2026-02-04 05:16:34
A federal judge issued a last-minute temporary stay on Monday to block the Trump administration’s attempt to remove temporary legal protections for up to 350,000 Haitian immigrants across the United States.
In a brutal 83-page takedown, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the US District Court for DC specifically laid into a December X post from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that claimed foreign “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” are ruining the vision of the founding fathers.
“The plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders,” Reyes wrote. “They are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies.’ They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank, Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major, id., and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse.”
“One of those (her word) ‘damn’ countries is Haiti,” Reyes continued. “Three days before making the above post, Secretary Noem announced she would terminate Haiti’s TPS designation as of February 3, 2026.”
Reyes said that it was therefore “substantially likely” that Noem had moved to end TPS status for Haitians due to “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”
Temporary Protected Status is a designation that allows people who have moved to the US from countries enduring ongoing armed conflicts, environmental disasters, or epidemics to legally work and reside in the US. It was set to expire on Tuesday, meaning many Haitian immigrants who came to the US legally would be subject to deportation.
As of March 2025, the US provides TPS protections to roughly 330,000 Haitians, according to the National Immigration Forum. Former President Barack Obama designated Haiti for TPS after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the country in January 2010, in which an estimated 220,000 people died and over 300,000 were injured.
As Isabela Dias wrote last year: “The Trump administration has moved to end TPS for Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans and canceled a humanitarian parole initiative, known as CHNV, that had allowed more than 500,000 migrants from four countries, including Venezuela, to come to the United States and work for up to two years.” In fact, as Reyes notes, “Noem has terminated every TPS country designation to have reached her desk—twelve countries up, twelve countries down.”
Bigotry toward immigrants has long been a cornerstone for Donald Trump and his followers. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeated unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other residents’ pets. The rhetoric resulted in dozens of bomb threats [link please]. Springfield, a city with fewer than 60,000, is home to about 15,000 Haitians. In 2018, Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole” countries.
Since Reyes’ ruling, Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the DHS, posted on X that the department would take the case to the Supreme Court.
“Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades,” McLaughlin wrote. “Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”
2026-02-04 03:48:14
It took over a week for Mia Ives-Rublee, a wheelchair user and senior director of the Center for American Progress’s disability justice initiative, to be able to move more than a block past her home after one of the country’s most extensive winter storms in years hit her home of Washington, DC, at the end of January.
“Living in a city that you know has the resources, and still dealing with these issues, shows just how poorly cities are ready to deal with accessibility issues,” Ives-Rublee told me.
When sidewalks in her area were cleared, she said, the snow was moved into curb cuts, making it practically impossible for people with mobility devices to cross the street.
Disabled people are uniquely impacted by climate events, including that system of snowstorms, which impacted more than half the United States. The failure of even some of the best-resourced cities to adequately clear snow so that disabled people with mobility devices can safely get around is both an infrastructure failure and a policy choice, leaving those people stuck in one area and stripping them of their autonomy.
“People with a range of disabilities need clean sidewalks for safe mobility, and many in the disability community experience restricted access to food and healthcare when public infrastructure becomes unusable in the aftermath of extreme weather events,” sociologist Angela Frederick, the author of Disabled Power, told me. “For community members with disabilities, the impact of extreme weather can go on and on, even after life has returned to normal for others.”
A 2015 study published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation looked at the challenges that Canadians with wheeled mobility devices faced during the winter months. More than 90 percent reported that their devices got stuck in the snow, that they slipped on the ice, and that they had difficulty using ramps. 99 percent said that using sidewalks and roads became problematic.
Living in Arkansas, Bailey Hunter, a wheelchair user, is less used to dealing with the snow. Hunter has not always used a wheelchair, and January’s snowstorm was the first time she had to be out and about with one in winter weather. She was unable to go to work for five days because the snow was not properly cleared.
“You have no autonomy, because you can’t physically move on the snow,” Hunter told me. “You can’t push yourself, you can’t do anything.”
And while losing access to the community can be burden enough, being snowed in can also be dangerous for disabled people.
“This isn’t just about us being able to get outside, but it’s actually a safety hazard,” Ives-Rublee continued. “If I need to go to the hospital, or if I need to go to the doctor’s office, I can’t do that with the snow being how it is.”
2026-02-04 02:33:43
Videos of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents last Saturday ricocheted around the world, allowing ordinary viewers to see for themselves, second by second, how the deadly skirmish unfolded. The video evidence from the scene immediately shredded the Trump administration’s claims, which smeared Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin.”
Senior Reporter Nathan Halverson wanted to ask a federal law enforcement officer—someone trained in handling quick-moving altercations while armed—what a trained professional saw in the video. So Halverson sat down with a former FBI agent to help us understand the visual evidence and how a proper investigation should play out from here.
Now retired, Ken Bagchi asked that we keep his face off camera because of his previous undercover work and to protect the active agents he worked with who remain in the field.
“I’m having the hardest time reconciling what it looks to me to be a victim lying face down on the ground, and agents are not within reach of them…understanding what you would say is the imminent threat of death or serious injury at that point, to justify continuing to shoot,” he said. “We should not fear information. We should not fear facts. We should not fear interviews. We should not be afraid for people to give a statement under penalty of perjury, saying, ‘I am swearing this to be true and this is what I saw happen.’”
2026-02-04 01:39:26
On a June afternoon in Washington, swarms of mosquitoes were feasting on thousands of Americans as they watched a military parade roll past the National Mall. It was the US Army’s 250th birthday, which also happened to be President Donald Trump’s 79th, and the MAGA-heavy crowd watched the procession trudge down Constitution Avenue, largely silent but for the squeaking of armored personnel carriers. Groups of soldiers marched by at seemingly random intervals, as if to foreshadow the actual military occupation Trump would unleash on the city two months later.
It was overcast and muggy, and spectators had lined up for hours to get inside the security perimeter. Uniformed troops were handing out free bottles of Phorm Energy—a beverage launched nationally the month before by Anheuser-Busch and Dana White, a vocal Trump supporter who runs the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Phorm, which bills itself as the “ultimate energy drink,” is an official sponsor of America250, a government-funded nonprofit organizing a series of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday, culminating on July 4 this year. When asked, a soldier explained he had been ordered to hand out the samples—despite Defense Department rules that bar the military from endorsing “a particular company, product, service, or website.” The Pentagon didn’t answer questions about this apparent violation.
So it goes with the Trump administration’s approach to the country’s semiquincentennial. Congress is expected to allocate some $150 million for the festivities, but that’s not enough to fulfill Trump’s vision. So corporations with links to the president or his inner circle—UFC, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase—have signed on as sponsors, pouring in millions of dollars alongside companies like Chrysler, Coca-Cola, and General Mills.
American history offers a medium through which Trump can wage the all-encompassing cultural, political, and legal battles animating his administration.
The promise of all that cash and spectacle helped America250 lure a flock of political operatives with Trump ties. Chris LaCivita, who helped steer Trump’s 2024 campaign, joined as a strategic adviser. Campaign Nucleus, founded in 2021 by former Trump campaign honcho Brad Parscale, helped organize America250 events. So did Event Strategies, which staged Trump campaign gatherings in 2020 and 2024, as well as the January 6, 2021, rally near the White House that preceded the attack on the US Capitol. America250 said in January that it’s no longer working with these contractors but hasn’t disclosed how much they were paid.
America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology. But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality. The president’s face is suddenly everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury.
Faced with sporadic pushback from a congressional commission overseeing America250 and from career officials at various agencies, Trump is now seeking to evade even these modest constraints. In December, he launched a new organization, Freedom 250, that could implement his most outlandish anniversary events without the inconvenience of legislative oversight or mandatory bipartisanship. For the president’s 80th birthday this year, Freedom 250 will help organize a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
The semiquincentennial is just one part of the commander in chief’s broader campaign to harness the mechanisms of the federal government to enforce his preferred version of the nation’s history and culture—a Trumpified presentation of America’s past and present. On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the administration even rolled out a taxpayer-funded webpage seeking to recast the day’s events as a patriotic effort to protest “the fraudulent election.” Three weeks later, Trump’s FBI seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots and other election material from Georgia’s largest county. “TRUMP WON BIG,” the president declared the next morning. “Crooked Election!”
Since his inauguration last year, Trump has taken personal control of the Kennedy Center—reshaping its artistic programming, installing a MAGA-dominated board that claims to have renamed it in his honor, and then closing it for renovations. He’s railed against “OUT OF CONTROL” museums that he insists are too focused on “how bad Slavery was.” He has successfully pressured the Smithsonian Institution to review displays to ensure “unbiased content” and has extracted significant concessions over what top universities teach students. At his direction, the National Park Service has altered or removed scores of exhibits at parks and historic sites on topics including slavery, Native Americans, climate change, and even fossils. Trump acolytes are also leveraging federal dollars to stop local librarians and educators from sharing content they dislike.
Under the pretense of stamping out “woke” ideas and promoting patriotism, the White House is attempting to mandate uncritical acceptance of its own take on the American story, one that celebrates the martial feats of mostly white men and an imagined religious and ideological conformity that minimizes the fights, tribulations, and dissenters who have defined the country. It’s an effort that flies in the face of American ideals—and reality.
“In a pluralist democracy, there are invariably conflicts of values,” says Alexander Karn, a Colgate University historian who has written about the 250th anniversary. “To deny that messiness by seeking to erase the perspectives that don’t flatter a dominant group or help create a triumphal history is anti-egalitarian and, therefore, anti-democratic.”
Instead, Karn argues, “the road to a ‘more perfect Union,’ which is enshrined in the Constitution, runs through the past, and it depends on our willingness to confront our history in an honest and thoroughgoing way.”
Which is not the road we’re on.
Inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—a historic gray structure that Trump has, to the dismay of preservationists, promised to paint white—John Adams has a message. “Facts do not care about our feelings,” an AI-generated version of America’s second president intones, paraphrasing not John Locke or Thomas Paine, but conservative influencer Ben Shapiro.
The exhibit, dubbed the Founders Museum, features computer-generated portraits of all 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Though some of the material is also available online, you need access to the White House complex to see it in pesrson. Nevertheless, according to the Daily Signal, a right-wing outlet invited to cover the opening, Education Secretary Linda McMahon described it as “a place where every American can connect with the courage and conviction that built our nation.” The White House did not respond to Mother Jones’ request to visit the museum.
The project is a collaboration between a Trump administration committee called Task Force 250 and PragerU, a conservative nonprofit that makes right-leaning educational materials. The task force has also partnered with Hillsdale College—a conservative Christian school known for incubating plans to push US education rightward—to create another series of videos, dubbed “The Story of America.” In the first installment, Hillsdale President Larry Arnn alludes to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. Trump’s use of the word “again,” Arnn asserts, shows the president’s interest in the country’s history. This, Arnn says, “places him somewhere near the politics of Abraham Lincoln.”
Task Force 250, created by Trump shortly after taking office in January 2025, has been a nerve center for the president’s whole-of-government effort to assert dominance over the country’s anniversary proceedings. It’s led by White House official Vince Haley, a Trump loyalist who in late 2020 played a key role in efforts to overturn the election using fake electors.
But in the byzantine politics of semiquincentennial commemoration, Task Force 250 is far from alone. There’s Freedom 250, Trump’s newly unveiled public-private fundraising vehicle that has recently taken the lead in implementing his highest-profile and most extravagant projects. And there’s America250, a theoretically nonpartisan organization established by a 2016 statute. America250 is overseen by the US Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan group whose members are appointed by Congress and that furnishes America250 with staff, offices, and congressionally appropriated funds. The president has the power to choose the commission’s chairperson, who in turn can hire and fire staff—meaning that in practice, Trump has substantial authority over how America250 operates.
This authority has not gone unnoticed. MAGA acolytes like Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) have called on Trump to remove commission Chair Rosie Rios, a Democrat who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022. So far, Rios has survived in the role, partly by publicly courting Trump. Last year, she installed Ariel Abergel, a 25-year-old former Fox News producer and Melania Trump aide, as America250’s executive director. Rios has said she “welcomes” Trump’s interest in the celebration and has credited him with enabling the commission to accomplish more than it did under Biden. It might also help that Rios serves on the board of Ripple, a crypto company that gave $4.9 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. That donation, Rios has said, was unrelated to her work for America250.
“America250 became sharply partisan, and increasingly less helpful to the many state 250 planning commissions.”
Last year, America250 brought on MAGA-aligned staffers like Trump campaign fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke and Monica Crowley, a former Fox News pundit who serves as the chief of protocol in Marco Rubio’s State Department. The organization also dismissed its liaison in charge of coordinating with federally recognized tribes. Numerous advisory councils—each dedicated to making the anniversary events resonate with different groups of Americans—were removed from America250’s website.
The YWCA, previously listed as a partner, disappeared from the group’s website in June. So did Advancing American Freedom, a conservative advocacy center founded by Mike Pence, the erstwhile VP who, according to the White House’s new January 6 page, perpetrated a “betrayal of the president” when he declined to help steal the 2020 election. A representative told us Advancing American Freedom had not realized it had been removed.
Other partners have chosen to sever ties. America250’s programming had become “heavy on spectacle and with no clear lasting public benefit,” the American Association for State and Local History said in a July letter explaining why it was ending its relationship with the organization. As John Dichtl, the association’s president, told us, “America250 became sharply partisan, and increasingly less helpful to the many state 250 planning commissions.”
Anniversary events have indeed been heavy on jingoistic, MAGA-style celebration of far-right values. In September, speaking at the Museum of the Bible, a private institution in Washington, Trump announced a new 250th-themed initiative, America Prays, which urges citizens to gather each week to “pray for America.” Participants include the conservative powerhouse Focus on the Family, the Palantir-aligned prayer app Pray.com, and Pizzagate peddler Jack Posobiec. Another participant: Let Us Worship, an organization run by Christian nationalist Sean Feucht.
Feucht also appeared at an event on the National Mall that America250 co-hosted with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “We are gonna be lifting our hands in praise, dancing here on this dance floor, and just glorifying the name of Jesus over our nation’s capital,” said Feucht, who noted he’d previously participated in similar private events. “But here’s the thing: This year, we are doing it in partnership with the US government.”
Even produce stands can turn into agitprop. The Great American Farmers Market in downtown DC got a partisan makeover last summer after partnering with America250. The market—held since 1995 by the Agriculture Department to showcase local bakers, farmers, and small businesses—instead offered “MAHA Monday” and a “star-studded lineup” of prominent Trumpers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. During one such event, a country music singer told a sparse audience: “Thank God Donald J. Trump is the president of the United States…Can you even imagine if you had to listen to Kamala Harris every single day on the news? My God. But we don’t have to, because our man won, and they lost.” Three days later, children who showed up for Smokey Bear’s birthday were treated to remarks from a quartet of Cabinet officials and music by country duo LoCash, a Trumpworld favorite.
A fight for control over America250 burst into public view in September when Abergel used an official Instagram account to post about the murder of Charlie Kirk. “America is in mourning,” he wrote. “God bless Charlie Kirk.” Members of the Semiquincentennial Commission had already spent months discussing how to oust Abergel, a person familiar with those discussions told us, faulting him for attempting to remove some of their members “by misrepresenting himself as acting on behalf of congressional leadership.” They made their move after his Kirk post, asserting that he had violated past orders not to commandeer the group’s social media. (Abergel, who has previously disputed the commission’s allegations, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Abergel didn’t go quietly. He told Fox News that he was fired because the organization’s leaders “hate President Trump more than they love America.”
Asked about concerns over America250’s right-wing bent, a spokesperson said the bipartisan Semiquincentennial Commission would run some programs, while the White House task force and the president’s new Freedom 250 entity would take the lead on others. “America250’s vision is to create the largest, most inspiring, and unifying commemoration and celebration in the nation’s history, bringing Americans together to reflect on our shared heritage,” the commission said in a statement. The commission added that Freedom 250—rather than America250—would now be “responsible for leading the President’s major national initiatives and signature events.”
By January, Freedom 250—which Trump’s team controls—seemed to have taken charge of the most visible anniversary celebrations, including a series of events promoted by the Interior Department. In memos sent out that month, the National Park Service told its employees to replace “America250” references and logos displayed online and in public with Freedom 250 insignias. “Freedom 250 is the Administration’s primary branding for all federal agencies participating in 250th activities,” states one of the documents. Another memo encourages employees to add Freedom 250 logos to their email signatures—displacing the America250 logos that once resided there.
“American250 is out,” said one NPS official. “Now it’s all Freedom250.”
Freedom 250 kicked off 2026 by turning the Washington Monument into “the world’s tallest birthday candle,” with projections depicting the nation’s “discovery, expansion, independence, and future.” Accompanying audio lauded figures like Christopher Columbus and Henry Ford and highlighted space exploration and AI. Left unmentioned: immigration, slavery, Native Americans, civil rights, and any notable woman at all.
There will be July 4 festivities in all 50 states, including the first-ever non–New Year’s ball drop in Times Square. The president has touted a “Great American State Fair” across the country and on the Mall, where anniversary events now have priority over all other potential gatherings—including any protests.
The highest-profile initiatives will be unmistakably Trumpian. Those include the massive triumphal arch the president hopes to build, as well as the White House UFC extravaganza that will, according to Trump, feature the “greatest champion fighters in the world.” Trump claimed last week that his administration is planning to construct a stadium that will hold 100,000 attendees for the fight. And he signed an order that calls for an IndyCar race, dubbed the “Freedom 250 Grand Prix,” through the streets of Washington. “It’s going to be very, very important,” Trump said.
There’s also the “Patriot Games,” a nationally televised Freedom 250 competition for high school athletes—one girl and one boy from each state—that the White House says will be overseen by RFK Jr. The Hunger Games echoes are hard to miss, though the competitors presumably won’t be battling to the death, and, in any case, Trump has assured Americans that “there will be no men playing in women’s sports.” And of course, he’s promised even more religion: “We will host a major prayer event on the National Mall to rededicate our country as one nation under God. We’re not changing that—there are a lot of people who would like to see it; it will never happen.”
America turns 250
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 18, 2025
President Donald J. Trump on Freedom 250 and the 2026 celebration that honors our nation like never before. WATCH: pic.twitter.com/aSaPqQ0U7m
Whatever the 250th celebrations have lost in pluralism, they seem to have replaced with newfound crypto connections. Last year, America250 co-hosted the “Code + Country” day of a major bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, where Rios thanked the audience for “what you have done to put this president in office”—though she noted the anniversary celebrations were legally “mandated to be bipartisan.” Joining her on the panel was LaCivita, who also serves on Coinbase’s global advisory council.
That night, women in cow onesies danced to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony at an America250 party sponsored in part by Tron, a company owned by crypto mogul Justin Sun. In 2023, Sun was accused of fraud in a federal complaint filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Beginning in late 2024, however, Sun became a major financier of the Trump family’s own crypto ventures. After Trump took office, the SEC agreed to pause its case while negotiating a final resolution.
Americans have always fought over the meaning of our history. In 1835, Democrats loyal to the late Thomas Jefferson objected to the placement of a statue of his rival Alexander Hamilton outside the New York Stock Exchange. During the 20th century, segregationists erected hundreds of monuments to Confederate soldiers—often in opposition to the civil rights movement. In 1995, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was forced to resign amid an outcry over a planned exhibition that some lawmakers and veterans’ groups complained was too critical of the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
Since his first term, Trump has reveled in such battles—but not because he cares about the details of the country’s past. This is a guy whose record includes installing a bogus historical marker commemorating a made-up Civil War battle at his Virginia golf course. The presentation of American history matters to Trump because it offers a medium through which he can wage the all-encompassing cultural, political, and legal battles animating his administration.
For Trump, “the enemies that matter are in the present: us, history professors, journalists, and any others who represent ‘wokeness,’” says Johann Neem, a historian at Western Washington University. In Neem’s view, Trump is weaponizing the backlash against genuine excesses in progressive scholarship as part of a “larger project to shut down independent sources of knowledge and authority.” Even as the administration purports to celebrate the American Revolution, it is waging “a cultural counterrevolution that has authorized them to feel comfortable violating the political principles of that revolution.”
Trump is especially into statues. His infamous statement that some attendees at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were “very fine people” occurred as he defended their opposition to the removal of a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
“The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story.”
But Trump’s approach to the nation’s birthday appears to have been particularly influenced by the culture wars of 2020. When millions took to the streets that year to protest the murder of George Floyd, the president’s current crusade against public acknowledgments of racism began taking shape. He became fixated on a series of incidents in which activists removed or vandalized statues of Confederates, slaveholders, and various other historical figures ranging from Spanish missionaries to Abraham Lincoln. He issued an executive order directing federal law enforcement to prosecute to the “fullest extent” anyone defacing monuments or government property—an order that served as purported justification when he dispatched militarized federal agents to Portland, Oregon, and other cities that year.
“Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” he said in a July 4, 2020, speech at Mount Rushmore—a monument on which Trump wants to add his own visage. At the same event, he announced plans to construct a vast “National Garden of American Heroes,” featuring “statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.”
Two months later, speaking at the National Archives Museum, Trump framed this Manichaean struggle as one rooted in education and scholarship. “The left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools,” he declared. “The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies.” He took particular aim at the “totally discredited 1619 Project,” the landmark New York Times package that, a year earlier, had sought to “reframe the country’s history” around the central role of slavery in the development of the nation.
The 1619 Project, whatever one thinks of it, was not a government work. But the response Trump proposed that day certainly was: a 1776 Commission that would “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.”
Trump stacked his new commission with conservative luminaries, led by Hillsdale College’s Arnn. In a report issued days after the January 6 attack, the group laid a framework for the president’s reactionary brand of history. The authors attacked the “untrue” and “devastating” charge that slave-owning founders “were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles” and the “illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil.”
Their report painted vast swaths of historical inquiry and education as fundamentally anti-American and dangerous. Such “deliberately destructive scholarship,” they warned, “is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.”
Biden disbanded the 1776 Commission. Trump immediately reestablished it at the start of his second term and tasked it with creating a “patriotic” lecture series about the country’s founding, to be broadcast nationally throughout 2026—though where those lectures will appear remains unspecified. The panel is also advising the White House’s Task Force 250.
The 1776 Commission’s version of history is reflected in Trump’s statue garden, which remains a key part of his anniversary vision. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which was gutted by DOGE last April but remains nominally in charge of the project, claimed until recently that the garden was “set to open in July 2026.” The White House, however, has quietly conceded that date is unlikely, stating the goal is to complete the project before Trump leaves office.
Regardless, the planned collection of 250 statues of past Americans in a yet-to-be-determined location is backed by $40 million in funding that Congress approved last year. Ronald Reagan, Humphrey Bogart, Medgar Evers, Milton Friedman, Jackie Robinson, and Whitney Houston are among the group Trump has supposedly personally approved.
No one has said how the garden will seek to reconcile the importance of figures like Evers, the murdered civil rights leader, with Trump’s hostility to public discussion of such matters.
“This country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE,” Trump posted on Truth Social last summer, opening yet another front in his all-encompassing campaign to reshape the American narrative. “We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
The president said he was dispatching “my attorneys” to the Smithsonian Institution—the country’s flagship network of museums devoted to history, art, and science, as well as the National Zoo—to clamp down on overly negative depictions of the United States. Among other issues, he said, museums focus too much on the evils of slavery. Instead, Trump explained, they should emphasize “Success,” “Brightness,” and the “Future.”
The 21 Smithsonian facilities, which are federally funded and free to the public, draw more than 15 million visitors per year—a massive cultural footprint that Trump was eager to control. In March 2025, he issued an executive order aimed at purging federal museums of “improper ideology” ahead of the 250th anniversary. In August, Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan and other White House officials wrote to the Smithsonian, emphasizing the need to “celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
The letter came after the Smithsonian’s board of regents had already agreed to review exhibits to “make any needed changes to ensure unbiased content,” including “personnel changes.” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch insisted the institution maintains independent authority over “our programming and content,” but he also noted that the ongoing review was designed “to ensure our programming is nonpartisan.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from a display, while leaving content related to other impeached presidents. The institution claimed it did so because the material “did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline and overall presentation” and “blocked the view of the objects inside its case.” Following criticism, it reinstalled revised language about Trump. But months later, a different Smithsonian museum, the National Portrait Gallery, removed its own description of Trump’s impeachments.
Citing the same executive order that Trump used to target the Smithsonian, the Interior Department has told the National Park Service not to disseminate information that “inappropriately disparages Americans” or says anything about nature beyond celebrating the “beauty, abundance and grandeur of the American landscape.” To comply, Park Service officials have altered or removed signs and exhibits at sites around the country. The ongoing changes, which likely total in the hundreds, include exhibits about slavery yanked from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, climate change signs disappeared from Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and placards discussing geology and fossil formation removed from Big Bend National Park in Texas.
Trump has also seized control of other institutions tasked with shaping the nation’s cultural and historical memory, ousting the leaders of the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Keith Sonderling, the new head of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, said he intended to “revitalize” that agency—which supports local institutions—“and restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations.” Sonderling has pressured librarians to implement the president’s various anti-DEI orders, while also quizzing them about how they were planning to celebrate the 250th anniversary.
“We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
Then there’s the Kennedy Center, DC’s iconic performing arts institution that was established by Congress to serve as a “living memorial” to the assassinated 35th president. Last February, Trump purged board members appointed by Biden and named his volatile adviser Ric Grenell president of the center—and himself board chair. “We’re going to bring it to a higher level than it ever hit,” he said in August. “We’re going to use the Kennedy Center as a big focus of…the 250th anniversary celebration.”
By December, over the objections of Kennedy family members, Trump’s loyalists had added his name to the center, and the president had immersed himself in ostentatious renovations. “Potential Marble armrests for the seating at The Trump Kennedy Center,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Unlike anything ever done or seen before!”
Trump also put his stamp on the center’s programming. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA,” he posted in February 2025. “ONLY THE BEST.” During his first term, Trump boycotted the Kennedy Center Honors after recipients of the prestigious awards criticized him. This time around, he personally announced the honorees, whom, he said, he was “98 percent” involved in picking. Those included country singer George Strait, disco singer Gloria Gaynor, and actor Sylvester Stallone, who in 2024 called Trump “the second George Washington.” In December, Trump hosted the ceremony.
Trump’s takeover has led a number of artists to cancel their planned performances. When drummer Chuck Redd pulled out of a Christmas Eve concert shortly after the renaming, Grenell threatened legal action against the jazz musician. Meanwhile, ticket sales at the institution have plunged. Amid the growing turmoil, Trump abruptly announced that he would shutter the center for two years—beginning on July 4—for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.”
Not even the White House itself is exempt from corporate-funded transformation. America250 sponsors Coinbase and Palantir are among the companies financing the demolition of the East Wing and the construction of Trump’s new ballroom. Beyond simply plastering the Oval Office in tacky gold, Trump has boasted about adding marble walls to a White House bathroom and paving over the Rose Garden lawn to build a Mar-a-Lago-style club. He’s installed a “Presidential Walk of Fame” with plaques deriding his recent predecessors and praising Andrew Jackson, who was “treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump.”
Trump’s own White House plaque leans even further into his grievances—and idiosyncratic capitalization—asserting that he overcame the “unprecedented Weaponization of Law Enforcement against him” to win a second term. To that end, in September, he rewarded his Smithsonian attack dog with a critical new assignment. In a Truth Social post that may have been intended as a private message to Attorney General Pam Bondi, he indicated that Halligan should be given control of the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia and that she should attempt to indict two of the president’s longtime legal tormentors: former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
For the administration, the incident offered yet another lesson in the value of historical narrative. Taking to X, White House aide Mark Paoletta—a close friend of Justice Clarence Thomas—insisted that Trump’s directive to prosecute his enemies was “perfectly appropriate” and followed “in the tradition of our greatest Presidents/Founders, such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.” A federal judge soon ruled that Halligan’s appointment and the indictments were invalid.
“It’s a beautiful sight to be with you in a place called Fort Bragg,” Trump said in June 2025, emphasizing the massive Army base’s name as soldiers holding American flags cheered. He continued: “Can you believe they changed that name in the last administration for a little bit?” Some of the troops booed loudly.
Fort Bragg, originally named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg, had been redubbed Fort Liberty during the Biden administration. After retaking office, Trump restored its old name, taking advantage of a loophole in a 2020 law barring military bases from honoring Confederate leaders. Officially, the fort’s name now refers to Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, a World War II Silver Star recipient, whom Trump never mentioned during his speech that day.
“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee,” Trump added to applause.
“Dictators brook no opposition, and this extends to the past.”
The Fort Bragg speech—an official America250 event that had been billed as patriotic and bipartisan—took place days after Trump had ordered the military to crack down on anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles. From the beginning, it looked a lot like a political rally. It was promoted by Never Surrender Inc., formerly the principal campaign committee for Trump’s 2024 run. “You’ve been invited to Fort Bragg by President Trump!” blared the subject line of an email that exhorted readers to “Make America Great Again!” MAGA merchandise was for sale at the event, and the troops in the audience had been handpicked “based on political leanings and physical appearance,” the news outlet Military.com later reported.
The screening effort apparently worked. Uniformed soldiers cheered Trump administration policies and booed when the president attacked “incompetent” Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass. “Los Angeles has gone from being one of the cleanest, safest, and most beautiful cities on Earth to being a trash heap with entire neighborhoods under the control of transnational gangs and criminal networks,” Trump insisted. “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again.”
But Trump’s vision for “freeing” America’s second-largest city went beyond using the military to control occasionally violent protests—he also declared his intention to curtail basic constitutional liberties. The demonstrators, he complained, “don’t carry the American flag; they only burn it.” Flag burners “should go to jail for one year,” he said. “And we’ll see if we can get that done.”
More cheers.
Rallies that celebrate a simplified, sanctified historical narrative have long been a favorite tool of autocrats. “Dictators brook no opposition, and this extends to the past,” says Karn, the Colgate historian. “When a dictator is intent on creating or sustaining a hierarchical social order, he will see to it that history abides.”
The military parade through Washington four days later proved to be a clumsy prelude for Trump’s very real efforts to deploy troops, along with heavily armed federal agents, on the streets of even more cities—often against the wishes of local officials. To justify sending the National Guard to Portland, the president made false claims about widespread violence, perhaps because Fox News repeatedly re-aired violent footage from 2020 as though it were part of the 2025 anti-ICE protests.
Since August, the Labor Department’s DC headquarters has displayed an America250-branded banner with a Mao-style image of Trump above the words “American Workers First.” The spectacle drew attention when National Guard members deployed by Trump were photographed beneath it—an image that captures the authoritarian ethos of his second term.
The troops, supposedly dispatched to Washington to fight crime, are now staying on in connection with the semiquincentennial. In an October court filing, the DC attorney general revealed that Guard leaders were planning for a prolonged deployment. “We know that America250 occurs this summer, and that will be a factor in determining the future of the mission,” a Guard commanding general wrote in an email included in the filing. In January, Trump officially extended the DC operation through the end of 2026, even as he bowed to court rulings blocking him from unleashing the armed forces on other parts of the country.
That Trump’s enthusiasm for the domestic use of troops is merging with America’s 250th festivities is almost too easy a metaphor. To celebrate the anniversary of a war sparked in part by the quartering of soldiers in US cities, the administration is lengthening a military occupation vehemently opposed by the local population.
A quarter-millennium later, amid “No Kings” protests and an unprecedented executive power grab, the arguments against tyranny that inspired American independence are alive and pressing. It seems worth asking whether America250 will celebrate the ideals of the country’s founders—or those of the monarch they rebelled against.
2026-02-03 20:30:00
This story was co-published with The 74, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
It was January 2022, and Rhian Allvin was in search of a space that could bring her vision to life.
The early childhood leader had just finished up her nearly decade-long tenure as CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a large, national, nonprofit that promotes high-quality early learning. She’d been steeped in early childhood policy, advocacy, and research for years. She was ready for something new, something hands-on. She wanted to start her own early care and education program.
That’s how she found herself, on that winter day, driving alongside a red-brick prison wall, past imposing watch towers, and onto the sprawling grounds that were once home to a notorious maximum-security prison at the Lorton Reformatory, a correctional complex in Lorton, Virginia.
“Because the ceiling is so tall, and the kids are so small, we wanted to bring the scale down.”
A pair of the former penitentiary’s buildings was among the first Allvin toured in her pursuit of a property that would become her flagship location. The site intrigued her—how could it not? But she walked away, at least at first.
“I said, ‘I’m already out over my skis. This isn’t a great idea,’” Allvin recalled. “I must’ve looked at 40 or 50 other spaces in Virginia. They were all so vanilla. Office buildings. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I took friends to see it.”
Allvin saw, in the former prison, a possibility for a second life, a rebirth. Eventually, she decided she would turn this historic site, awash in nearly a century of violence and trauma, “into a place of light and joy.”
It took over a year to prepare the space, but Allvin opened the doors to Brynmor Early Education & Preschool in October 2023, with the capacity to serve up to 152 children. Today, the shuttered correctional facility is home to a thriving, high-quality early learning program.
Inside the 15-foot-tall walls, where blood was shed and brutality unfolded, babies now sleep soundly, practice newfound motor skills, learn to communicate with gestures and words, and explore the boundaries of their bodies.
Under a roof that has overseen riots, escapes, and assaults, toddlers now sit at tiny tables for mealtime, learn to wash their hands at little sinks, and attempt to regulate their big emotions under the tutelage of patient caregivers.
On the same grounds where prisoners were once on lockdown for 23 hours a day, children now move about the courtyard freely, riding bicycles and scooters around a racetrack, letting their imaginations guide them in a mud kitchen.
To get to this point, Allvin and many others had their work cut out for them. But the program is named Brynmor — Welsh for “great hill” — for a reason. Though Allvin saw a “steep hill to climb” in transforming this site and in creating a high-quality, profitable, early care and education business, she decided to take that first step anyway.
The Lorton Reformatory comprised eight prison facilities across three campuses in the relatively small Northern Virginia community, located about 20 miles outside of Washington, DC.
The complex, which operated from 1910 to 2001 and was primarily used to incarcerate DC inmates, began as a progressive work camp and evolved to include distinct buildings for women, youth, and eventually a maximum-security penitentiary.
By the late 20th century, the Lorton Reformatory, like so many other maximum-security prisons in the United States, had become overcrowded. Violence became an everyday occurrence, according to former guards and inmates featured in Lorton: Prison of Terror, a documentary produced by former inmates and released in 2022. The facility was described as “unfit for humans” and “dusty, dirty, and dangerous.”
“I had moments where I was like, ‘Was this really a good idea?’ There were days where it felt like too much work.”
After it closed, the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Over subsequent years, much of the old prison complex was gutted, redeveloped, and converted into art studios, gyms, and luxury apartments.
There have been several comparable efforts to repurpose closed prison facilities across the United States over the last couple of decades, said Nicole D. Porter, senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that studies policies impacting the criminal justice system.
Though a common outcome is mixed-use developments, she has noticed a trend of these spaces being converted into education centers to serve youth—typically teenagers already involved in the criminal justice system or viewed as “at risk.”
But Porter believes Brynmor is unique; she’s not aware of any other former prison facility that hosts young children. And she pointed out the irony of a program serving early learners in a building that once housed incarcerated people, since early childhood investment has been associated with lower rates of crime in adulthood.
“The idea that a site that caused so much harm … is converted into a site of learning, of teaching young people in a healthy way and a holistic way, is very encouraging,” Porter said of Brynmor. “I would hope it serves as a point of inspiration in what could be possible at closed prisons going forward.”
By the time Allvin was touring the maximum-security unit in 2022, only a small portion of the original prison cells were intact, preserved in a separate, undeveloped building on the grounds.
The two buildings she visited—9050 and 9060 Power House Road—had already been hollowed out. The two-story-high cell blocks had been removed. There was no HVAC or plumbing, just two vast rectangular buildings.
“I got a cold, dark shell,” said Allvin, who signed a long-term lease for the buildings.
But the high ceilings and large, striking glass windows, which Allvin described as “cathedral-like,” drew her in.
“The buildings were completely empty. We had a blank slate here,” said Theresa del Ninno, principal at Maginniss + del Ninno Architects, a small, women-owned architectural firm that has done a number of adaptive reuse projects for early childhood, including Brynmor. “You don’t really think, ‘This was a maximum-security prison.’”
One might imagine a former prison as gray and drab, an eyesore. That is not the reality of the Lorton site.
“There was always talk about what’s going to happen with these beautiful, historic brick buildings,” said del Ninno. “For years we’ve seen them there, so it was exciting to get a chance to work in two of them.”
The symmetrical Brynmor buildings, at about 6,700 square feet apiece, are connected by a brick colonnade portico, with ample green space in between. Inside each two-story building, the ceilings are nearly 20 feet tall. Great big windows—100 in all—allow natural light to pour in.
These elements created design challenges and opportunities.
Natural light is an obvious advantage, the architects shared. “It’s so bright and light-filled and open,” del Ninno noted.
“I could picture a child care center being there,” said Kim Jesada, project architect, about her first impressions upon seeing the space.
But the same tall, rectangular windows that allow all that light in also created challenges. “We like to have windows down at a child’s eye level,” del Ninno explained. The bottom sills of these windows, however, sit nearly eight feet off the ground.
The architects made cutouts in interior classroom walls and added internal windows along the corridors to allow light from outside to penetrate the innermost parts of each building.
They also had to do something about those two-story ceilings, which are more than twice as high as a standard room.
“Because the ceiling is so tall, and the kids are so small, we wanted to bring the scale down,” del Ninno said.
They added acoustic baffles—sound-absorbing panels that hang from the ceiling—to create the feeling of a lower ceiling and smaller space without obstructing natural light.
The buildings’ shape is “very unusual,” Allvin said. That, too, was a problem to solve.
“Because the buildings are so long,” Jesada said, “we didn’t want to have one single corridor running down that feels like one endless shaft.”
Instead, the corridor charts a diagonal path through each building. That design choice resulted in what del Ninno called “non-rectilinear” classrooms—or what Allvin described as “funky-shaped.”
“I would hope it serves as a point of inspiration in what could be possible at closed prisons going forward.”
They landed on a design that had infant and toddler classrooms in one building and Pre-K in another. The buildings are connected by an open, covered walkway that overlooks a shared play area that’s almost as big as each of the buildings. It includes an outdoor storytime space, a concrete racetrack, an infant play area, and natural climbing structures with timber.
The process of transforming the buildings into the welcoming, child-friendly haven they are today was long and arduous.
“I had moments where I was like, ‘Was this really a good idea?’” Allvin recalled. “There were days when it felt like too much work.”
It was an expensive undertaking, she said. “I was building a 14,000 square-foot child care center on a family child care home budget mentality.”
She paid for the multimillion-dollar project with a combination of “socially conscious” investors, a loan from a community development financial institution and private foundation support, she said. And fortunately, there was no shortage of help.
Allvin’s own children, now grown, assembled cribs. A network she built throughout her career, including leaders of other early care and education organizations such as ZERO TO THREE and Child Care Aware of America, pitched in too, putting together furniture. But it wasn’t just friends and family who stepped up. Members of the community were moved by the transformation and wanted to be a part of it.
Shortly before the center opened, Allvin realized she needed more hands on deck, so she hired a few workers through a local company to help. One of the workers shared with Allvin that he’d grown up in DC with a very clear idea about what Lorton Reformatory represented. “He said, ‘Anytime you need help, let me know. All I knew this place to be was where people came to die. Now it’s a place where babies are born, where light happens,’” Allvin recalled. “So many people have had that reaction.”
Around two weeks before opening day, a local couple who had heard about the preschool showed up to see it for themselves, Allvin said. Both of them were former prison guards at Lorton. Allvin took them inside to see the progress, and standing in the infant classroom, the man commented that he wished society designed spaces as intentionally for incarcerated people as it does for kids, she recalled. The woman, Allvin said, returned every day for two weeks to help get the space ready to serve children and families.
When the ribbon cutting ceremony came, Jesada, one of the architects, brought her young daughter with her. She got to see the space anew through her daughter’s eyes. The girl was not privy to the buildings’ history. Her face lit up as she walked in, Jesada remembered.
“The kids aren’t coming into this space thinking, ‘I’m going to preschool in what used to be a prison,’” Jesada said. “[My daughter] saw a warm and inviting space filled with light.”
She added: “I think that with any project, seeing any of the users walk in and their reaction to the space, is what makes me want to keep designing. You see how people get to enjoy the space. Seeing this space filled with kids was my favorite part of it. They feel comfortable and safe learning.”
“He said, ‘Anytime you need help, let me know. All I knew this place to be was where people came to die. Now it’s a place where babies are born, where light happens.”
Tiara Smith, an infant teacher at Brynmor who joined a few months after the center opened, didn’t realize the program was housed in a former prison until she started the job. After seeing the still-intact cells on campus, though, she said the significance of the turnaround is not lost on her.
We’re the change,” she said. “We’re making a difference to new lives—infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. We can give them that foundation to learn to love school, and love life, and enjoy life. We can be that partnership with families. It’s definitely a powerful thing.”
Brynmor has been open for just over two years, and already it has demonstrated what so many in early care and education believe to be impossible.
From the start, Allvin was committed to serving children from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing from her experience as a national early childhood leader, Allvin has been able to build a thoughtful revenue and fee structure that makes that possible. About 60 percent of Brynmor families receive some form of financial assistance — either through government subsidies, child care scholarships with the support of a private foundation, or military subsidies. The rest pay the full price out of pocket.
The center recently earned National Association for the Education of Young Children accreditation—the gold standard for quality in the field, yet a designation that only a fraction of programs can claim. And it invests in its staff. In a field where the average wage is $13 per hour and nearly half of early childhood educators use at least one form of public assistance, Brynmor pays its teachers on par with public school employees, and provides them with health insurance, retirement matching, paid leave, and other benefits.
“That’s why we exist,” Allvin said. “That’s our North Star.”
The model is working so well that Allvin is busy scaling the business. Brynmor now has two more locations, one in the heart of D.C. and another inside a 250-year-old Baptist church in Virginia. Next up, she said, is an effort to convert a former elementary school into an early learning program.
In a field where scarcity is the default, each of these realities is rare. Together, they’re remarkable.
Yet it tracks with the narrative surrounding this project. Light chases out darkness. Hope overcomes despair.
And bit by bit, the promise and potential of our nation’s youngest children rewrites the story of a space that, for decades, represented pain and despair.
2026-02-03 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Can a lump of coal ever be…cute?
It’s a question no one was thinking about until last Thursday, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted a cartoon of himself on X kneeling next to “Coalie”—a combustible lump with giant eyes, an open-mouthed grin, and yellow boots, almost like a carbon-heavy Japanese video game character.
It might seem like a strange mascot to promote what Burgum calls the “American Energy Dominance Agenda.”
“Especially for this administration, I would have expected a little bit more macho twist to it,” said Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo, and the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World.
In Japan, Dale said, seemingly everything gets a cute character attached to it—not just in TV shows and games, but also as part of government public relations efforts. This ultra-adorable aesthetic, associated with rounded shapes and huge eyes, is so common it has a name: kawaii. Even the Tokyo police department has an orange, mouselike mascot, with a disarming cuddliness that serves to make law enforcement feel softer and less threatening.
“There’s nothing funny about black lung disease. There’s nothing funny about the water pollution.”
Coalie appears to do something similar, countering Burgum’s “mine, baby, mine” message with a kawaii-style innocence. “You know, it makes us feel more familiar,” Dale said. “It makes us want to get closer.” Those warm, fuzzy feelings come from how our brains are wired to respond to babylike characteristics. Give a character a round body, big eyes, and chubby arms and legs, and you can even make a lump of coal look huggable.
Coalie is just the latest in a long line of characters used by controversial industries, from tobacco to nuclear energy, that seem designed to make their risks feel less threatening—though they typically looked less cute, at least in the United States. David Ropeik, a risk expert, sees Coalie as part of a tradition of advertising strategies that widely disliked companies use to push back against criticism.
“It’s a common response from cultures that feel themselves under attack, looking for ways to make their case in a less than adversarial way to sell their point of view,” Ropeik said. President Donald Trump has been working on rehabilitating coal’s image as the administration tries to stall the fuel’s decline. Trump has even said he has a standing order in the White House for staff to use the phrase “clean, beautiful coal.” He explained why in November, saying, “It’s ‘clean and beautiful’ because it needs public relations help.”
Even cuteness can backfire, though, if people notice that an extra-adorable character is trying to coax them into liking something dangerous. Consider Pluto-kun, a cherubic mascot from the 1990s who promoted the Japanese nuclear company Tepco—at one point by cheerfully drinking a glass of plutonium as if it were harmless. The character attracted little attention until the nuclear accident at Tepco’s Fukushima plant in 2011, when people began resurfacing Pluto-kun online to point out the irony of its upbeat reassurances as the threat of nuclear disaster felt real and immediate.
Some felt a similar dissonance when Interior Secretary Burgum posted the image of Coalie. Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy at Appalachian Voices, an environmental nonprofit, said the character was mocked by some of her friends and colleagues who work to support coal communities because of the serious damage they see firsthand from coal. “There’s nothing funny about climate change,” she said. “There’s nothing funny about black lung disease. There’s nothing funny about the water pollution that many people in Appalachia experience because of coal mining.”
Part of the problem was that the timing was bad, Barnes said. The day after Coalie showed up on Burgum’s social media feed, Trump signed a law that redirects $500 million in funding originally set aside for cleaning up abandoned coal mines to the Forest Service and federal wildfire management programs. On top of that, the administration has been trying to roll back safety programs for miners. To people who care about the health of people working in mines and living near mines, Barnes said, Coalie “comes across as a middle finger, in a way.”
For Coalie’s creators, the backlash was a bit surprising, according to Simone Randolph, the communications director at the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, or OSMRE. The thing is, Coalie wasn’t initially intended as a mascot for “American Energy Dominance.” Its story actually started way back in 2018, when a social media manager at OSMRE put googly eyes on a picture of coal.
“Coalie” became a running joke in the office and an icon on their Teams channel, evolving into different versions over the years, Randolph said. “If you walk down our hallway in the D.C. office, people have pictures of Coalie on their doors.”
Despite the uproar over Coalie, Randolph hopes the mascot can help people learn about her obscure federal office. OSMRE oversees the permitting and regulation of the country’s coal mines and is responsible for cleaning up old, polluted mining land. The agency has transferred and authorized billions of dollars to restore mining lands for better uses—like what’s now the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden.
“So often, communication boils down to something that’s kind of bland,” Randolph said. “It doesn’t really catch the public’s attention. And so we were hoping to do something that would be a little bit more attention-grabbing.” Last week, OSMRE posted an explainer of its work using Coalie as a guide to walk readers through the agency’s responsibilities.
But the office’s character has notable differences to the version of Coalie that Burgum posted on X, which has tiny pink circles next to its eyes. Its features show a clear link to kawaii, an unusual move for an American institution, Dale said. It’s possible that it’s the result of somebody in Burgum’s department using AI to generate the image. In his own experimentation, Dale has found that AI will often add kawaii features to cute characters. Randolph said that OSMRE’s team uses AI tools, encouraged by Burgum, and that the version of Coalie he posted was designed to align with the secretary’s existing “Cartoon Doug” character.
Randolph said that it was an intentional decision to have the interior secretary introduce Coalie online, to bring more attention to OSMRE’s work. “The response has been extreme on both sides,” she said. “And my hope is that we can capitalize upon this moment to at least show the good work that is happening.”
