July 16, 2026
An exchange yesterday between Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to oversee the U.S. intelligence community as director of national intelligence, illustrated the dilemma of those trying to force Trump’s lies onto the American people when they are confronted with reality.
Ossoff asked Clayton: “Who won the 2020 election?”
Clayton responded: “Uh, you know, I’m not, I’m not gonna do this with you.
Ossoff: “This is a job interview. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee.”
Clayton agreed.
Ossoff: “Who won the 2020 election?”
Clayton: “Like I said, I’m not I’m not gonna get into that with you.”
Ossoff continued to ask, and Clayton continued to refuse to answer the question, saying: “We can keep doing this,” and saying he was not going to “engage in the theater.”
Ossoff said: “You’re here asking for the support of senators to lead America’s intelligence community. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with this committee and with the American public, but you refuse to answer a simple matter of fact about the 2020 election. Is that right?”
Clayton: “No, that’s not right.”
Ossoff: “Then answer the question. Who won the 2020 election?”
Clayton: “I have answered the question.”
Ossoff: “Answer it. What is your answer?”
Clayton: “I’ve given you my answer.”
Ossoff: “What is your answer?”
Clayton sat in silence.
Ossoff: “You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election? But you ask to lead America’s intelligence community? Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question, why can you not give it?”
Clayton could not answer because, although all of the claims of Trump and his loyalists that he won the 2020 presidential election have collapsed in court, Trump requires his cronies to claim that the election was stolen in order to have justification for rigging future elections. They know the truth—that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and by 51.3% to 46.8% in the Electoral College. But they refuse to say so because if they do, they will lose Trump’s favor.
Those loyalists are the people Trump is putting in control of the American government. In his own confirmation hearing today for elevation to the position of attorney general—the person at the head of the country’s legal system, representing the American people—Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche slipped. When asked if he and Trump were friends, Blanche answered, “I’m his lawyer,” before correcting himself to say: “was his lawyer.”
Blanche was Trump’s criminal defense attorney and has openly used the power of the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s political opponents.
The editorial board of the New York Times called out another problem with Blanche. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams questioned whether Blanche is fit to practice law at all. She found that the slush fund/immunity deal Blanche signed off on with Trump, the Trump family, the Trump Organization, and their associates had been manufactured to give cover to a deal they did not want reviewed by a judge.
Yesterday we saw in real time how, with Blanche’s support, Trump is stacking the courts with loyalists. In Seattle, Washington, a panel of federal judges appointed by five presidents unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff, a former judge and longtime state and federal prosecutor as U.S. attorney. The judges appointed Rogoff to replace the Trump appointee whose 120-day interim position ended in February. By law, an interim U.S. attorney can stay in office for no more than 120 days, but Trump has tried to get around that law by changing the title under which his appointees operate, turning the interim U.S. attorney into an assistant U.S. attorney while leaving the top position empty.
The judges, to whom replacing an interim U.S. attorney falls if there is no presidential appointment, unanimously agreed to Rogoff. He took the oath of office at 8:00 in the morning and, within the hour, received an email telling him he was fired.
“District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and [the president] can fire them,” Blanche posted on social media Wednesday.
Trump’s styling of himself as an authoritarian ruler showed yesterday in the announcement from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the Treasury will issue a new commemorative $1 coin with Trump’s likeness on it this fall as “a lasting symbol of patriotism.” It is unclear if the coin will circulate as currency.
While living monarchs who are heads of state appear on coins, living political leaders who appear on currency tend to be those trying to make themselves indistinguishable from the government. Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Idi Amin in Uganda, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq all put themselves on currency. The U.S. passed a law in 1866 barring living people from appearing on U.S. financial instruments.
According to Alice Gibbs of Newsweek, the Trump administration is getting around that law by relying on a law permitting the coining of collectible currency to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, as the country did with its bicentennial quarters in 1976.
Luke Broadwater and Marco Hernandez of the New York Times today did a deep dive on the helipad Trump is building on the South Lawn of the White House. They note that it’s usually very hard to get permissions to build a helipad because of zoning laws, airspace regulations, and impact on the environment. Trump himself has said there is “no harder zoning thing to get.”
But Trump is pushing ahead with the one he wants without permission from Congress and without any review panel. Construction began last month on the site where Trump had ordered an Ultimate Fighting Championship stadium built for a cage match on his birthday. Trump says Lockheed Martin, which is a major defense contractor and which makes the new, powerful helicopters Trump uses, is donating the money to build the helipad.
A spokesperson for the White House told the reporters that “operational upgrades to the White House grounds, such as the helipad installation, do not require commission reviews.”
Trump did not get reviews or permissions to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool either, and when that went poorly he insisted that vandals had attacked it. His loyalists parrotted his claims, and the Department of Justice went so far as to arrest and charge 67-year-old cyclist David Hearn, who touched part of the pool’s detached lining, accusing him of vandalizing it.
Today Jarrett Ley, Meg Kelly, Klara Auerback, and Maura Judkis of the Washington Post reported that all of the peeling occurred at the seams of the lining and that experts said those failures were likely due to the way the lining was installed. They explained at length what those mistakes were.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers denied that this could be the case. “There were no missteps during the initial repairs to the pool,” Rogers said. “Unfortunately, deranged individuals made several gashes in the side of the pool and destroyed over 300 feet of the pool’s siding. Once the necessary repairs to fix the vandalism are complete, the Reflecting Pool will be restored to all its glory.”
Trump’s conviction that he and his cronies should run the United States without input or check from Congress or experts and without reference to reality has brought us to a perilous place.
Trump yesterday told the Fox News Channel that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran’s bridges and power plants. Today, Parisa Hafezi, Samia Nakhoul, and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported that Iranian leaders have asked the Houthis they back in Yemen to close the Bab el-Mandeb strait that commands the opening between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb are the two main routes for oil exports from the Middle East. The closure of the second strait would exacerbate energy shortages even as the U.S. oil reserve drops to its lowest level since 1983.
Despite the administration’s insistence that addressing climate change is a “scam,” the extreme weather caused by climate change has sparked more than 800 wildfires in Canada and at least a dozen in northern Minnesota. Smoke from the fires is exposing Americans from the Midwest to the Northeast to hazardous levels of air pollution.
CBS News reports that Detroit, Minneapolis, and Chicago today rank in the top five most polluted cities in the world, and that officials in New York City are distributing N95-type masks to commuters. Ben Noll of the Washington Post reported that more than 115 million people are in the plume of unhealthy to hazardous air quality and that conditions are expected to get worse.
At the same time, pouring rain in the Texas Hill Country is causing deadly floods. CNN reported that the Guadalupe River at Comfort, Texas, rose more than 25 feet in an hour as the heavens dropped about half a year’s worth of rain in southern Texas.
Meanwhile, there are now nearly 7,000 known cases of food-borne illness from a parasite that is causing “explosive diarrhea” in patients in more than 30 states across the U.S. Brian Beutler of Off Message commented: “I feel like if Biden or Obama had turned America into a diarrhea splatter film, Republicans would’ve made it into a political problem for them.”
A new Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that Trump has lost even many Republicans. Only 37% of those polled approve of his job performance, while 61% disapprove. The percentage who “strongly” approve of Trump has dropped to a new low of 15%. Only 26% of Independents approve of his job performance, while 71% disapprove. Sixty-six percent of Americans say groceries are unaffordable.
And so, with Trump scheduled to give a prime-time address tonight, apparently to argue for voter restrictions, Senator Ossoff told reporters: “Here’s what’s going to happen tonight: the world’s most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour grapes address to pursue his 6-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/16/us/politics/white-house-helipad-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/opinion/todd-blanche-attorney-general-senate-hearing.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-federal-prosecutor-seattle_n_6a584854e4b07a7875d1956c
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/15/trump-situation-room-iran-bombing
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ending-the-Green-New-Scam-Fact-Sheet.pdf
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/forests-forestry/wildland-fires/climate-change-wildland-fire
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wildfires-smoke-millions-exposed-midwest-northeast-us/
https://abcnews.com/US/dangerous-wildfire-smoke-continues-air-quality-alerts-17/story?id=134809268
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/16/weather/live-news/texas-flash-flooding-camp-mystic-climate
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28476291-hearn-motion/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/opinion/blanche-confirmation-trump-attorney-general.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/16/trump-approval-stuck-30s-post-ipsos-poll-shows/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m7n427xd8o
Substack:
@brianbeutler/note/c-292693465
X:
DAGToddBlanche/status/2077501246294929627?s=20
Bluesky:
chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mqqupeotzs2k
atrupar.com/post/3mqp24kjgcv2r
The measure of a public servant isn’t just whether they know the truth. It’s whether they’re willing to tell it when it carries a personal cost.
Most threats to democracy don’t begin with people who can’t distinguish truth from falsehood. They begin with people who know the difference but choose loyalty over honesty. When public office rewards loyalty over truth, institutions stop serving the public and begin serving power.
Truth isn’t just a personal virtue in a democracy. It’s one of its essential institutions.
I find the polling numbers you mention… a 37% approval rating… tragically high. One-third of Americans are that self-destructive? So confused they align themselves with a psychopath with total contempt for them and everyone else?
I grieve for our country.