Fiasco: Trump's contractor confesses to Reflecting Pool train wreck
(Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)
September 11, 2026
ALTERNET
The New York Times reports that the contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in its repair plan, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, not vandalism.
The Times reviewed government documents showing the company took responsibility for the decay and damage to the pool liner, despite the administration’s insistence — and prosecutions —claiming the damage was done by delinquents
“President Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals wielding knives or box cutters for damage to the pool’s ‘American flag blue’ liner, even after the Justice Department dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the national landmark,” reports the Times. “But the documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found problems in both the design and the execution of the renovation. The documents include Atlantic’s reports to the government as well as daily progress updates from the National Park Service over the past two months.”
Atlantic apparently held its own errors liable in an Aug. 14 report, and then provided additional detail on Sept. 2, according to documents.
The Justice Department, which had charged several people with vandalizing the pool in early July, began moving to dismiss the cases on July 31, according to the Times.
In documents, the company blamed “human oversight” in some patches of the renovation, saying workers did not apply enough chemical primer to gel the layers of the liner together. But the bigger problem, the company said, was that the repair plan itself laid out in the contract actually called for the layers of liner to include two chemicals that are incompatible.
“The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than what the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat caused the bottom layer to blister and come loose, the documents show. The contractor said it had not expected that outcome because it was very uncommon to mix the two products in that way,” reports the Times. “The failure illustrates the consequences of the Trump administration’s rushed effort to renovate the pool this spring. In a hurry to finish the work before the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, the government bypassed competition and gave Atlantic a no-bid contract to carry out an untested approach designed in part by the general manager of one of Mr. Trump’s golf clubs.”
The Times reports the government has agreed to pay Atlantic $14.7 million for its work, but the contractor has said the pool is under warranty and eligible for additional repair.
Regardless, the Times reports Interior Department spokeswoman Katie Martin appeared to insist vandals were to blame for the damage, saying that they had “repeatedly reached into the pool and ripped at the coating.”
In July, federal prosecutors acted on President Donald Trump’s claims of vandalism and announced the indictment former Olympic canoeist David Hearn for pulling up a piece of the liner, on a felony vandalism charge.
But in a reversal, prosecutors pushed to dismiss the charges against Hearn and three others alleged vandals.
“Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, wrote that the Interior Department had misled her staff about the extent to which the damage had stemmed from vandalism rather than a ‘botched installation,’” reports the Times.
WSJ analysis proves it: MAGA is the party of (NATIONAL) socialism
REUTERS/Evan Vucci
September 11, 2026
ALTERNET
On Friday, a new report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the MAGA movement has embraced the very “socialist” policies for which President Donald Trump attacks his Democratic opponents. According to the Journal’s chief economic commentator, Greg Ip, MAGA’s “disdain for capitalism and centrism” has it looking more “socialist” by the day.
Ip raises the example of Vice President JD Vance, who dismissed Milton Friedman during an interview in June as irrelevant “in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites." This sort of statement is a far cry from traditional free market Republican economics. According to Ip, such thinking tracks with the “Horseshoe theory,” in which “the similarities between communism and fascism” begin to overlap to the point where they are almost indistinguishable. Like the “communists” and Democratic socialists the president so often rants about, writes Ip, Trump, Vance, and other MAGA figures “disdain free markets and globalization while embracing big, coercive government" and "are obsessed with identity."
According to Ip, these ideas began to shape the Republican Party in 2016 “with Trump’s populist takeover of the Republican Party. ‘Trump has re-educated, or mis-educated a lot of Republican voters into thinking everything is rigged. It’s how Bernie Sanders thinks about the economy,’ said Andy Laperriere, policy analyst at Piper Sandler. ‘The foreigners, the big companies, the system, whatever, is ripping us off.’ Laperriere noted that many ideas that originated on the left now command considerable backing from Republicans. Limiting drug increases to the rate of inflation, banning large investors from buying single-family homes, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 and capping credit-card interest rates at 10 percent all command support of around 70 percent or more, according to polls.”
Ip argues that Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) – long the standard bearer for American socialist politics – “have a lot in common.” Ip writes that “Sanders wanted to nationalize oil companies in the 1970s and proposes 50 percent state ownership of AI companies now. Trump used to call for seizing Middle Eastern oil or being paid to defend it, and just grabbed control of a chunk of Venezuela’s reserves. He has taken stakes in numerous companies and discussed doing the same with AI.”
And when it comes to moving MAGA’s identity away from the broader tolerance typical of centrism, says Ip, “Vance has gone further than Trump in arguing that religion and national origin, not an idea, are the basis of American identity. ‘We cannot rebuild Western civilization, we cannot rebuild the United States of America or Europe, by letting millions and millions of unvetted illegal migrants come into our country,’ he told a conservative audience in early 2025. Vance has also led the charge against Republican economic orthodoxy.”
While MAGA may be increasingly socialist, Ip argues that it will never merge with Democratic socialists because “they may agree that identity matters, but disagree vehemently on why.” Most of the president’s policies simply don’t resonate beyond MAGA. As Ip notes, “Outside of his core base, support for Trump’s handling of the economy and immigration have plummeted.”
MAGA’s deathgrip on Gen Z was severely overstated: report
Attendees pray during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 20, 2025. REUTERSSeptember 10, 2026
ALTERNET
There’s been plenty of attention on Gen Z voters since they swung right in 2024, but apparently assumptions were a little too premature, says Gen Z culture analyst Rachel Janfaza. They’re not the “red-pilled MAGA hardliners” they were sold to be.
“In 2020, as Gen Z voters came of age, the culture war was at its peak and it felt like every candidate, race and issue was a reflection of our values,” wrote Janfaza. “But today, young voters’ concerns are more material and far less ideological. There’s a common set of issues unifying Gen Zers across the political spectrum: the cost of living, inflation, AI, war, corruption.”
To get a sense of how young voters — including 8.5 million potential first-time voters — are feeling about the 2026 midterm elections, Janfaza and company spoke to them in a series of focus groups. And what interviews with 70 young people aged 17 to 33 in 28 states and Washington D.C. revealed was that they were not MAGA’s future as earlier reported.
“They care a lot less about being woke and a lot more about being able to get a job and pay their rent — let alone buy a home. And they’re looking for candidates who get that,” said Janfaza. “Gen Z voters really just want their politicians to be good, honest people, who work hard for their community and country. That means tackling the cost of living, working on government programs like SNAP and WIC, embracing social policies when it comes to healthcare, jobs, education, and regulating AI. It’s not that complicated. And it’s party agnostic.”
The generation doesn’t identify easily with the two political parties, but they certainly don’t identify with MAGA. In fact, according to interviews, when young voters support socialist candidates or say they favor socialism writ large, it’s really because they feel the status quo isn’t working.
“Life feels totally unaffordable, but young people believe that it doesn’t have to be this way. They want the government to provide Americans with a social safety net and endorse policies like universal or at least affordable health care, affordable housing, a higher minimum wage, affordable education, paid family leave, taxes on corporations, etc.,” Janfaza said.
And unlike other movements rotted in the past or worse, Gen Z appears to have “a hunger for forward looking policies.”
Call it “Hopemaxxing,” said Janfaza, but it means Gen Z wants to hear what a candidate’s plan is to fix the status quo, rather than preserve it. And don’t bother coming at them with the intent to “just blame the other side,” they say. This generation is “looking for candidates to inspire.”
Want to know how New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani cut inroads with the generation? He talked “pothole politics,” complete with on-the-ground repair policies for infrastructure and other endeavors.
And while MAGA isn’t about to benefit from this particular state of mind, Janfaza said Democrats shouldn’t rest easy on their laurels either. This is a results-minded generation.
“How people vote in the midterms will be all about the cost of living, but if young people don’t believe that any of the candidates can make a difference, they may not even show up,” she said.
The old order is dying as America faces a full-blown political reckoning
REUTERS/Eric Lee
September 11, 2026
ALTERNET
“The old order is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in this interregnum, monsters appear.” —paraphrase of Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci
While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Trump, Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it. As are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed and hundreds of other Democratic candidates this year.
At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives to it.
Arguably, the greatest failure of government in the past century was the Republican Great Depression, kicked off by Herbert Hoover with GOP tax cuts and tariffs in 1929 and lasting largely through the end of World War II. It created a populist moment that brought to power a Bernie-like populist in America named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It also brought to power a Trump-like populist in Germany named Adolf Hitler.
Because populist moments or eras typically evolve out of desperation — a third of Americans and Germans were unemployed in the 1930s — they open the door to people who offer solutions that radically depart from the norm. Breaking the old model and replacing it with a new one, in fact, is the essence of that populist pitch, be it coming from the fascist or the democratic socialist side.
And make no mistake: America is now being pulled in both directions by powerful movements from both sides. A recent Pew poll found that while almost 90 percent of Americans trusted our government to “do the right thing” for them in the Eisenhower/Kennedy 1960s, today that number sits at a shocking 17 percent.
The ground for a major, wrenching transformation of America has been seeded and the neofascist movement — which figured it out first — has, for the moment, captured control of our federal government along with about half of our states. But there’s also massive progressive pushback and dissatisfaction that, if anything, is amplifying the widespread populist sentiment.
So, which side will prevail?
The creation story of this moment is found when Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian mullahs to hold onto their American hostages until after the election of 1980, thus destroying President Jimmy Carter’s chance at reelection. Reagan immediately began to execute a neofascist vision that had been presented to him by the billionaires who funded the Heritage Foundation with their 1981 “Mandate for Leadership,” that era’s version of Project 2025.
He destroyed the American union movement, slashed wages for working class people gutting the middle class, made it harder to retire on Social Security, made deep cuts to FDR’s social safety net, ended free college, killed Carter’s solar energy programs, gave trillions of tax dollars to billionaires while raising taxes on working people, slashed funding for our public schools, and repeatedly blamed the nation’s problems on Black people and “elites” in our universities.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton picked up Reagan’s neoliberal mantel and brought us “the end of the era of big government” and “the end of welfare as we know it” as Reagan’s draconian tax cuts — which no Democratic president since has seriously challenged — began the modern explosion of billionaires and monopolistic corporations.
President Obama, although he campaigned on the populist-sounding slogan of “hope and change,” continued the neoliberal plan, turning our healthcare system over to a handful of massive insurance companies and their billionaire executives.
Forty-five years of neoliberalism, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, have taken us from two-thirds of us being in the middle class with a single paycheck in 1981 down to a mere 41 percent of us claiming that status and having to have two full-time jobs to do it today.
Like the Republican Great Depression devastated average voters, so has this failed neoliberal experiment, bringing us to this second modern populist moment.
On the neofascist side, there’s a populist movement initially led by tech and fossil fuel billionaires that’s been joined by the over 200 billionaire families and foundations who spent nearly one in five of all dollars used in the 2024 election.
They’re aided daily in their efforts by propaganda operations run by Vladimir Putin (internet trolls), Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Benjamin Netanyahu (AIPAC), all committed to spreading strongman ethnonationalist movements across the world at the expense of democracy. And, of course, Donald Trump and his seizure of our federal government and police agencies.
Their most compelling weapon is their control of most of our media, particularly the powerful social media sites Facebook and X. As Peter Theil wrote in 2010, quoted in the opening of Gil Durand’s brilliant new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy:
“The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world… the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority… But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world—without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you—through technological means… technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
On the side that still embraces democracy, the populist progressive movement has been led by Bernie Sanders for decades, although that mantle is increasingly being picked up across the Democratic Party as politicians recognized over the past decade this populist moment.
Multiple polls from 2016 showed that Bernie Sanders could’ve easily beat Trump, if the Democratic Party machine and the big donors Bill Clinton brought along hadn’t sabotaged Sanders. It was verified by Politifact. Populist voters were ready to elect a populist in that election, and the only one offered them was Trump.
They rejected the neoliberalism of Reagan and the Clintons alike, and those who vote for Democrats are clearly now opting for a reinvention of America along the social democracy lines pioneered by the Scandinavian nations.
In his book I Paid Hitler, 1930s steel baron Fritz Thyssen confesses that he was entranced by populist Hitler’s promise to “resurrect” Germany from the depths of the Depression and its loss in World War I. He organized the first seed money that got Hitler into power in 1933 and brought along many of his fabulously rich peers.
Today’s heir to Hitler’s authoritarian populist mantle is Trump (although Vance and Rubio, among others, are waiting for the king to fail so they can step into the vacuum).
During that same time, the plutocrat and former New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt turned his back on his own class and embraced a Bernie-like populist message, claiming that he could put America back together by taxing the morbidly rich at 90% and using government to meet workers’ needs.
Today’s heirs to FDR’s progressive populist mantle could well be billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (although there are numerous competitors).
On both sides, the message is similar:
“The elites and the government have failed us, feathered their own nests while ignoring us and ours, and they must be overthrown and replaced. We need radical change in the direction of our government and our culture.”
The only difference is that the Republicans are saying they’ll fix things by handing the reins of government to billionaires and the stability of society to armed, masked ICE agents while Democrats are saying we must reverse Reaganism, tax the rich, and use that money to restore our middle class with free healthcare, education, and housing supports.
We’ve been in this populist moment since the middle of the GW Bush administration, although it was a slow boil until the 2016 election. The first indication was Obama winning with a populist message, and the for-sure proof was Trump winning twice on purely populist messages. The Trump movement, however, figured out that this was where America was at long before it occurred to Democrats (other than Bernie), and Biden’s efforts, although valiant, were too little and too late.
So, here we are at this populist moment, and our country faces a binary choice: fascism or democratic socialism.
Republicans are universally lined up on the fascist side, backing Trump and ICE while feeding at the trough of their billionaire donors. That unanimity gives them tremendous power; their only problem is that they’ve failed to deliver for the people and voters know it.
Democrats are split, between those corrupt neoliberals like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and John Fetterman who are deeply in the pockets of corporate and wealthy interests, and a new and growing generation of politicians who often describe themselves as democratic socialists or social democrats.
This schism, a remnant of the Clinton years, is weakening the Democratic Party’s populist appeal as many believe the Perez-style Democrats will prevent the AOC- or Pritzker-style Democrats from actually accomplishing the transition to a social democracy that America needs.
Some doubt that this is the most important election in our lifetime, noting that every cycle we hear that kind of rhetoric. But, given the stakes and the boiling populist energy arrayed on both sides, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t the most critical one since 1932 America and 1933 Germany.
Get Thom Hartmann's daily columns on his Substack, Hartmann Report. Click here to join for free.
Ex-federal judge reveals Trump’s plan for 'catastrophic end' of democracy
September 10, 2026
ALTERNET
On Thursday, a former federal judge detailed what he deemed “the final battle for America’s democracy,” laying out President Donald Trump’s plan to seize power on January 3, 2027. This is according to attorney and former U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Luttig, who warns that “Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all.”
“Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021,” asserts Luttig. “Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021. That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.”
Over the course of his second term, says Luttig, Trump has taken steps to “seize control of the midterms” to ensure that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress. As Trump himself declared in February, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting.’ ... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” And the Republicans, notes Luttig, “have dutifully fallen in line … So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3.”
The core of the plan involves a Republican plot to claim the election was rigged after they lose. According to Luttig, “This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker [Mike] Johnson (R-LA) removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor. McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.”
“he constitutional crisis will begin, warns Luttig, when “sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.” Such action will be met with lawsuits arguing that the clerk must perform its mandated action, which will work their way through appeals. “The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when,” says Luttig, the court orders the elected Democratic representatives be seated and the clerk refuses. “Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”
From there, the matter would end up before the Supreme Court, which would be forced to answer “perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?” Should the Court decide to side with Republican claims of fraud, Luttig concludes, “two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America.”
