Trump tears down the House

 Maureen Dowd of The New York Times:

Before the orange cyclone hit town, Washington was a far more staid place.

Al Gore loved to host small dinner parties focused on scholarly topics. One dinner was devoted to the meaning of metaphor. “I l-i-i-ke metaphors,” Gore drawled to The Washington Post when he was vice president. “The more complex and arcane the better.”

What must Gore make of the unsanctioned, ahistoric, abominable destruction of the East Wing by Donald Trump? It’s the most remarkable metaphor we’ve ever seen in the nation’s capital. It’s not complex or arcane. It’s simple and visceral. It slams you in the face — metaphorically speaking.

“He’s saying, ‘I can do whatever the hell I want and you can’t stop me!’” said David Axelrod, who worked in the Obama White House. “In this case, it’s sundering history.

“If you worked in the White House, you have a reverence for every wall of that place. Tattered as it may have been, there was a dignity to it. It was a quietly stately citadel of power in America, not a palace for a mad king. Trump has a manic desire to tear down history and write his own.”

A Jackie Kennedy garden was plowed over by the bulldozers. The woman with the best taste in the history of the White House was rubbished by the man with the worst taste in the history of the White House.

Many of his voters wanted to see Trump take a jackhammer to Washington, but I’m not sure they meant it this literally.

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Melania probably doesn’t care. As The Times’s Katie Rogers reported in her book about first ladies, “American Woman,” Melania only dropped by the East Wing, which held the offices for the first lady and her staff, a couple of times in the first term. She hasn’t been around much this term either.

Treasury Department employees, who work opposite the razing, were warned not to share pictures of it. There must be a sense that it’s profane, as it was in 1980 when Trump smashed Bonwit Teller’s limestone friezes, which he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to build Trump Tower. The friezes had little artistic merit, said a “vice president” of the Trump company, identified as “John Baron” — a fake name Trump used, he acknowledged while testifying in a lawsuit over his use of hundreds of illegal Polish immigrants for the demolition.

But Trump has so little respect for this 123-year-old symbol of American history that he didn’t check with federal planning officials or Congress before he obliterated one side of the White House. As if he’s tearing down a gas station.

When I visited the White House with my mom as a kid, we loved overhearing foreign tourists ooh and ahh about how relatively small and modest the house was. Its simplicity was part of its charm. We didn’t have the grand castles of the European nobility we were trying to shed. It was just a nice house with good curb appeal.

Trump does not do small or modest. He does big, flashy odes to self. The joke when Trump was first running was that he’d slap his name on the White House facade as he did with all his other properties. And now it’s happening. White House officials are saying Trump will name the ballroom after himself.

It’s another example, as Rahm Emanuel says, that Trump wants to rule, not govern.

“He believes that the only thing you can do wrong is that which is not in your self-interest,” Axelrod said.

The president has the kind of blot-out-the-sun narcissism that spurs him to do whatever it takes to keep all eyes on him. He ignores the law, procedures, consequences.

It’s a slam-dance presidency that delights in transgressing and provoking.

Build a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot gilt ballroom — which will overshadow the central edifice — while the government is shut and people have been thrown out of work; plaster tacky gold all over the Oval; sue everyone willy-nilly; put foes through legal torture; send troops to American cities; shrug off due process and blow alleged drug runners out of the water.

“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” he said Thursday. “We’re going to kill them.”

Trump’s talent is finding wormholes in the system that he can exploit for his own satisfaction or financial gain — things that are not specifically outlawed because it never occurred to the founders or anyone else that a lowlife could rise so high.

Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien wrote that in seeking private funding for the ballroom, Trump may encourage influence-peddling — grifting off the presidency even more.

After turning the Justice Department into his own vigilante posse, Trump now wants to warp the once-esteemed department even more. He has made a cockamamie demand that Justice give him $230 million as compensation for previous federal investigations of him. The Times editorial board called it “a breathtaking act of self-dealing.”

Trump once thought nothing of aiming to overthrow the government he ran. Now he thinks nothing of threatening to sue the government he runs if he isn’t allowed to pay himself a quarter-billion dollars.

“We the People” is quaint. Now we are governed by the whims of one person.

Trump stopped trade talks with Canada on Friday because he did not like an ad commissioned by the province of Ontario that quoted from a radio address President Ronald Reagan made that criticized tariffs.

Trump, who posts fake A.I. slop, called the ad “FAKE.” (Reagan’s quotes were accurate but were in a different order.) The Canadians paused it.

It was like when Trump levied a 50 percent unilateral tariff on Brazil because it had the temerity to prosecute Jair Bolsonaro, who also tried to steal an election when he was president. Or when Trump mused about bailing out his right-wing ally in Argentina, potentially to the tune of $40 billion, and promised to quadruple the amount of Argentine beef allowed into this country at a lower tariff rate — infuriating struggling American ranchers.

Trump can indulge any crazy impulse and nobody is able to check him.

“The Congress is adrift,” Senator Lisa Murkowski told The Times’s Carl Hulse, on overseeing Trump’s legally questionable military moves and vindictive tariffs. “It’s like we have given up. And that’s not a good signal to the American public.”

Congress is adrift. The White House is a shipwreck. Trump is marauding in the Caribbean. James Comey and Letitia James are being forced to walk the plank, and next up could be Jack Smith and Adam Schiff.

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The President is getting away with murder, literally

During his first presidential campaign Donald Trump famously claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. At the time it felt like an empty boast. No more, writes David Cole in The New York Review of Books.

Between September 2 and September 19 the US military, acting on President Trump’s orders, bombed three boats traveling in international waters, reportedly killing seventeen civilians in cold blood. Ordinarily when US armed forces kill civilians, the president does not brag about it, yet Trump is apparently so proud of the executions that he posted video footage of them on Truth Social. And while ordinarily the killing of any civilian prompts investigations and apologies, in this instance the administration has promised only that there are more to come. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America,” Trump said during his speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23, “please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.”

There was no conceivable legal authority for these killings. We are not at war with drug traffickers. The “war on drugs” is a metaphor, not a legal term of art that authorizes killing the “enemy.” The human beings on these boats were civilians, and even if there were an actual war going on, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians unless they are directly engaged in hostilities. Even if the boats’ occupants were, as the administration alleges, carrying illegal drugs, that offense would at most have authorized their arrest, trial, and, if convicted, incarceration for a period of years. It would not authorize the death penalty, much less their summary execution without trial.

Trump has called the dead “narcoterrorists” and has asserted that the eleven killed in the first strike were associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, a “foreign terrorist organization.” But that designation authorizes only economic sanctions against the group, such as freezing their assets, and criminal penalties against Americans who do business with them. It does not authorize any use of military force, much less the intentional lethal targeting of civilians.

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Condemned Alabama man's final words 'I didn't kill anybody'

The 40th Execution of 2025

An Alabama man, Anthony Boyd, convicted of helping to burn a man alive in 1993 over a $200 drug debt was executed by nitrogen gas on October 23, 2025, reported The Associated Press.

Anthony Boyd, 54, was pronounced dead at 6:33 p.m. at William C. Holman Correctional Facility, authorities said. The execution was carried out by nitrogen gas, a method Alabama began using last year. Boyd was sentenced to death for his role in killing Gregory Huguley in Talladega County. Prosecutors said Huguley was set on fire after he didn’t pay for $200 worth of cocaine.

Boyd used his final words to proclaim his innocence and criticize the criminal justice system.

“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” he said.

“There can be no justice until we change this system,” he continued. He said he wanted to express love to those who are still fighting, before closing with, “Let’s get it.”

The execution appeared to take longer than prior nitrogen gas executions. The state does not reveal the exact time the gas began flowing.

At about 5:57 p.m. Boyd clenched his fist, raised his head off the gurney slightly and began shaking. He then raised his legs off the gurney several inches. At about 6:01 p.m. he began a long series of heaving breaths that lasted at least 15 minutes, before becoming still. The curtain closed to the execution chamber at 6:27 p.m. The prison commissioner said the gas is kept flowing for five minutes after monitoring shows the inmate no longer has a heartbeat.

A prosecution witness at Boyd’s trial testified as part of a plea agreement and said that Boyd taped Huguley’s feet together before another man doused him in gasoline and set him on fire. Defense lawyers said he was at a party on the night Huguley was killed and the plea deal testimony was unreliable.

A jury convicted Boyd of capital murder during a kidnapping and recommended by a vote of 10-2 that he receive a death sentence.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement that the state “remains steadfast in its commitment to uphold the law and deliver justice for victims and their families.”

“For more than 30 years, Boyd sought to delay justice through endless litigation, yet he never once presented evidence that the jury was wrong,” Marshall said.

Boyd had been on Alabama’s death row since 1995. He was the latest chair of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, an anti-death penalty group founded by men on death row.

Alabama began using nitrogen gas last year to carry out some executions. The method uses a gas mask strapped over the inmate’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing the person to die from lack of oxygen.

Nationally, the method has now been used in eight executions: seven times in Alabama and once in Louisiana.

The state and Boyd’s spiritual adviser gave conflicting accounts of what happened in the execution chamber.

The Rev. Jeff Hood stood by Boyd as he died. He was also at the first nitrogen gas execution.

“This is the worst one yet,” Hood said. “I think they are absolutely incompetent when it comes to carrying out these executions.” He said Alabama had promised nitrogen was a “quick, painless, easy form of execution and this is by far nothing anywhere close to that.”

Hood said he believed Boyd planned to try to communicate through leg movements. Hood said he believed “some level of consciousness, in my opinion, for at least 16 minutes.”

Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said he believed Boyd’s shaking and other movements were involuntary.

He said while the execution took longer than previous ones, it was “just a few minutes past some of the others.”

Boyd’s lawyers had asked a federal judge to halt the execution to give the method more scrutiny. A federal judge declined the request. She ruled Boyd was unlikely to prevail on claims that the method is unconstitutionally cruel.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon also denied Boyd’s request to stay the execution and to instead let him die by firing squad. Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored a scathing dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Sotomayor, citing witness descriptions of past nitrogen gas executions, wrote that there is “mounting and unbroken evidence” that the method is unconstitutional. She wrote that “allowing the nitrogen hypoxia experiment to continue” fails to protect the dignity of the nation.

Alabama has maintained that any shaking or gasping exhibited by inmates during nitrogen gas executions are largely involuntary actions caused by oxygen deprivation.

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Mangino discusses death of teen connected to D4vid with Jesse Weber on Law & Crime's Sidebar

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Mangino discusses Pennsylvania conviction on Law & Crime Network

My interview with Chris Stewart of Law & Crime Network about the first degree murder conviction of Michael Dutkiewicz in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. 

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NYT: The abdication

A must read: Carl Hulse, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times writes: 

By almost any measure, Congress is failing. And flailing.

The government is shut down for the 23rd day; many federal workers aren’t getting paid, agencies and museums are closed, and top lawmakers are making no serious effort to resolve the impasse. Congressional staff members have begun referring to themselves as volunteers. The House has not voted since Sept. 19, and Speaker Mike Johnson won’t call members back. He has refused to seat a new Democratic member from Arizona one month after her election victory.

As the Trump administration shifts billions of dollars around to take care of its priorities during the shutdown with scant input from lawmakers, ignoring Congress’s clear constitutional supremacy over the power of the purse, Republicans in control have done nothing to push back. Nor have they exercised oversight of President Trump’s legally questionable military moves off the coast of Venezuela, his imposition of tariffs or anything else that has challenged the authority of their beleaguered institution.

“The Congress is adrift,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska. “It’s like we have given up. And that’s not a good signal to the American public.”

No leverage

Trump and his aides have usurped congressional power with little G.O.P. resistance. In many instances, House and Senate leaders have willingly ceded their prerogatives and cheered on the president. The Constitution gives Congress responsibility for levying tariffs, and Trump’s may hurt rural America, but the Republicans who represent it have been mainly silent.

The same goes for the administration’s operations against alleged drug runners from South America. Despite bipartisan support for sanctions on Russia, Republicans reversed course and delayed action because of mixed signals from Trump. He seemed willing to restrain Moscow, then pulled back, then finally imposed sanctions unilaterally yesterday.

Trump himself suggested this week that Congress had little left to do after passing its sweeping domestic policy and tax measure. “We don’t need to pass any more bills,” he told Senate Republicans at the White House on Tuesday. “We got everything in that bill.”

Trump and his Republican allies have steamrolled Democrats this year. Now Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, is employing what little leverage Democrats have by denying Republicans the 60 votes they need to pass a short-term spending bill to fund the government. They want Republicans to extend health insurance subsidies and help millions avoid big premium increases.

But Republican leaders have made it clear that they view their role as subordinate to the president, saying they won’t open talks with their Democratic counterparts unless Trump allows them to do so. And he’ll sign off “as soon as Schumer reopens the government,” the speaker wrote on social media.

Balance of powers

There are evidently some limits to what Congress will swallow. Republicans this week pressed the White House to withdraw the nomination of Paul Ingrassia to head the Office of Special Counsel after Politico disclosed racist texts he had sent.

Senate Republicans also raised the alarm on behalf of cattle ranchers after Trump suggested that he might increase imports of Argentine beef to bolster markets there. The administration showed signs of heeding their calls.

But the funding impasse now has top Republicans talking about a yearlong extension of current federal spending, instead of a new budget. That would further undermine Congress’s authority, shifting the power to shape spending from the once formidable Appropriations Committees to the White House and its budget director, Russell Vought.

At a White House luncheon with G.O.P. members of Congress on Tuesday, Trump celebrated Vought as “Darth Vader,” for the fear provoked by the man behind the administration’s drive to strip spending power from Congress. “You’re doing a great job, I have to tell you,” Trump told Vought.

Then Senate Republicans applauded the man eager to render them irrelevant.

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Creators: Increase in Executions Doesn't Signal Support for Death Penalty

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
October 21, 2025

As of this writing, there have been 39 executions this year. That is a substantial increase over last year, and for that matter, over the last decade. The last time there were more than 30 executions in a single year was 2014.

Is this proof that support for the death penalty is growing? Hardly, executions are a lagging indicator of past support, while new death sentences and public opinion polls are a better barometer of current sentiment.

Why is an uptick in executions not an indicator of surging support for the death penalty? The 39 people executed this year were convicted long ago. The average stay on death row for those put to death so far in 2025 was 25.6 years.

More telling is the number of new death sentences each year. The number of death sentences imposed in the United States has declined significantly since a peak in 1996, when 316 death sentences were handed down. As of June 30, juries across the country imposed only 10 death penalty sentences. In recent years, the numbers have remained near record lows, with 26 new death sentences in 2024, 21 in 2023 and 18 in both 2022 and 2021.

What are Americans saying about the death penalty? According to an October 2024 Gallup poll, support for capital punishment was at a five-decade low in the United States. Overall, Gallup found 53% of Americans in favor of the death penalty, but that number masks considerable differences between older and younger Americans.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, more than half of young adults aged 18 to 43 now oppose the death penalty. Among those expressing political affiliation, support for the death penalty fell markedly in all groups and in all generations, with the exception of Republicans aged 60 and older, where support for the death penalty rose by two percent.

In spite of the declining support for the death penalty, on Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump's first day in office, the White House issued a proclamation that included the following, "The Government's most solemn responsibility is to protect its citizens from abhorrent acts, and my Administration will not tolerate efforts to stymie and eviscerate the laws that authorize capital punishment against those who commit horrible acts of violence against American citizens." 

The White House's position demonstrates the divide in this country regarding state-sponsored death. This year's executions are concentrated in the South. All but three executions were carried out in the South. Florida, Texas, Alabama and South Carolina account for 27 of the 39 executions.

In addition, every state that carried out an execution so far this year voted for Trump in 2024.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, half of all U.S. states have abolished the death penalty or currently prohibit executions. In fact, 32 states have either abolished the death penalty or have not carried out an execution in more than a decade.

Clearly, outside the red states below the Mason-Dixon line the death penalty is slowly but surely falling out of favor.

Examining the death penalty in America's largest state provides some perspective on today's death penalty. Since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1978, thirteen condemned inmates have been executed. During those 45 years, 166 death row inmates have died from natural causes, suicide, drug overdoses or undetermined causes.

The absurdity of the death penalty doesn't end there. In Pennsylvania, where there are just under 100 men on death row, only three men have been executed in more than 45 years. The dysfunction of Pennsylvania's death penalty has caused Governor Josh Shapiro to reevaluate his position. Shapiro, a former state attorney general, has come out against the death penalty: "At its core, for me, this is a fundamental statement of morality, of what's right and wrong in my humble opinion."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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