch echoes the tinsel applied to American history through entrenched mythologies like the Lost Cause.

There is no final price tag on all of this, beyond a few figures floated by the president, who has said that his $400 million ballroom will be financed privately — by billionaire donors and corporations maintaining contracts with the federal government in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Some of the funding for the National Garden of American Heroes will come from siphoning money out of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. We may never know how much it all costs, or who curried favor by paying for it, or what conflict-of-interest lines were crossed.

But the larger, less tangible costs can be roughly tabulated. The Commission of Fine Arts, which was created in 1910 to oversee the design of the city and execute and protect the vision of the McMillan Plan, is now a toothless organization stacked with loyalists including some with no expertise in design or architecture — among them a 26-year-old White House aide who has served as the president’s executive assistant.

Design review is dead, and with it the values of simplicity, chastity and modesty celebrated by Latrobe and Smith. Washington is now subject to design by fiat, by whim, by executive orders, whether legal or not. Trump is moving quickly to introduce noise, disorder and incoherence into the design of the capital city. It will be a lot less beautiful. And people who live here and those who visit may not know why, but they will sense that disorder and incoherence and tune it out, like just more noise.

Categories Accountability, History, Trump

Paul Waldman: Has Any Other President Done As Much to Damage the Economy?

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2026 //
6

Paul Waldman was one of my favorite reporters at The Washington Post. He left and started his blog, “The Cross Section.” In this post, he says that most of Trump’s economic setbacks are the result of his own disastrous policies, not forces beyond his control.

I do think Walkman is unfair to Hoover. Unlike Trump, Hoover had a distinguished career and tried to make the right decisions for the right reason.

Waldman writes:

As spring arrives and the cherry blossoms bloom around Washington, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are officially in the toilet:

There are many reasons why he keeps falling lower and lower, but the single most important is likely that Trump has utterly failed on what the foolish and gullible believed was his great strength: the economy. While he does a lot of distasteful but symbolic things like demolishing the East Wing and plastering his name on everything in sight, all of Trump’s most consequential screwups and authoritarian abuses have an economic component. And they all make things worse.

In fact, you’d have to go back to Herbert Hoover to find a president whose decisions were so directly and willfully disastrous for the economy. That’s not because this is the worst economy since the Great Depression; it isn’t, not yet anyway. But in all the downturns and crises we’ve had over the last century, the causes were largely outside of the president’s control.

Those presidents might have made some different decisions or found a way to improve things more quickly, but one wouldn’t say that George W. Bush created the economic crisis of 2008, or that the inflation that crossed the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter happened only because of the decisions they made. Most of the judgments we make of them in retrospect were about how they responded once the crisis arrived. They may have been blamed when things turned bad, but one could argue in every case that it wasn’t really their fault. The latest example is from 2022, when inflation spiked all over the world and here at home Joe Biden got the blame.

But what’s happening now is different. Consider the major policy initiatives of Trump’s second term:

  • Tariffs: Trump believes fervently in the power of tariffs to produce boundless prosperity, and so he has imposed an ever-shifting program of tariffs on foreign materials and products. The nearly universal conclusion of economists is that this policy has been a failure; not only hasn’t it created the manufacturing boom Trump promised, it has increased prices for American consumers and led our trading partners to begin constructing a new global trade system to circumvent the U.S.
  • Immigration: Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration — both deporting immigrants already here and making it all but impossible for new immigrants to come — has been an economic disaster. As a Brookings Institution report notes, “Reduced migration will dampen growth in the labor force, consumer spending, and gross domestic product” in years to come. Multiple economic sectors from construction to agriculture are facing labor shortages, and job growth has slowed to a crawl. And because the crackdown is motivated by naked animus toward all immigrants but especially non-white ones, it extends to a large and growing number of policy areas. For instance, the Small Business Administration just announced that it will cut off loans to green card holders, despite the fact that immigrants start more businesses and create more jobs than native-born Americans. One could hardly imagine a dumber economic own-goal, done for no reason other than the fact that the Trump administration hates immigrants.
  • Energy: Trump has waged an outright war on renewable energy, one of the most dynamic and fast-growing sectors of the world’s economy. As a result, we’ve ceded the green manufacturing sector to China, which now makes most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries. While the Chinese electric car industry is leaping ahead, ours is pulling back, a direct consequence of Trump’s decision to kill EV subsidies. In its lust to prop up the fossil fuel industry, the administration is literally forcing utilities against their will to keep coal plants open so customers can pay more for electricity and get dirtier air in the bargain. And speaking of fossil fuels…
  • The Iran War: We don’t know how long this war will go on, but the economic effects are already being felt. Gas has now crossed $4 a gallon (which will cause a broad increase in prices for all kinds of goods), farmers are facing a spike in the cost of fertilizer, and as Paul Krugman points out, the real effects of the constriction in oil supplies haven’t even been felt yet, which is why some energy analysts are predicting that this could be a worse crisis than the oil shock of the 1970s. The Pentagon wants an additional $200 billion to fund the war, and congressional Republicans are considering health care cuts to pay for it. There are now serious worries that the war could produce a global recession.

He’s a business guy, he knows the economy and stuff

To call this a record of economic incompetence would be too kind. In every case, Trump chose to do what he did for the most stupid, petty, and malicious reasons, despite the fact that the economic effects his decisions would produce were obvious and predicted by anyone with half a brain. It’s especially notable given that in his first term, Trump operated with a kind of benign neglect on many economic fronts, the consequence of which was that before he utterly screwed up his response to the covid pandemic, things were going pretty well. Yes, he restricted immigration and imposed some tariffs, but it was on a much smaller scale. For the first three years of his term, job growth was reasonable, inflation was low, and the economy largely rolled along.

Which probably reinforced the widespread and completely false notion that because Trump was a business guy who knows business stuff, he would be skilled at managing the economy. Even if Trump had been a traditional business leader and not a scam artist with a checkered record of successes and spectacular failures (including multiple bankruptcies), that wouldn’t have meant he knew anything about macroeconomic policy; as I’ve been shouting for far too many years, government and business are not remotely alike, and the skills and knowledge one needs to succeed in one do not transfer to the other.

Yet despite the crushing weight of all available evidence, one still heard voters in 2024 say that because Trump knows business, he could come into office, business away all that inflation (which was largely gone by the time of the election anyway), and bring us to a new age of prosperity. The fact that people thought that is a tribute to the propagandistic power of repetition: Say a thing often enough, no matter how ridiculous it is, and at least some people will believe it. (The same is true of the idea that Trump is a great deal-maker, when in fact he is the world’s worst negotiator.)

To their credit, Americans are now giving Trump dreadful ratings on the economy; in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll (which was taken a week ago, before the national average for gas topped $4 a gallon), his economic approval was only 29%, worse than Joe Biden’s at the height of the 2022 inflation:

It would be nice if this were the result of the American public’s discerning judgment, but it almost certainly isn’t. That’s not to say that a majority of them favor fascism, because they don’t. But to drive your approval as low as Trump’s has gotten, you have to really muck up the economy. And on that score, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Economy, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

A Song About Trump’s Education Policies: “We Believe in Local Control”

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2026 //
4

A good way to start off April Fool’s Day is by listening to this song by a group of young people in Colorado. The lyrics were written by Kevin Welner and are posted at the website of the National Education Policy Center.

The Trump regime says clearly “We believe in local control.” Except when they don’t.

Trump has issued executive orders about what may or may not be taught. Trump’s executive order #14253, signed on March 27, 2025, was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” What it meant in practice was to censor any teaching or displays that showed the shameful aspects of American history, and to focus instead on “patriotic history.”

Trump has launched a campaign to oust diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as gender studies, African-American studies, and studies of other groups.

Trump has tried to seize control of institutions of higher education institutions by falsely accusing them of anti-Semitism. He has sought to control the admission of students, the curriculum, and the hiring of faculty.

Trump has taken institutions of higher education hostage by withholding or cancelling billions of dollars for research into medicine and science unless they turned control over to the federal government.

But, as the song says, “We believe in local control!”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Higher Education, Lies, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Trump Says He Was Shocked to Learn that Kristi Noem’s Husband is a Cross-Dresser

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2026 //
5

Hypocrisy and karma merge.

The Daily Mail reported Donald Trump’s shock on learning that Kristi Noem’s husband is a cross-dresser who has a Barbie fetish. He likes to wear huge boobs and skintight pants.

A spokesperson for Noem, 54, claimed that the family was ‘blindsided’ by Bryon’s cross-dressing history – adding that his wife of 34 years is ‘devastated.’ 

The Daily Beast reported:

The newly-ousted Homeland Security secretary, 54, was left “devastated” by a Daily Mail report revealing that Bryon Noem, 56, adopted an online ego as a pouty-faced bimbo, complete with fake boobs and skintight leggings, to chat with adult performers— allegedly paying them thousands of dollars…

The Mail reported that it obtained hundreds of messages involving three women tied to his “bimbofication,” a fetish that involves roleplaying as a hypersexualized Barbie doll by donning massive breasts and figure-hugging clothing…

The revelations about the Noems’ marriage cut sharply against the image the couple has long put forward—one of faith and traditional values. As a prominent conservative figure, the allegations about their relationship risk undercutting Kristi’s political brand.

FOX News reported that she was antagonistic towards gay groups when she was Governor of South Dakota.

During her time as 33rd governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem was sued by a transgender and “gender nonconforming” advocacy group, The Transformation Project, after the state terminated a contract with the organization.

She also received backlash from the LGBTQ community for signing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which advocates claimed sanctioned discrimination against queer people.

.

Categories Accountability, Gender

Good News! One Judge Stops Construction on Trump’s Hideous Ballroom; Another Overturns Trump Order to Stop Funding PBS-NPR!

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2026 //
0

This afternoon, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., stopped work on Trump’s ballroom, saying it needs Congressional approval.

Federal Judge Richard Leon ruled against the ballroom, saying Trump’s lawyers made “brazen” claims. Among them, that completing the ballroom was a matter of national security. If completed, the ballroom will be more than double the size of the White House.

The New York Times wrote:

A federal judge ordered a halt to construction of President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom, ruling that Trump lacks authority to fund the estimated $400 million project through private donations.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon disagreed with the Trump administration’s argument that the president has broad authority to make changes to the White House, including on the scale of a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” Leon wrote in a 35-page ruling issued Tuesday afternoon. He said that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have.”

Leon also wrote that Trump must identify a law that allowed him to demolish the White House’s East Wing annex last year without congressional approval.

Judge Leon was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002.

In a 35-page opinion, Judge Leon wrote that Mr. Trump likely did not have the authority to act on his own, without consulting Congress, to replace entire sections of the White House — changes that could endure for generations.

He also reiterated concerns he had raised for months in court: that from the start, the administration has provided shifting and questionable accounts of who was in charge of the project and under what authority private donations could be accepted to fund it.

“Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!” he wrote. “But here is the good news. It is not too late for Congress to authorize the continued construction of the ballroom project.”

Judge Leon wrote that if the White House sought congressional approval, the legislature would “retain its authority over the nation’s property and its oversight over the government’s spending.”

“The National Trust’s interests in a constitutional and lawful process will be vindicated,” he added. “And the American people will benefit from the branches of Government exercising their constitutionally prescribed roles.”

“Not a bad outcome, that!” he concluded.

The decision suggested that Judge Leon was satisfied that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit chartered by Congress to guard America’s historic buildings which had sued over the project, had put together a workable challenge following several misfires.

In another federal court, the Trump administration’s executive order canceling the funding for NPR and PBS were ruled unconstitutional by federal judge Randolph Moss, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014.

The New York Times reported:

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that President Trump’s executive order barring the federal funding of NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment.

Randolph Moss, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in his ruling that Mr. Trump’s order, signed last May, was unlawful because it instructed federal agencies to refrain from funding NPR and PBS because the president believed their news coverage had a liberal viewpoint.

“The message is clear: NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the President disapproves of their ‘left-wing’ coverage of the news,” Judge Moss wrote. But the First Amendment, he said, “does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type.”

The ruling will likely have minimal effect on the federal funding of public media. Two months after the executive order, Congress voted to claw back roughly $500 million in annual funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that distributes federal money to NPR and PBS. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has since shut down, and public radio and TV stations across the country have sought alternate forms of revenue…

In his opinion, Judge Moss wrote that the executive order and other public statements from the White House criticizing NPR reporting, including about Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “targets a disfavored viewpoint.”

“It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the president does not like and seeks to squelch,” Judge Moss wrote

If I read this correctly, the money is gone. It probably was shifted to the military, where it is a drop in the bucket.

The Trump FCC has no objection to media consolidation under rightwing auspices. But it does not like media where critical thinking and debate are encouraged.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

Adam Kinzinger: The Prospects in the Iran War Mess

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2026 //
2

Adam Kinzinger writes a regular blog, where this important post appeared. He was a Republican member of Congress from Illinois who agreed to serve on the January 6 Committee, knowing his Trump-aligned party would isolate him. He decided not to run again, but he remains active in politics. He is a combat veteran.

He wrote that control of the Strait of Hormuz is the key to everything and that the U.S. is paying a price for Trump’s hostility to our allies:

It has now been over a month since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury. Iran’s nuclear sites are degraded. Its air force is largely gone. Its senior military leadership has been decimated. By the traditional metrics of military campaign assessment, the United States has won — or at least that is what the administration is telling itself.

But the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. And that changes everything.

The story of what happens next in this conflict is really three overlapping stories: economic, diplomatic, and military. They are inseparable, and each is deeply, structurally broken in ways that the triumphalist announcements coming out of Washington are not grappling with honestly. Understanding that requires sitting with the scale of what a closed strait actually means — and then asking the hard question of whether anyone in charge actually has a plan to reopen it.

Declaring Victory Into the Void

On March 31st, 2026, reports emerged that President Trump had told aides he was prepared to end military operations in Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed. The White House press secretary, asked directly whether reopening the strait was a “core objective” of the war effort, said it was not. This followed a dizzying series of 48-hour ultimatums, deadline extensions, threats to obliterate Iran’s power plants, and a social media post in which the President of the United States referred to a critical international waterway as the “Strait of Trump.”

The signal this sends to global markets, to allies, and to Tehran cannot be overstated. If the United States walks away from this conflict with the strait still effectively closed, Iran will have achieved something extraordinary: it will have absorbed one of the most intensive American-Israeli military campaigns in modern history, lost its supreme leader, seen its conventional military largely destroyed — and still hold a chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows.

That is not a defeated power. That is a wounded power with leverage.

Let us be precise about what the Strait of Hormuz actually means to the global economy, because the word “important” has been used so many times that it has lost all weight.

On a normal day, before February 28th, approximately 20 million barrels of oil transited this narrow channel — 21 miles wide at its tightest point — every single day. That is roughly one-fifth of the world’s entire oil supply, moving through a corridor that Iran can, and now demonstrably has, made functionally impassable at will. In the first full month of war, vessel crossings dropped from roughly 135 ships per day to an average of six. Six.

Brent crude has surged close to 50% since the conflict began, touching over $112 a barrel. U.S. gasoline prices have crossed $4 per gallon for the first time in nearly four years. The International Energy Agency has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Every single one of those numbers will get worse if the strait stays closed — or worse, if markets conclude it will stay closed indefinitely.

That last point matters most. Oil markets do not price the present; they price expectations. Right now, markets are still pricing in some probability of resolution — a deal, a military reopening, a diplomatic settlement. The moment that probability goes to near zero, you will see another leg up in oil prices that will be sustained, not a spike. It would represent a structural repricing of global energy, with cascading consequences for inflation, interest rates, industrial costs, and food prices (fertilizer shipments through the strait have also been disrupted, threatening planting season in multiple countries).

What would that sustained leg look like? It is not difficult to imagine oil at $140, $150, or higher. The world has not truly absorbed the scenario where a major shipping chokepoint is closed not temporarily, by crisis, but semi-permanently, by policy.

The Insurance Problem Nobody Can Fully Solve

The closure is not simply a matter of Iran’s navy physically blocking ships. That would actually be easier to address militarily. What Iran has done is subtler and, in some ways, harder to unwind: it has turned the strait into an active combat zone, where the threat of drone and missile attack makes the waterway functionally impassable for commercial shipping regardless of what any navy does.

The maritime insurance market understood this within days. Major P&I clubs — Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard, the London P&I Club, the American Club — canceled war risk coverage for vessels operating in the Persian Gulf within the first week. Rates for Very Large Crude Carriers hit record highs, with the benchmark freight rate for shipping oil from the Middle East to China rising more than 94% in a single day early in the conflict. Before the war, typical war-risk premiums for Strait of Hormuz transit ran between 0.15% and 0.25% of hull value per week. By late March, some quotes were coming in at 5% to 10% of hull value for a single transit. For a tanker worth $100 million, that is several million dollars for one voyage.

The U.S. government recognized this problem and moved to address it. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation established a $20 billion reinsurance program, to backstop commercial insurance for ships attempting the crossing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the cabinet in late March that the program would begin soon. As of this writing, there is no confirmed evidence of any vessel benefiting from the program having actually transited the strait.

And here is the fundamental problem with government insurance as a solution: it covers the financial risk. It does not cover the human one. Charter agreements include clauses that allow captains to refuse orders to enter a zone if the risk to the vessel and crew is assessed as too high. No reinsurance program changes that calculus for a mariner looking at a drone war in the Persian Gulf. Sailors have families. They have life insurance policies that may have exclusions for active combat zones. They have the right, in many jurisdictions, to simply decline a voyage they believe will kill them. You can insure a hull. You cannot compel a person to accept a bullet.

The clean version of reopening the strait requires not just insurance but safety — and right now, even a degraded Iran has demonstrated it can put drones in the water and missiles in the air with enough frequency to make every transit a gamble with human life.

The Military Dilemma: You Cannot Disarm a Rocket Launcher

The administration has made much of the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities. This is largely accurate. Iran’s navy has been severely degraded. Its air defenses are largely gone. Its air force is functionally inoperative. These are real achievements.

But the Strait of Hormuz does not require a navy to close. It requires, in the limiting case, a man with a drone and a coast to launch it from. The IRGC has spent decades building a distributed, asymmetric maritime warfare capability precisely because it understood that its conventional forces could never match the United States. Mines. Small fast boats. Land-based anti-ship missiles. Cheap drones that cost a few thousand dollars and can seriously damage a tanker worth hundreds of millions. These capabilities are dispersed, hidden, and enormously difficult to fully eliminate through airstrikes.

The harder truth is this: even if the United States were to conduct the most comprehensive military campaign imaginable against Iran’s remaining capacity to threaten the strait, Iran retains the ability to reconstitute a sufficient threat to close it again over time. An IRGC soldier with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher on a cliff overlooking the strait is a sufficient deterrent to commercial shipping. The threat can be rebuilt. The closure can be reimposed. This is the fundamental strategic problem that no amount of bombing resolves.

The only durable solutions are an agreement that gives Iran sufficient reason not to close the strait, or a change in the Iranian political order so fundamental that the intent to close it no longer exists. Everything else is temporary — and markets, over time, will price that temporariness accordingly.

The Diplomatic Catastrophe: We Broke Our Alliances Before We Needed Them

This brings us to what is, in many ways, the most damaging and least-discussed dimension of this crisis: the United States walked into a conflict requiring maximum allied cooperation after spending months systematically degrading its most important alliances.

Trump’s Truth Social post on March 20th calling NATO a “PAPER TIGER” and its member states “COWARDS” for not dispatching forces to help reopen the strait was extraordinary. Not for its vulgarity, which has become routine, but for its timing and its logic. He was, in effect, demanding that allies sacrifice their sailors and their economies for a conflict they were not consulted about, had not agreed to, and in some cases had explicitly opposed — and calling them cowards for declining.

The response from allied governments was predictable to anyone paying attention. Australia said it had not received a formal request to participate in strait operations, and its prime minister pointedly noted that Australia had not been consulted before the February 28th strikes. Germany publicly condemned the U.S. posture (after being one of the most supportive allies of the strikes initially). Britain has cooperated in some defensive operations but has drawn clear lines about the scope of its involvement. The United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, while condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf partners, made clear that British operations were defensive and limited. France, whose relationship with Washington has been severely damaged by tariff disputes and the broader contempt the administration has shown for European institutions, has been largely absent.

This is the predictable consequence of a foreign policy that has treated alliances as transactions, demanded payment for commitments, threatened to abandon mutual defense guarantees, questioned the legitimacy of multilateral institutions, and — almost unbelievably — spent the preceding year threatening to invade Greenland and annex Canada. When you spend political capital like that, you do not get to spend it again quickly. Trust, once spent, does not regenerate on command.

The result is that the United States finds itself trying to manage a global energy crisis that affects Europe and Asia far more than it affects America — the U.S. is largely self-sufficient in energy, as multiple administration officials have noted — while the nations most economically injured are not actively helping to solve it and in some cases are actively frustrated with Washington’s handling. Europe gets far more of its energy from the Gulf than the United States does. Japan, South Korea, and India are massively exposed to Hormuz-priced oil. China, which has reached separate arrangements with Iran, is threading a different needle entirely. The international coalition that might have made a military or diplomatic solution to the strait possible does not currently exist, and the window for assembling it has narrowed severely.

And when you cannot assemble a coalition, and you cannot militarily guarantee a solution, and you cannot sustain unlimited military presence indefinitely, you are left with either a deal or an ongoing crisis. The United States currently doesn’t know clearly who within Iran’s fractured post-war power structure is even authorized to make a deal.

The Governance Vacuum Problem

One detail that has received insufficient attention in the coverage is this: the administration has acknowledged it is not entirely clear who is in charge of Iran right now. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in the initial strikes. The government of President Pezeshkian continues to exist and engage in some diplomacy. But the IRGC — whose navy controls the actual mechanics of strait harassment — has historically operated with significant autonomy and has its own institutional interests, its own ideology, and its own command structure. The person with the finger on the drone controller at the strait may not be taking orders from whoever sits across the table in Islamabad or wherever talks are happening.

This is not an abstraction. It means that even a notional diplomatic agreement about the strait may not translate cleanly into tankers moving safely. It means verification is almost impossible in the near term. It means that a ceasefire at the political level is not the same thing as safety at the waterway level. The closing of the strait may have started as a strategic decision by the Iranian state. It may now be partly self-perpetuating — sustained by actors whose primary interest is leverage, money from tolls Iran is now legislating, or simply ideological commitment to bleeding the Gulf states and their Western partners.

Iran has, in fact, begun to formalize its control: its parliament is moving to codify tolls for ships transiting the strait, requiring detailed information sharing and fees. This is not the behavior of a state preparing to cede control of a chokepoint. It is the behavior of a state that has decided the chokepoint is now a permanent asset.

The Path Out: Narrow, Contested, and Getting Narrower

The range of outcomes is not large. At one end: a negotiated settlement that reopens the strait under terms that do not reward Iran disproportionately. At the other end: a prolonged closure that restructures global energy markets, accelerates the fracturing of the international economic order, and leaves Iran — weakened militarily, devastated at home, but strategically positioned — with a leverage point that will outlast any administration’s attention span.

The honest assessment is that the best outcome — a negotiated reopening that does not leave Iran stronger than it was before February 28th, and that does not simply reward closing the strait as a template for future coercion — is very hard to achieve.

It requires a negotiating partner with actual authority over the people who can end the attacks on shipping. It requires an American administration willing to sustain focus and strategic patience, operating through quiet diplomacy rather than Truth Social ultimatums. It requires the reconstruction of at least some allied cooperation to provide diplomatic cover and economic pressure. It requires Iran to conclude that reopening the strait under acceptable terms serves its interests better than continued leverage over global oil prices.

None of those conditions are clearly present right now.

The absolute worst outcome — the one we should be most worried about — is not a dramatic escalation or a ground war. It is muddling: mixed signals from Washington, periodic deadline extensions, occasional tanker attacks, oil prices that stay structurally elevated, markets that gradually accept $120-per-barrel oil as the new normal, Iran slowly consolidating its de facto authority over transit, allies who have drifted further away, and no clean moment of resolution that anyone can point to. Just a slow, grinding deterioration of the global energy order, presided over by an administration that declared victory and went home.

A Hope, Honestly Assessed

It would be dishonest to write this without acknowledging that negotiations are, as of this writing, apparently ongoing. Pakistan has facilitated back-channel contacts. Iran has acknowledged the exchange of messages, even while denying direct talks. Some tankers have moved. Deadlines have been extended. The fact that both sides are talking at all, even indirectly, is not nothing.

There is a version of a deal that could work. It would require Iran to reopen the strait under some formulation that allows it to claim a measure of dignity and face-saving — perhaps a ceasefire framework, perhaps economic relief, perhaps some form of international maritime governance for the strait that gives Iran a role without giving it a veto. It would require the U.S. to accept less than total victory — to not demand a posture from Iran that is explicitly weaker than before the war — while extracting enough in return that the closure of the strait is not simply rewarded.

The deep problem is structural: as long as Iran retains any capacity to threaten shipping through the strait — and as we have discussed, that capacity can be rebuilt and is, in the limit, as simple as a drone and a shore — the threat of re-closure is permanent. Any deal that does not include either a verifiable irreversible disarmament of Iran’s strait-harassment capabilities, or a fundamental change in the political character of the Iranian state, is ultimately a temporary arrangement. And verifiable, irreversible disarmament of a distributed asymmetric force is something no arms control regime has ever achieved.

This is not an argument against a deal. It is an argument for sobriety about what a deal can deliver. A negotiated reopening buys time, reduces near-term economic damage, and creates a space — however narrow — for a longer-term political evolution in Iran that makes the threat less likely to be exercised. That is worth pursuing. It is just not the same thing as solving the problem.

The shortest honest summary of where we are: the military phase of this conflict is likely winding down. The strategic problem — a wounded Iran with leverage over global oil supply, a fractured alliance system, a confused negotiating track, and a chokepoint that can be closed again whenever someone in the IRGC decides to close it — is not.

And it will not be resolved by a tweet, a deadline, or a declaration of victory.

Categories Accountability, International, Trump

A Must-Watch Interview: Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2026 //
2

This is a very important interview, a thoughtful discussion between two remarkable people.

Two historians talk about Trump tyranny, the rule of oligarchs, and the power of the fossil fuel industry.

Snyder reminds us of the importance of the November elections. It’s our chance to put limits on the oligarchs and authoritarians.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Trump

The Trump Regime is a “Criminal Enterprise” and Must Be Held Accountable

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2026 //
10

I subscribe to Marc Elias’ blog called “Democracy Docket.” Marc is a veteran prosecutor who is actively pursing lawsuits against the crimes of the Trump administration and winning many of them.

On his blog today is a fascinating conversation with another veteran prosecutor Glenn Kirschner.

Together they discuss how the Trump regime has corrupted the rule of law; how grand juries have usually stood firm in defending it; why Trump and his cronies must be held accountable for their efforts to destroy our democracy; why Merrick Garland was weak but Jack Smith was strong; why the Department of Justice must always be apolitical and hold members of both parties accountable; how Pam Bondi has repeatedly broken the law; and why the Epstein Files will eventually reveal a massive coverup.

All that is to say that I found the discussion to be enlightening and informative. These two—Elias and Kirschner–are truly experts, not just someone fulminating at the latest outage.

Since the content of the blog is for subscribers only, I can’t post it in full. It is definitely worth your while to subscribe.

Here is Marc Elias’ introduction to the dialogue:

For decades, the American justice system has operated on a “presumption of regularity” — the idea that the government acts in good faith. But as we enter the second year of this administration, that presumption has become a dangerous fantasy. Glenn Kirschner spent 30 years as a federal prosecutor, and he knows that when the rule of law is hanging by a thread, there’s no such thing as “business as usual.” 

Glenn joined me to explain why we need a “scorched earth” mission to investigate the criminal enterprise currently occupying the White House. We also dive deep into the Epstein files cover-up and discuss what it takes to hold the Trump administration accountable when we take back the White House in 2029. 

And here is a brief snippet from Kirschner’s remarks:

Glenn: I think accountability doesn’t look like “you’ve got to throw them all in prison, they all need to be in orange jumpsuits.” That’s not accountability. My version of accountability, my definition of accountability, is if we fairly, impartially, aggressively — and I mean scorched earth — investigate in an apolitical fashion every crime that we see with our own eyes. The President and his cabinet, basically this is a criminal enterprise. I prosecuted lengthy RICO cases in federal district court in Washington, D.C. I don’t say that flippantly. This is a criminal enterprise.

So what we need to do is make sure every crime gets fully investigated through an apolitical investigation whereby we give all of the evidence to the grand jury and we let them serve as the first check on our instincts with respect to who should be prosecuted. Do we have enough evidence to make out, one, probable cause, and two, beyond that, do we prosecutors believe we have a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits, which looks like a conviction at trial? That’s some of the language taken from the U.S. Attorney’s Manual. That is our procedural Bible at the Department of Justice. Once we secure indictments against everybody who has been victimizing the American people and violating our nation’s laws, then we move into the courtroom. We try the case as best we can. We deliver it to the jury and they begin to deliberate.

Accountability is done at that point. That may sound counterintuitive coming from a prosecutor who liked winning convictions. I enjoyed holding perpetrators accountable, vindicating the rights of victims, and protecting the community. But the result is not as important as the process. Justice is a process. And once we deliver it to the second check on our instincts—the trial jury sitting as the conscience of the community, just as grand jurors do—we live with the result, win, lose, or draw: conviction, acquittal, or mistrial because it’s a hung jury where the jurors couldn’t agree unanimously on a verdict. That’s what accountability looks like: putting everybody fairly and apolitically through the criminal justice system and let first the grand jurors decide and then we let the trial jurors decide.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Trump

My Views on Mayoral Control of Public Schools in NYC

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
17

I submitted the following testimony to the Committee on Education of the New York City Council, when it held public hearings February 10, 2026, on the current system of natural control of the schools.

I studied mayoral control and other forms of governance when I wrote my first book, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973.

My testimony follows:

The time has come to rethink the governance of the New York City public schools. 

Mayoral control in its present form was enacted by the Legislature in 2002, at the behest of newly elected  ayor Michael Bloomberg. 

The Legislature was no doubt dazzled by Mayor Bloomberg. He was and is an amazing businessman who built an iconic technology-media corporation. 

To think that this titan of American business was willing to take responsibility for the school system was an exciting prospect. 

What is more, the Mayor boldly said that he could fix the schools. He projected confidence. He believed, and he was convincing. 

The Legislature gave him an unprecedented level of control over the system. The Mayor would appoint a majority of a new board, which he called the Panel on Education Policy, its name a signal of its powerlessness. The eight of 13 members appointed by Bloomberg served at his pleasure, not with a fixed term. This arrangement eliminated any likelihood that his appointees would exercise independent judgment. On the rare occasion that they did, he fired them. 

And of course, the legislation gave Bloomberg the power to pick anyone he wanted as Chancellor. 

For Chancelor, Bloomberg appointed a lawyer, Joel Klein, who had no experience as an educator or an administrator. 

Klein spent 8 1/2 years as Chancellor. 

During the 12 years of the Bloomberg mayoralty, there were many changes–the dissolution of large high schools, the creation of scores of small schools, the opening of charter schools, the imposition of a standardized citywide curriculum in math and science, the launch of a Leadership Academy to train new principals, and a heavy emphasis on standardized testing to judge students, teachers, principals and schools.

Schools received A-F grades, based on whether their test scores went up or down. Schools were closed if their scores were persistently low. Test scores were everything. 

When Klein left on the first day of 2011, the Mayor appointed a retired magazine publisher who had no relevant experience. That didn’t work. After 3 months, she was gone. 

While there was much breathless reporting about a “New York City Miracle,” there was no miracle. New York City’s public schools are not a paragon for other cities to follow. 

The problems of educating New York City’s public school children have not been solved. 

Mayoral control in the administrations of DiBlasio and Adams continued to reflect the inherent flaws of the concentration of power in the hands of the Mayor. 

If we step back for a minute, the nation is now experiencing a Presidency in which almost all power resides in one person: the President. Surrounded by a servile Cabinet, a Congress whose majority supinely obeys almost every Presidential order, and a Supreme Court with a sympathetic conservative majority, Americans can see daily the dangers of a government that has no checks and balances. 

The New York City public school system is no different. Checks and balances are necessary. Presently, there are none. 

Top-down management with no checks and balances is especially inappropriate for the school system. Parents and communities feel that they have no voice, and they are right. 

The truth is that there is no organizational structure that is perfect. Mayoral control has been tried for nearly a quarter-century. We now know that it has multiple flaws. We know that there has been no”New York City miracle.”

Some adjustment is needed now. 

I propose reviving the Board of Education. Every borough should be represented on that Board. The Board should select the Chancellor, who reports to the Board on a regular basis. The Board should be composed of people devoted to improving the public schools–either as educators or community advocates. They should know the schools and school leaders in their borough. They should regularly attend meetings of local school boards. They should serve for a set term and should be free to exercise their independent judgment. They should receive a salary for their time, so that their service on the Board is properly compensated. It would be a full-time position. 

Clearly, the Mayor has a large stake in the schools. He or she should have representatives (but not a majority) on a reconstructed Board of Education. 

The Mayor’s ultimate power is that he or she controls the budget. 

Will such an arrangement solve all problems? No. But it will create a structure where parents and communities have a voice and are heard. The Board, when choosing a Chancellor, should select an experienced educator, whether chosen from the city or from another school system. 

There will still be controversies. It’s inevitable. Over funding. Over building new classrooms to meet the requirement to reduce class sizes. Over charter schools. Over admissions to gifted programs and selective schools. Over racial segregation in a system whose students are overwhelmingly Hispanic, Black, and Asian.  

The Mayor–every Mayor–has a full plate of issues to deal with: economic development, public safety, transportation, natural disasters, building codes, public health, housing, and much, much more. He or she doesn’t have time to run the school system, nor is he or she likely to be an experienced educator. 

I can’t think of any important problem that mayoral control has solved.

My advice: Create a stable and democratic structure.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Disruption, New York City

Paul Krugman: Treason in the Oil Markets

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
14

Paul Krugman, Nobel-Prize winning economist, writes about shady speculation in the oil futures market. He says it’s not just insider trading, it’s treason.

He writes:

Source: Yahoo Finance


Over the weekend Donald Trump threatened dire vengeance on Iran unless its government opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, a deadline that would expire Monday evening in Washington. Specifically, he announced that the U.S. would begin bombing power plants — plants that supply electricity to Iran’s civilian population — unless the Strait was cleared.

But at 7:05 AM Monday Trump called the whole thing off — for five days, he said, but many people are assuming that the threatened action, which would have been a massive war crime, is now off the table.

The reason for the about-face, he claimed, was that the U.S. was engaged in productive negotiations with Iranian officials — although this seems to have come as news to the Iranians, who denied that any such negotiations are taking place. Sad to say, in this case, as I tried to explain yesterday, the fanatical, brutal Iranian regime is more credible than the president of the United States. Is he lying or living in a fantasy world? Neither possibility is comforting.

But in any case, Trump’s sudden climb-down was startling. Who could have seen this coming?
The answer is, the person or people who bought large quantities of stock market futures and sold large quantities of oil futures around 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement. As CNBC reports,

At around 6:50 a.m. in New York, S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop. With thin liquidity typical of early trading hours, the sudden burst stood out as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.
A similar pattern was observed in oil markets. West Texas Intermediate May futures also saw a noticeable pickup in trading activity at roughly the same time, with a distinct volume spike interrupting otherwise quiet conditions.

This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.

This wasn’t the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn’t count the purchases of stock futures.

When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”

Why is profiting from insider information about national security decisions effectively a form of treason? First, it’s hard to think of a more fundamental principle for officials we entrust with important decisions, especially those that involve national security, that they or people they know should not be allowed to exploit their positions for personal gain.

Second, financial trading based on what should be closely held secrets reveals information to current or potential foreign adversaries. To exaggerate a bit, but only a bit, who needs to bribe agents within the government, or recruit them with honey traps, when you can infer the same information by keeping track of transactions on futures markets?

Finally, there isn’t that big a gap between using knowledge of national secrets to make lucrative financial trades and simply selling those secrets to the highest bidder. Once you’re breached the line that says you shouldn’t profit personally from access to information that is or should be highly classified, the line between trading based on state secrets and selling those secrets directly is a blurry one.

In fact, I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning. Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?

I’m sure we’ll find out once Kash Patel’s FBI carries out its careful, no-holds-barred investigation.

For the humor-impaired, that was a joke. However, I do believe that the culprits will be easy to determine once Democrats are back in power, and they must apply the full force of law to the people responsible.

One question that may be harder to resolve is the extent to which the possibility of insider trading may actually have influenced policy. Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest? If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.

There’s a broader lesson here: You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.

Among other things, deeply corrupt governments tend to be very bad at waging war, no matter how much they may exalt “warrior ethos” and “lethality.” When we do a post-mortem on how the Iran debacle happened, arrogant ignorance may still get top billing. But grotesque venality will come a close second.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Cheating, Corruption, Fraud, Trump
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