Midterm Countdown: 16 Days to Go.
An image Donald Trump posted this morning, of his vision for the locally cherished East Potomac Park golf courses in DC. Last weekend, Trump operatives illegally cut down hundreds of mature trees on the courses. Today he announced plans to close the courses altogether next month, to convert them to a PGA venue. DC-ites will note that this plan entirely eliminates the famous bike and running path around the perimeter of Hains Point, which among other things is a featured part of the annual Marine Corps Marathon. (Trump posting.)
The purpose of this post is simply to list, in timeline order, some of the chaotic and corrupt events of the past five days, as we near the two-week mark before the midterms.
When I put up my previous chronicle, a federal judge was throwing the book at MAGA officials from the White House, the Interior Department, and the National Park Service for their illegal, surprise-attack toppling of several hundred mature trees at East Potomac Park, in Washington. (Also known as Hains Point.)
This desecration cut especially deep for people in the DC area, even when compared with … everything else. It’s not just that it will take another century to replace trees that were a hundred years old. It’s that Hains Point, which sits on the waters of the Potomac directly across from National Airport, and its park and recreation spaces have a unique place in DC community culture.
The golf and tennis facilities are distinctly public, and open to all, for very low fees. You see a wide range of people using them: Golfers and tennis enthusiasts, young families pushing strollers, runners and bikers and skaters taking the multi-mile course around the whole Hains Point peninsula, bird-watchers and nature-lovers and so on. Notably, they come from the full range of DC’s population. And this is what Trump now wants to bulldoze and turn into “One of the Best and Most Spectacular Golf Courses anywhere in the World,” as he put it this morning in a post.
In that post, he explicitly called out the new course’s appeal to the PGA tour and as a venue for golf’s “major” events. Toward that end, he said that the current courses would be closed altogether starting next month. “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he concluded. Grrrrr.
We’ll get back to that. For now, lest we forget, items from a busy timeline.
October 13, Tuesday:
Katie Zacharia makes her first appearance at a White House press briefing, as the new press secretary. As the world knows, it would also be her last.
Trump spends most of the day flying to Alaska for another campaign-rally speech, this one mainly for incumbent GOP Senator Dan Sullivan. Before departure, Katie Zacharia and Natalie Harp walk with others alongside Trump toward the ramp for Air Force One. On arrival in Alaska, they sit with him on Marine One.
(Those were the days: Zacharia and Harp with their president aboard Marine One, in Alaska. Photo Alex Wong / Getty.)
During his rally speech, Trump issues real-time pardons to two people who had pleaded guilty to violating the federal Clean Air Act by removing pollution-control equipment from trucks. As he loves to do, Trump signs the pardons with a Sharpie and holds them up for the crowd to admire.
Also in this rally, Trump renews his promise to give every adult American $5,000 if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate. So far I haven’t heard any reporter or audience member ask him why, since Republicans already control the House and the Senate, don’t they just do this now.
This rally came one day after federal agents had raided the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar. Trump calls her out in the rally speech, saying she was “garbage” and a “phony,” who had “married her brother” to fake her way around immigration laws.
Then it’s back to the Lower 48, starting with Arizona.
October 14, Wednesday.
As the campaign troupe heads to its event in Bullhead City, Arizona, the first little bar-exam clouds appear on the horizon for Katie Zacharia. In California, a watchdog group called Campaign for Accountability files a complaint with the State Bar about Zacharia’s many public claims to be a “lawyer.” The unraveling begins.
From the stump in Arizona, Trump announces that the uppity Canadians will soon be sorry, because their country will “end up being the 51st state, because that’s the only way it works.” He also reminds the world that “our plate’s getting larger all the time,” and says the appetite still extends to “our new and beautiful Greenland.”
That night, at a rally to support GOP congressional candidates in Montana, which he carried by 20 points, Trump gave his standard grievance-pitch to the crowd for more than an hour. Local news reports highlighted his plea to “Pretend that I’m running. Please remember, I am on the ballot.”
October 15, Thursday.
The Trump team is back in Washington, just in time to see another blockbuster story of its corruption. This one is from Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey, and Aaron Schaffer of the beleaguered WaPo, and it includes names, photos, and money of the business people who are funding Trump’s new ballroom—the one he said he was paying for himself. Even in current circumstances, the story is genuinely shocking.
Lead image from the WaPo story.
Trump Department of “Justice” files a suit against California election authorities, demanding that they check some 20,000 names on a mail-in ballot list on suspicion that they are not legal voters. The DOJ sends the “evidence” to California officials on a thumb-drive, with the password written on a sticky note. Back in the olden days, before Trump, the DOJ refrained from any such queries in the 60 days before an election.
Katie Zacharia begins her final 24 hours in office, with the first on-the-record confirmation that she never passed a bar exam. Then she is roughed up in sessions with the usually hospitable Fox News.
October 16, Friday.
The last day for Katie Zacharia. In the morning, Trump tells a press gaggle that “If I were Katie, I’d reconsider.” A few hours later, JD Vance tells her she’s done. The WSJ has a “final days” blow-by-blow here. Anthony Scaramucci tweets, “Records are made to be broken.” (Weirdo linguistic note: How is it that Trump, with all his other butchery of the language, somehow remembers to use the subjunctive? “I if were” vs “if I was”? In our household we’ve marveled at this whenever we hear him speak. If I were closer to details of his schooling and upbringing, maybe I’d be able to guess.)
Trump waives sanctions on Russia. Trump’s adoring vassal the late Lindsey Graham had consistently stood up for Ukraine. The law sanctioning exports from Russia (and Iran) is known as the Lindsey O. Graham Act. Last month Trump signed that act into law. Now he signs one of his Executive Orders waiving its effect on Russia. “What part of enforcing a law passed 86-11 by the Senate does the President and his advisors not understand?” writes Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, in a tweet. Tillis is not running for re-election and voted to confirm Pete Hegseth, RFKJr, Todd Blanche, and Trump’s other notorious nominees.
The current Commander of US Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, releases a truckling YouTube video claiming that the Strait of Hormuz was “open for business.” The corruption of the career military in the Trump/Hegseth era is genuinely alarming.
October 17, Saturday.
“No Kings” rallies occur in all 50 states. Meta, controlled by the also-truckling Mark Zuckerberg, shuts off the No Kings instagram account during the events.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy weighs in about Trump’s sanctions-waiver for Russia, essentially saying that Trump has come out of the closet as an outright tool of Russia.
Trump campaigns in Kentucky and in his rally speech boasts of his domination of tech companies like Google. In his first term, he said, Google officials wouldn’t take his calls. “Now they kiss my ass.” His example was their immediately changing the Google Maps names of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario (to “Gulf of America” and “Lake America”) at his request.
At this same event he also says, superfluously, “I can do stuff that’s unbelievable.” The word “ass” is appearing more and more frequently in his discourse. At this event he mentions Ohio Senator Jon Husted, a schoolboy athlete, and says (again) that “I examined his ass.”
October 18, Sunday, also today.
Trump announces, via Truth Social, that his goal for the East Potomac Park golf course is not simply to upgrade it to “Professional Class” but also to close it almost immediately, and to remove the entire path around Hains Point—used by runners and bikers and also accessible for single-lane traffic by cars—to make room for his new course.
Among the groups who might object to this closure: The US Marine Corps, whose annual Marine Marathon features a lap on that very path around Hains Point.The day is not yet over, but Trump has found time to issue an official endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election. Great.
How another leader spent this week.
If you’d like a more positive example of a similar timeline, how about this, involving Pope Leo: