Would you be shocked to learn that Donald Trump’s months of claims that the White House ballroom would go up with zero taxpayer spending were a total lie? And we don’t just mean the $1 billion in “security improvements” for the project they tried (and failed) to get in the latest spending bill. The Washington Post reports this morning that tens of millions of dollars of public funds have already gone into the project.

“Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings,” WaPo writes. “They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.” Knock us over with a feather. Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill and Andrew on Substack and YouTube for Morning Shots Live today at 10 a.m. EDT today.

Trump’s Arrested Agenda

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump is, above all, a showman. While he’s plainly slowing with age, he has certainly not lost his ability to deliver near-daily shocks with his attacks on good government, ethics, and taste. But the nature of those shocks has been changing lately. More and more, they’ve seemed calibrated to obscure a harsh truth: Not yet two years into Trump 2.0, the administration’s momentum has ground to a halt.

I’ve written about this slowdown before. But I was forcibly reminded of it yesterday while reading the latest piece of jaw-dropping reporting from the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which pulled back the curtain on a secret internal White House fight from April of last year: Stephen Miller’s campaign to get Trump to suspend the right of habeas corpus for accused illegal immigrants.

The fight came at a time when the White House was charging ahead at max speed with its mass-deportation plans, with Miller and Trump hoping to deport millions in relatively short order. They’d already twisted America’s existing laws into pretzels to set the stage for those deportations, most notably by invoking the Alien Enemies Act. But they were still being slowed by individual migrants’ ability to bring their cases before a judge. Miller proposed: What if we simply took that away? It was “an opportunity for Mr. Trump not only to speed up deportations,” Haberman and Swan write, “but also to assert vastly expanded power over a legal system that was getting in his way.”

Ultimately, miraculously, cooler heads prevailed:¹ Trump never pulled the trigger on trying to suspend the right for migrants.

Reading this report was a shocking experience for two reasons. First, obviously, are the merits—it’s insane that any White House would contemplate such measures in peacetime at all.² But the piece also yanks the reader back to a time last year when pretty much everything was like this.

At this moment, months into his second term, Trump was hurtling forward on everything everywhere all at once. DOGE was ripping through the government, USAID was vanishing in a puff of smoke, “Liberation Day” tariffs were slamming into place, ICE was off the leash, planeloads of migrants were being shipped to an El Salvador torture prison, the National Guard was preparing to march into U.S. cities, suspected deep-staters were being purged from law enforcement and having their security clearances yanked, law firms and colleges were being strong-armed into submission, Trump was threatening to invade Greenland and the Panama Canal, and on and on.

This period of Trump’s furious maximalism seemed to die in Minneapolis early this year. It has stayed dead since. Instead, Trump has spent the first half of 2026 mostly just fighting to keep stuff from sliding away from him. Simply reauthorizing funding for ICE and the Border Patrol turned out to be an enormous, sweaty legislative lift. So was maintaining his tariff regime after the Supreme Court ruled huge portions of it unconstitutional. Ditto maintaining his government’s ability to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreigners—a typically uneventful legislative renewal Trump managed to capsize with his clownish appointment of hatchet man Bill Pulte to a top intelligence role. His top 2026 legislative priority, the elections grab-bag Save America Act, is a running joke that the Senate will never seriously consider. Other major initiatives, like the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” barely made it past the announcement stage before blowing up in the face of furious public opposition.

Increasingly, the things that have occupied Trump this year are the things that, last year, were just a sideshow to the major policy work. He has become obsessed with the minutiae of his self-aggrandizing monument building, from his Freedom250 birthday bash to the Kennedy Center to the East Wing Ballroom to the reflecting pool to his planned triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery.

And even that isn’t all going to plan: A judge’s order that his name come off the Kennedy Center has provoked a world-historical hissy fit, with Trump declaring the institution dead and installing an apparently permanent cover over the building’s facade rather than allowing it to be seen with his name removed.³