Misfit was here!

Glitter

“All journeys end when we reach our destination but the journeying remains a thing apart, unique unto itself. Most of us make life’s journeys without understanding that the journeying is a separate thing.”

June 15, 2026

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 16

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President Donald J. Trump’s remaking of Washington, D.C., to reflect his personalized approach to power rather than the American people and their government has become a little too on-the-nose over the past week.

After weeks of hyping the idea that he would restore the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial to “SPECTACULAR” condition after it had been “destroyed by Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump today reposted an article from the right-wing site Breitbart, titled: “‘Thank You President Trump’: Reflecting Pool in D.C. Wows After Trump Renovations.”

In fact, as Kinnia Cheuk of Politico reported today, the renovations Trump said would cost $1.5 million appear from federal contracting records to have cost almost $16 million, and the pool is now fouled with green algae.

But Trump and his cronies are simply telling the American people it’s a win. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the reflecting pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” a spokesperson for the Interior Department told Cheuk.

The alleged compliance of the board of the Kennedy Center with a court order requiring it to remove Trump’s name from the center illustrates yet another of Trump’s hallmarks: cheating the system. Trump packed the board with loyalists who made him chair and then changed the name of the building despite specific language from Congress that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center.

The board missed the court deadline by twelve hours. Then Charles M. Floca, whom Trump installed at the head of the Kennedy Center, certified to the court that “the Center and its Board have complied with the Court’s order.” In a statement, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said that the center was “fully compliant with the court’s directive” and that the board was evaluating “legal options.”

Their conclusion seems to have been that the court ordered them only to take down Trump’s name; it did not order them to show that his name was down, or to keep Kennedy’s name visible. Currently, the Kennedy Center portico facade is covered with a giant tarp through which workers have created passageways to make the center’s doors accessible while keeping the portico covered.

Trump has made his career on the idea that there is always a way to cheat the system if you operate in bad faith, and he has carried that idea into the government. Famously, in 2016, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said Trump was hiding his tax returns because he had paid no federal taxes in years, Trump answered: “That makes me smart.”

Now, after voters reelected him in 2024, Trump’s hand-picked acting attorney general Todd Blanche has agreed that the Department of Justice will not prosecute Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for tax evasion.

Both system-cheating and spectacle were on display in last night’s Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the South Lawn of the White House. Trump got around restrictions on using the White House grounds for such an event by claiming it was in honor of the nation’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, for which Congress has suspended normal regulations.

Then at 9:30 Friday night, as Aram Roston and Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian reported, the UFC issued a press release saying that the cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial, which emerged on Wednesday as an official sponsor of the event, would be the “Presenting Partner of a new $250,000 Performance of the Night bonus pool.”

World Liberty Financial is the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, overseen by Zach Witkoff, the son of billionaire Steve Witkoff. The elder Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and for peace missions, including to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin (apparently at Putin’s request).

Zach Everson of Public Citizen explained what this arrangement means. In addition to connecting World Liberty Financial directly to the White House, UFC is giving cash to World Liberty Financial. World Liberty Financial gives its crypto to the fighters. World Liberty Financial then invests the cash in U.S. Treasury bonds and keeps the interest.

The UFC fight on the White House lawn was also about spectacle, and not just about appealing to Trump’s base as fighter Josh Hokit did by echoing a right-wing conspiracy theory that smeared former First Lady Michelle Obama. MAGA influencers and administration officials hyped the event as representing the United States, but on June 11, Reuters reported that only 16% of Americans thought it was appropriate to hold UFC cage matches at the White House. Forty-six percent said it was inappropriate. Even among Republicans, only 31% thought it was appropriate.

We are about to see if Trump’s focus on cheating the system for his own ends and distracting from his actions with spectacle will work over something as huge as the Iran war and Americans’ constitutional rights.

Shortly before he appeared at his birthday fight, Trump posted on social media: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

About an hour later, he posted: “This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region. Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me. The Leaders of the Region have, for the first time, found a President who can help them achieve real Peace. With the opening of the Strait upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal, oil will flow on both ends again for the Region, and the World!”

It appears that Trump badly wanted to sign an agreement with Iran yesterday on his birthday before taking off today for Europe to attend the G7, an informal forum made up of leading industrialized democracies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and including the European Union (EU). Rumors about what was included in negotiations swirled all weekend.

While Trump is boasting that the agreement is a triumph, no one has yet seen any terms, and the agreement that is scheduled to be signed in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday appears to be a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a 60-day ceasefire for continued negotiations, not a final agreement.

Zack Stanton of MS NOW notes the ways in which Trump’s version of the MOU and what Iranian officials say about it are quite different. Trump says the Strait of Hormuz will be “permanently toll-free” while Iranian officials say they will regulate the strait along with Oman.

Trump is trying to cover over the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets by saying “no money will exchange hands.” But this morning, Vice President J.D. Vance told CBS that in addition to that $24 billion, Iran will also have access to $300 billion in funds for reconstruction.

Discussion of Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be put off for later.

In his remarks about the MOU yesterday, Trump thanked Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping for their help.

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted that even without the details, “it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.”

Iran’s government is intact and now under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Strait of Hormuz is under Iran’s control, Iran has significant drone and missile stocks, Iran can continue to sponsor terrorism, and money will flow to Iran. Nichols points out that Iran leaves the conflict stronger than before. Any claims that Trump managed to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions is “silly,” Nichols notes: the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was working to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment before Trump tore the agreement up in 2018, and when Trump chose to start bombing in February 2026, Iran was “nowhere near getting a bomb.”

Nichols notes that Trump’s declaration that the strait is open is “terrific, but such a statement has about as much effect as I or my wife or my cat declaring the strait open; only Iran can make that decision.” He concludes: “The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker, with important stocks of weapons depleted, and with its consumers paying the price for the war at the gas pump.”

That the terms of the MOU are unlikely to favor the U.S. showed perhaps even more clearly when Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has been a staunch advocate for using even more force against Iran, appeared to tee up blaming Vance for the terms of the agreement. He also suddenly fell back on the need for Congress to put its stamp on what seems likely to be an inglorious end to a war Trump and loyalists like Graham have insisted Congress had no role in approving.

“Under our law, any nuclear deal with Iran will be sent to Congress for review and a vote,” he wrote on social media. “I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress.”

But Trump will try to sell this as a win.

After their recent reporting that the Trump administration went into panic mode to cover up the Epstein files last summer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in the New York Times today that the Trump administration came much closer to trying to get rid of the writ of habeas corpus than was previously known. That right prevents the government from locking people up arbitrarily; authorities must charge a prisoner with a crime and take the case into the legal system. The Constitution spells out: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Last spring, when the Supreme Court said undocumented immigrants had the right to challenge their deportations, according to Swan and Haberman, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller proposed simply suspending the writ of habeas corpus and throwing them out.

Warned away from the idea because of the outcry it would spark, the administration found a way to cheat the system: it changed longstanding policy concerning immigrants who had been in the U.S. for a long time. In the past, those caught on the border could be detained without a hearing, while those who had been here for a long time could request to be released on bond. The administration simply treated those who had been here for years as if they had just arrived, throwing them into detention without a bond hearing.

Judges have ruled against this new interpretation, but having found a way to cheat the system, the administration is simply ignoring them. As legal commentator Joyce White Vance put it: “The question inside Trump’s White House wasn’t whether they could suspend rights—it was whether they could get away with it.”

And then there was the idea of using spectacle to sell the Insurrection Act. Haberman and Swan report that Miller and, especially, Vice President Vance pushed the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to put down protests of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. They did so even after federal agents had shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. According to the reporters, Vance said the use of troops to put down Americans in the streets would be painful in the short term, but it would send a message that what he insisted were paid protesters—there is no evidence that either Good or Pretti was a paid protester—would never again disrupt ICE operations.

While the White House did not invoke the act at the time, the reporters conclude that for the proponents of invoking it, the Insurrection Act “would remain a loaded weapon in a West Wing eager to test the limits of presidential power.”

Early this morning, Trump posted on social media: “On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’”

June 14, 2026

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 15

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On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved “[t]hat six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia; that each company consist of a captain, three lieutenants, four serjeants, four corporals, a drummer or trumpeter, and sixty-eight privates…[and that] each company, as soon as completed, shall march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.”

And thus Congress established the Continental Army.

The First Continental Congress, which met in 1774, refused to establish a standing army, afraid that a bad government could use an army against its people. The Congress met in response to the British Parliament’s closing of the port of Boston and imposition of martial law there, but its members hoped they could repair their relationship with King George III and simply sent entreaties to the king to end what were known as the “Intolerable Acts.”

The Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 changed the equation. On April 19, British soldiers opened fire on colonists just as Patriot leaders feared they might. In the aftermath of that deadly day, about 15,000 untrained Massachusetts militiamen converged on Boston and laid siege to the town, where they bottled up about 6,500 British Regulars.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord made it clear the British government endangered American liberties. The Second Continental Congress met in Independence Hall in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, to address the crisis in Boston. The delegates overcame their suspicions of a standing army to conclude they must bring the various state militias into a continental organization to stand against King George III.

With the establishment of the Continental Army, a British officer, General Charles Lee, resigned his commission in the British Army and published a public letter explaining that the king’s overreach had turned him away from service in His Majesty’s army and toward the Patriots:

“[W]henever it shall please his Majesty to call me forth to any honourable service against the natural hereditary enemies of our country, or in defence of his just rights and dignity, no man will obey the righteous summons with more zeal and alacrity than myself,” he wrote, “but the present measures seem to me so absolutely subversive of the rights and liberties of every individual subject, so destructive to the whole empire at large, and ultimately so ruinous to his Majesty’s own person, dignity and family, that I think myself obliged in conscience as a Citizen, Englishman, and Soldier of a free state, to exert my utmost to defeat them.”

After they established a Continental Army, the next thing Congress members did was to name a French and Indian War veteran, Virginia planter George Washington, commander-in-chief. To Washington fell the challenge of establishing an army to defend the nation without creating a military a tyrant could use to repress the people.

It was not an easy project. The Continental Army was made up of volunteers who were loyal primarily to the officers they had chosen, and because Congress still feared a standing army, their enlistments initially were short. Different units trained with different field manuals, making it hard to turn them into a unified fighting force. Women came to the camps with their men, often bringing their children. The women worked for the half-rations the government provided, washing, cooking, hauling water, and tending the wounded.

After an initial bout of enthusiasm at the start of the war, men stopped enlisting, and in 1777 Congress increased the times of enlistment to three years or “for the duration” of the conflict. That meant that the men in the army were more often poor than wealthy, enlisting for the bounties offered, and Congress found it easy to overlook those 12,000 people encamped about eighteen miles to the northwest of Philadelphia in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for six months in the hard winter of 1777–1778. The Congress had no way to compel the states to provide money, food, or supplies for the army, and the army almost fell apart for lack of support.

Supply chains broke as the British captured food or it spoiled in transit to the soldiers, and wartime inflation meant Congress did not appropriate enough money for food. Hunger and disease stalked the camp, but even worse was the lack of clothing. More than 1,000 soldiers died, and about eight or ten deserted every day. Washington warned the president of the Continental Congress that the men were close to mutiny, even as a group of army officers were working with congressmen to replace Washington, complaining about how he was prosecuting the war.

By February 1778 a delegation from the Continental Congress had visited Valley Forge and, understanding that the lack of supplies made the army, and thus the country, truly vulnerable, set out to reform the supply department. Then a newly arrived Prussian officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, drilled the soldiers into unity and better morale. And then, in May, the soldiers learned that France had signed a treaty with the American states in February, lending money, matériel, and men to the cause of American independence. The army survived.

By the end of 1778, the main theater of the war had shifted to the South, where British officers hoped to recruit Loyalists to their side. Instead, guerrilla bands helped General Nathanael Greene bait the British into a war of endurance that finally ended on October 19, 1781, at the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia, where British general Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington and French commander Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau.

The Continental Army had defeated the army of the king and established a nation based on the principle that all men were created equal and had a right to have a say in the government under which they lived.

In September 1783, negotiators concluded the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war, and Congress discharged most of the troops still in service. In his November 2 farewell address to his men, Washington noted that their victory against such a formidable power was “little short of a standing Miracle.” “[W]ho has before seen a disciplined Army formed at once from such raw materials?” Washington wrote. “Who that was not a witness could imagine, that the most violent local prejudices would cease so soon, and that Men who came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other, would instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers?”

With the army disbanded, General Washington himself stepped away from military leadership. On December 23, Washington addressed Congress, saying: “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

In 1817, given the choice of subjects to paint for the Rotunda in the U.S. Capitol, being rebuilt after the British had burned it during the War of 1812, fine artist John Trumbull picked the moment of Washington’s resignation from the army. As he discussed the project with President James Madison, Trumbull told the president: “I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army, perhaps, would have been unanimously with him, and few of the people disposed to resist his retaining the power which he had used with such happy success, and such irreproachable moderation.”

Madison agreed, and the painting of a man voluntarily walking away from the leadership of a powerful army rather than becoming a dictator hangs today in the Capitol Rotunda.

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Week Three in 250 to 250

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON AND 250 TO 250

JUN 14

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This was the third week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.

This week had some surprises— for me, anyway— which has been part of the fun of doing these. I knew who An Wang was, but not his story, and confess that while I had heard of the New Madrid earthquakes, I had no idea how important they were.

I hope you enjoy this week’s videos. 

You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.

Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250 Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Narrated by Tom Perez

Tom Perez is a civil rights attorney, former Chair of the Democratic National Committee, and served as U.S. Labor Secretary under President Barack Obama. Perez tells us about the tragic 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the workplace reforms that it inspired.

New Madrid Earthquakes, Narrated by Conevery Bolton Valencius

Dr. Conevery Bolton Valencius is a Professor of History at Boston College, and author of The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes and The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. Dr. Valencius recounts the New Madrid earthquakes that reshaped the landscape, displaced Indigenous Americans, and prompted America's first disaster relief legislation.

Samuel Adams, Narrated by Stacy Schiff

Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose works include the New York Times bestsellers Cleopatra, The Witches: Salem, 1692, and The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams. Here, Schiff chronicles the life of Samuel Adams, the relentless agitator who shaped public opinion and pushed the colonies toward independence.

An Wang, Narrated by Representative Lori Trahan

United States Representative Lori Trahan of Massachusetts is the granddaughter of immigrants who became the first in her family to graduate from college before embarking on a distinguished career that culminated in her election to Congress in 2018. Representative Trahan recounts the life of An Wang, the Chinese American computer engineer who invented magnetic core memory and embraced an ethic of philanthropy.

Everglades, Narrated by Jack E. Davis