Trump gives Washington a good shake as he plays the world
Vroom vroom, Donald Trump revved up his engine as he made “a little circle in a nice, secure…slightly slower” presidential limo the Beast, before kicking off the Freedom 250 Grand Prix in the nation’s capital.
Then the POTUS waved a big green flag fast and furious like an excited schoolboy to let a bunch of fast, flashy cars go swooshing around a 1.7-mile street circuit at 200 mph in 147 laps covering roughly 250 miles.
The earth trembled. But mercifully none of the more than 200 manhole covers welded down around the course flew off. Carefully shielded by their nervous curators, thousands of artefacts in the museums along the route too survived as “the beautiful cars” made freedom go “roaring like never before.”
Sunday’s picnic marked the end of Trump’s “Summer of fun” for America’s 250th big birthday bash, suggested the New York Times, with several events with a Trumpian flavor — from a UFC fight on the White House lawn to a massive July Fourth fireworks show on the National Mall.
Whoa whoa, not so fast, not so soon. There were more shake downs to do. More memes to mash. And more enemies to bash. So America’s own all-in-one Swiss knife let loose a fresh salvo of verbal missiles at the enemy — No, not Iran but Canada.
As trade talks with its neighbor collapsed, Trump calling it “difficult and unreasonable” and its negotiators “clowns,” slapped punitive 50% tariffs with a threat to change the name of Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’ with a new LEGO map on Truth Social.
READ: Trumpiana: “If you’re grass, you’re very happy!” (
Though shaken, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney chose to do what no other major U.S. ally has done, hitting back with tariffs on steel products and a swath of new duties on $20-billion worth of U.S. products exported to Canada.
But undeterred by the prospect of toilet roll prices hitting the fan, Trump followed up the threat with an executive order making the change official.
“We have a gulf and we have a lake – now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” he declared, “Maybe we’ll change them both.”
“As you know, Canada has been ripping us off for a long time on trade. Sad,” said Trump who had previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” on the first day of his second term in office.
“Even the military: we defend Canada for nothing. We don’t get anything. They don’t pay us to defend Canada. But we defend Canada,” Trump complained.
And as his expletive-laden “Operation Epic Fury” failed to tame Iran even after six months, Trump “unleashed” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as the Wall Street Journal put it, to redouble economic pressure on Tehran and its enablers.
“Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” said Bessent announcing a rather prosaically named “Operation Economic Outcast,” comparing it to D-Day.
Trump is working the phones and “every country has a defined timeline to shut down activities we have identified,” he said, “If they do not take action, we will do so unilaterally.” But he declined to lay out the timelines or name names.
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Trump then despatched CIA director John Ratcliffe on a widely publicised “very sort of semi-routine” secretive visit to Moscow to share the agency’s bleak assessment of the Russian war against Ukraine, and urge Moscow to cut a deal.
Some officials cited by the New York Times hoped that President Vladimir Putin, a former intelligence officer himself, would see a message from the CIA director as more urgent and credible than communications through normal diplomatic channels.
“We would like to see the war with Ukraine end,” Trump himself told Fox News. “Now something may come out of it. We’re working very hard to get that war ended and frankly they both want to see it ended at this point.”
Before Ratcliffe flew to Moscow, U.S. intelligence indicated that the Kremlin views the Iran war as an opportunity to escalate action against U.S. interests, according to a Washington Post report.
With just 67 days to go before the crucial midterm elections, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has reassigned hundreds of fraud detection officers to look for noncitizens in voter registration data, according to another Post report.
READ: Trumpiana: Citius, altius, fortius, hyperboleus! (August 8, 2026)
Immigration arrests too have hit record highs with ICE increasingly targeting people with no criminal record to get closer than ever to meeting its goal of 2,000 daily arrests.
Meanwhile, miffed at a judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from the facade of the Kennedy Center of Performing Arts, government lawyers argued that it may have to be demolished without Trump’s planned renovations and addition of his name as its ‘restorer.’
Not so fast, said the judge peppering the arts institution lawyers with inconvenient questions about the urgency of adding Trump’s name to the building by Sept. 8 and if it wouldn’t amount to promoting a specific individual. But he did postpone a final decision for a month to keep the pot boiling.
Meanwhile, a coalition of more than 600 preservation groups, architectural associations and Tribal governments have sought lawmakers’ intervention to check moves to loosen rules that govern proposed changes to historic landmarks and Indian tribal sites.
But away from the prying eyes of nosy judges, the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic reportedly wants to get rid of a recently removed “woke” painting by celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley, who painted Barack Obama’s presidential portrait.
— Probably to replace it with one big beautiful portrait trumpeting Trump!