Let's judge the architecture of The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.

🚨 FIRST LOOK: The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library is officially here.

Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team at @Trump.

This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an… pic.twitter.com/azV1hx0HG2

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) March 31, 2026

The world gave "SNL" some great material and "SNL" did not squander the opportunity. Enjoy the near perfection of "The White POTUS."

Why it's not complete perfection: 1. You need to have watched Season 3 of "The White Lotus" to get most of the jokes, 2. The joke about the watch is bad. It was like the old "moron" jokes of the 1960s — e.g., why did the moron throw his watch across the room?/He wanted to see time fly — and the idea that Eric Trump is a moron isn't worth spending time on. 

"Donald J. Trump’s... impassioned defense during closing arguments... attacked both the New York attorney general who brought the case and the judge overseeing it...."

"[He] cast[] himself as a victim of what he claimed was their partisan crusade against him.... He took the microphone, said that he did not see how he could stick to the facts and the law when the case went beyond them and then monologued for five minutes. He attacked the judge, saying, 'You have your own agenda.' He went after Ms. James, accusing her of perpetrating 'a fraud on me.' Perhaps the most surprising feature of Mr. Trump’s closing argument was that he stopped willingly after five minutes. When the lunch break arrived, Justice Engoron asked him to finish, and Mr. Trump obliged...."

From "What to Know After Closing Arguments in Trump’s Civil Fraud Trial/A judge’s decision lies ahead, and appeals are highly likely. But this case could end Mr. Trump’s decades-long role in the New York real-estate business" (NYT).

The NYT writers find it "surprising" that Trump — who disrespects the Attorney General and the judge — respects lunchtime.

This part of the article makes me think it's clear what the judge is going to do:

"Inside, the church was less than half full. There were plenty of Hermès bags but few boldfaced names from the gilt-covered slice of Manhattan society the couple had inhabited..."

"... in the 1980s and 1990s.... 'In the tumultuous times of the last few years, with all the attacks we faced,' [Donald Trump Jr.] said, 'she was the first person to call and see if I perhaps wanted, or maybe needed, to move back in with her. That call was simultaneously the sweetest and most emasculating thing ever. And she could do that with the best of them, and usually it was on purpose.' When he was a small child, Mr. Trump said, he went with his family to the Hamptons. While there, he acted at Gosman’s (Montauk’s best-known seafood spot) in a way that 'exceeded the limits' of everyone’s patience. His mother, he said, took him to the bathroom and showed him 'what Eastern European discipline was really all about.' When it was over, he said, she told him, 'And if you cry, we’re going to come back in here and do this again.'... [Eric Trump] told another story about his sister Ivanka destroying a very pricey chandelier while playing in the house with a beach ball. 'Ivanka managed to quickly convince my mother that it was me,' he said. That time, the 'remedy,' as he put it, was a 'wooden spoon,' and what made his mother even more irate as she spanked him was his fervent denial of having played any role in the misbehavior. 'Not only had I broken the chandelier, but now I was also lying to her,' he said. But by the time she realized he was telling the truth, Mr. Trump said, she was 'too tired to deal with Ivanka.'"

From "At Ivana Trump’s Funeral, a Gold-Hued Coffin and the Secret Service" (NYT).

I'll just say it was mean of the Times to say "the church was less than half full" and tag this post with "mothers," "domestic violence," and "gender difference" and move on.

Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents' Dinner: "You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you use to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him but I think you love him."

"I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn't sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He's helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster and now you're profiting off him."



Yes, a lot of her jokes thudded in that crowd and she said "fuck" a few times and got more sexual than most comedians at that event, but the line I quoted — which was almost the last thing she said — was a good one.

Typical reaction shot:



ADDED: Consider the words "You helped create this monster." What is "this monster"? It can't be Trump the man, because the press didn't create (or "help create") the man. The "monster" must be something else — The Myth of Trump, The Power of Trump, The Outsize Public Persona of Trump... or perhaps simply: The President Trump. He couldn't have become President without them. Their love made him strong, and they are responsible for what they have done. It's not enough, then, for them to stand back and act horrified — look! a monster exists. It's their monster. They are Frankenstein.

Slate must think the word "male" in this headline makes it not just okay but hilarious.

Oh, no! I'm wrong. I clicked through from the front page, above, and the article looks like this:



Wow. I'm surprised. It begins:

There’s a certain class of public figure whose face routinely gets described as “punchable.” He’s usually male; though arguably society shouldn’t be encouraging the punching of anyone (with possible exception for Nazis), good etiquette would seem to indicate that women are considered the less punchable sex. The guy with the punchable face is usually white; it’s hard out there for white men lately, in case you hadn’t heard. He’s usually young, too: What’s more annoying the know-it-all grin of impetuous youth? In addition to the privilege that being young, white, and male already affords him, he of high punchability often has a look that somehow scans as extra-privileged, a mouth seemingly born with a silver spoon in it....

Is this the way we're talking now? It seems so wrong, and yet I admit that in private speech, I do sometimes say "I just want to smack that guy." Smacking is less violent than punching, but it shows that I've got the hang of this metaphor.

Is Trump mentioned in this article? (The question occurs to me because I'm thinking about Trump retweeting that CNN wrestling video, which some people found funny and comprehensible as metaphor and some people deplored as encouraging violence against journalists (if only in the mind of the mentally deranged).) Donald Trump isn't mentioned in the article, but both of his sons — not just the much bloodied Don Jr. but the other one, Eric — are presented as most squarely within this concept of punchable, along with 5 other men: Martin Shkreli, Scott Disick, Ryan Lochte, Miles Teller, and Justin Bieber.

[O]bviously the Trump sons are beady-eyed paragons of smugness. There is a relationship, then, between punchability and self-knowledge. Misbehaving so badly when they have the advantages that they do is what tends to raise the public’s hackles. Can they all be so blithely unaware of the tiredness of the “bad boy” trope, or the many overgrown babies who have already trod this ground? And yet they continue to smirk.

"Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay cost taxpayers $97,830 in hotel bills."

A WaPo headline.

What the government paid for was Secret Service protection.

Were there equivalent headlines for what taxpayers paid when members of Obama's family traveled to do things that were not the work of government — vacations, career-boosting internships, political fundraisers and rallies?

WaPo wafts the notion that traveling for business is different because one makes money doing business. The wafting is done through a quote from a law professor:

“This is an example of the blurring of the line between the personal interest in the family business and the government,” said Kathleen Clark, an expert on government ethics and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis....

“There is a public benefit to providing Secret Service protection,” Clark said. “But what was the public benefit from State Department personnel* participating in this private business trip to the coastal town? It raises the specter of the use of public resources for private gain.”

As an erstwhile law professor, I'm fascinated by the use of law professors to give heft to wafting theories. There's no way to know how many law professors WaPo queried before getting this quote from Clark. A cynically educated guess would be 17.** And I'm fascinated by the ability of law professors to seem to say something useful to the theory being wafted without really saying much of anything at all. Note the phrases "blurring of the line" — no line is crossed or even located — and "raises the specter" — which doesn't even acknowledge that there's an issue. A "specter" is a ghost.

In other Secret Service news, "Malia Obama parties into the early morning in NYC":

The former first daughter attended a starry HBO “Girls” premiere, then went dancing into the early hours of the morning....

We were told that “Secret Service agents were all over the place” at the party, but they managed to blend into the crowd of more than 600 guests.

_______________________

* The Secret Service is not located in the State Department — it's in the Department of Homeland Security — but the money for the Secret Service's hotel rooms was paid through the State Department. The State Department and the Secret Service refused to talk to WaPo about why the money came from the State Department. Is it the usual source of funding when the trip is outside of the homeland? WaPo doesn't explain. It just leaves us with the lawprof's wafting, which blends the spectral problem of the State Department source of funding with the question how it benefits the public to protect members of the President's family. Is that really something we wonder about?

** [ADDED at 8:33] I'm less cynical now, because I just happened to be researching a completely different government ethics question — whether Bill and Hillary Clinton stole furniture from the White House — and the government ethics expert quoted in the fact-checking article I found was Kathleen Clark:

[O]ne Steve Mittman from New York gave [Bill Clinton] two sofas, an easy chair and ottoman worth $19,900... [Mittman said he thought he was] donating to the White House itself as part a major remodeling project in 1993....

[T]he White House had retained an interior decorator who, according to the report, coordinated 43 of the 45 furniture gifts received over the Clintons’ eight years. 

Kathleen Clark focuses on government ethics law at Washington University in St. Louis. For her, that interior decorator raised a flag. "I don’t know how you coordinate gifts without soliciting them," Clark said....

There's a ban on soliciting gifts, so the solicitation would be evidence that the furniture was not a personal gift to the Clintons.

"Calling the Clintons’ actions ‘stealing’ or ‘theft’ is hyperbolic," Clark said. "It’s hard to take that language seriously in this context."  

I didn't find it hard! Clark is the one who made me see that the furniture must have been a gift to the White House and not personally to the Clintons. She said it must have been solicited. The only way it's "hyperbolic" to call it stealing is if you expect us to modify language to coddle and insulate politicians. It's not hyperbole to defeat that expectation. It's clear speech — my #1 cause on this blog.

New York Magazine and its readers make a point of taking pleasure in a group of teenagers shouting "Fuck your father!” at Eric Trump.

"As we reckon with the reality that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, the nation’s teens have mobilized as well — by roasting Trump’s offspring in public."

"Fuck your father" is despicable harassment, not roasting.

A roast is an event in which a specific individual, a guest of honor, is subjected to good-natured jokes at their expense intended to amuse the event's wider audience.... The implication is that the roastee is able to take the jokes in good humor and not as serious criticism or insult, and it is seen by some as a great honor to be roasted. The individual is surrounded by friends, fans, and well-wishers....

A group of strangers yelling "Fuck your father!" is not good-natured or any kind of honor. There's nothing the slightest bit friendly about it. We're told there were "about eight" of these teenagers, accosting Eric (and his wife) as they crossed a street in NYC. This is ugly and should be condemned, but New York Magazine asks us to take a break from our own suffering (over the outcome of the election) and appreciate it. Vile.

"I really like humble Trump, and that’s what I saw last night. That’s the father I know. And here’s a man who’s not a politician..."

"... he’s not a PC guy either, and he has run on not being politically correct and every single day he’s out there giving speeches. He has strayed, and he admitted it last night. When he said it last night, the audience went crazy. It’s cool that he toned it back. It was really neat that he did that.”

Said Eric Trump.