President Donald Trump’s plans to redesign the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool could make it less reflective.

The Mar-a-Lagoification of our nation’s capital continues apace. After the foiled shooting Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump and his allies said that was further reason to build his ballroom, while on Friday, Trump posted photos on his social network showing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool getting refurbished with a new coat in a different color. For now, the memorial looks more like a municipal swimming pool

In photos Trump shared to his site, workers in bright yellow safety vests apply what appears to be blue liquid epoxy or rubberized pool coating to the empty pool. “It’s essentially a pool surface, but it’s industrial-grade pool,” Trump said unprompted last week during a White House event on drug prices in which he claimed he had a bigger crowd at the Reflecting Pool than Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Over the years as a developer I’ve probably built more than 100 swimming pools,” Trump said. “You’re going to end up with a beautiful, beautiful Reflecting Pool.”

The Reflecting Pool was designed by architect Henry Bacon and originally opened in 1923 with an asphalt and tile bottom, according to the Trust for the National Mall. Over time, the pool sank roughly a foot because it was built without pilings, and it lost about 600,000 gallons weekly from cracks and leaking. The pool was completely rebuilt in 2012 with a water supply system that pulled water from the Tidal Basin and filtered it. The bottom of the restored pool was tinted a neutral gray so it’d be more reflective.

Trump wants to make the pool blue, which Charles A. Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told the Washington Post “risks reading more like a large lap pool than the solemn and hallowed visual and spatial connection between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.”

It could be worse. Trump said he originally wanted a turquoise color for the pool, “like in the Bahamas” (not to mention like at the pool at Mar-a-Lago), but his contractor suggested “American flag blue” instead. A resort-style turquoise pool would be ill-suited for the National Mall. If the new color is true to the U.S. flag, though — Old Glory Blue, or Pantone 282C — it will at least be dark.

Regardless of the finished look after work is completed, a larger issue will still stand. As with his tearing down of the East Wing, Trump’s top-down approach to redesigning Washington’s public spaces and federal buildings disregards federal law and degrades norms.

Tearing down and rebuilding the White House every four to eight years would be imprudent. Even Americans who’d prefer a U.S. capital city that looks like Palm Beach should be alarmed by the precedent taking shape if the president can tear down buildings or redesign monuments unilaterally.

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Why Trump’s ICE rebrand to NICE wouldn’t help its public image

President Donald Trump’s latest idea to rebrand a government agency could give one of his most disliked policies a much more pleasant-sounding name. That might not work out as planned, though.

Trump shared a social media post on Sunday highlighting a woman’s suggestion that he rename U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, as National Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or NICE, “so the media has to say NICE agents all day every day.”

“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT. President DJT,” Trump wrote.

The proposed rename goes against trend for Trump, who wants to formally rename the Department of Defense the Department of War. Trump’s branding instincts in office are toward toughness, not softness.

Public opinion about ICE is firmly hardening against it, which may be why the name change seems so obvious and smart. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of how ICE handles its job, according to a UMass poll released on April 1, and Fox News polling shows the agency’s disapproval rising from 41% in 2018 to 58% today. But giving the agency a friendly backronym likely wouldn’t be a quick fix.

An alphabet soup of names

The U.S. government is filled with acronyms, and officials increasingly turn to backronyms, or acronyms that are reverse engineered because of what they’ll spell out. No one loves them more than Congress.

About 10% of bill and resolution names introduced in Congress over a two-year period were backronyms, according to a 2022 review by The Atlantic, and the proportion of backronyms in bill names has risen in every Congress since at least 2001.

There was the $2 trillion pandemic stimulus and relief legislation called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) in 2020, and the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act (CHIPS and Science Act) that funded semiconductors and other priorities in 2022.

With a little creativity, a piece of legislation with a name as long as a Fall Out Boy song title becomes a short, handy piece of storytelling in cable news chyrons and tweets.

Backronyms are a messaging tool that turns an otherwise bureaucratic-sounding collection of letters into a bumper-sticker-type slogan. But not all of them are honest. While some backronyms are corny or clever, others are designed to misdirect or manipulate, wrapping unpopular legislation in the flag.

The USA Patriot Act, or Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, passed weeks after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and expanded the surveillance state, while the SAVE Act, or Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, is a voter suppression bill that’s currently stalled in the Senate.

Why a “nice” rebrand is a bad idea

Renaming ICE to NICE might attract more negative attention to the agency, says Brian Christopher Jones, a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool who’s studied topics such as acronyms and misleading PAC names.

“I wonder whether this particular backronym, NICE, would open the agency up to potentially even more criticism than before,” he says, noting the Patriot Act has been criticized for its name.

The turn in public opinion against ICE was spurred on by footage of its agents being the opposite of nice, and the proposed new name would only further draw attention to behavior that’s dissonant with the backronym.

The name of the U.K.’s own NICE, which stands for National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, hasn’t stopped people from disparaging it, says Jones, who also questions whether the new name in the U.S. would turn off the people the agency is trying to attract to work there.

“I’m not so sure if law enforcement personnel would think the same about working for an agency called NICE,” he says.

Trump could try renaming the agency, but actually making ICE nice will take more than just a cutesy acronym.

This story was first published in Fast Company.

Have you seen this?

A royal visit. What a scary weekend. I’m so glad no one was hurt after shots were fired at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The world needs more peacemakers and it starts with you and me. King Charles is in the U.S. this week for his first state visit as monarch, and I have some suggestions for where he should go. [Whig by Hunter Schwarz]

State Dept. finalizing plans to put Trump picture on U.S. passports. The redesign is ostensibly part of a larger celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence. [The Bulwark]

New York City’s iconic compost bin gets a cool kids makeover. In collaboration with the Department of Sanitation, Only NY reimagined NYC’s curbside compost containers. [Fast Company]

James Comey indicted over seashell photo that officials said threatened Trump. A federal grand jury has returned an indictment charging former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram photo he posted of seashells, which allies of President Donald Trump portrayed as a threat. [NBC News]

A new U.S. postage stamp is triangle-shaped, and it’s valid on mail sent around the globe to more than 180 countries.

The triangle Postcrossing stamp from the U.S. Postal Service commemorates an international pen pal project started in 2005 by Paulo Magalhães, a student in Portugal. The program connects people around the world in a simple but increasingly old-fashioned way: Send a postcard, get one back.

What started as a website Magalhães hosted on his personal computer has since spread around the world. Today, more than 805,000 people from more than 200 countries and territories have sent more than 80 million postcards through the program. Americans have sent more postcards through Postcrossing than the residents of any country except Germany, but maybe a new stamp could put the U.S. on top.

Postcrossing has gotten its own stamps before in countries including Germany and Finland. The U.S. Postcrossing stamps come following a letter-writing campaign by supporters to the USPS Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which recommends future stamps. Their successful letter-writing campaign also marks the return of a rare postage stamp shape.

Most U.S. stamps are square- or rectangular-shaped, but in 1997, the USPS released its first triangle-shaped postage stamps, a pair of 32-cent stamps showing vintage-style illustrations of a clipper ship and stagecoach. Another, a 41-cent triangle stamp in 2007, marked the 400th anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, by English colonists, and it was shaped like a triangle because that was also the shape of the fort they built there.

The latest triangular stamps feature artwork by Arizona-based artist and designer Jackson Gibbs. Known for his editorial work in outlets like The New York Times and New York magazine, Gibbs says the creative brief for his first-ever stamps was to portray the activity of postcrossing, or sending postcards, which he depicted in images in his playful, cartoon style. The four stamps he designed show people carrying mail on horseback through a Saguaro desert, underwater, in space, and by motorcycle.

“The ideas came from things I like to draw over many years of culminated experience,” Gibbs tells me. The stamps were designed by USPS art director Antonio Alcalá.

The U.S. Postal Service says the stamps recognize postcrossing for “promoting greater understanding across countries and cultures,” and it’s unveiling them at the Boston 2026 World Exposition from May 23 to 30 alongside stamps commemorating the American Revolution, the American bison, international peace, and North American soccer.

The stamps come in sets of four or eight that fit together in a square, and they’re classified as Global stamps, which, like Forever stamps, hold the postage value equivalent of First-Class Mail no matter the cost of postage, except they can be used for international correspondence. First-Class Mail International is available in countries including Canada, Great Britain, and Australia, according to the USPS.

The official Postcrossing FAQ recommends writing on postcards about what daily life is like where you live, or about things like your favorite quote, a recipe, a childhood memory, or your favorite book, movie, band, or hobby. Bringing back triangle stamps for a program built on sending postcards makes smart design sense since they take up half the space of a rectangular stamp for a piece of mail without much room to spare. Now not only will Americans have more space for writing, but they’ll have a fun, friendly stamp to share with new friends around the world.

This story was first published in Fast Company.

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You can see these fonts from space

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Arizona’s Department of Transportation offers specialty license plates for Alice Cooper, the Phoenix Suns, and Route 66, and starting last month, it rolled out a simple new blackout design to raise money for good causes.

A portion of the fees from specialty plates in Arizona go to charities or nonprofits. For most, it’s $17 for the initial plate, then $17 annually thereafter for renewal fees. Most charities do this with plate designs that include their branding, like the Girls Scouts trefoil or a four-leaf clover for 4-H. For 4AZKids, a plate that supports charities that help Arizona children, the plate is all black and super minimalist with no logo. The state name and license plate number are written in white.

“Our goal is to raise as much as possible to support children’s charities in Arizona, and we believe we can do this by giving Arizona drivers what they want — a complete logo-free black plate,” Tad Crother, president of Saguaros, the group behind the plate, tells me. “We saw that all-black specialty license plates in other states are seeing huge sales numbers, and we wanted to capitalize on that demand here in Arizona.”

The group granted $750,000 to 29 nonprofits in 2025, he says, including Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Boys & Girls Clubs, and Arizona Cancer Foundation for Children. Crother says the money the plates raise has the potential to add a larger stream of funding for its work.

Blackout designs are growing in popularity across the country, but they’re actually a throwback to some of the earliest license plates in the U.S. In Delaware, the first state, its first license plates issued in 1909 was a white-on-black porcelain plate, while other states had their own early, simple, two-color plates.

License plate design started changing 50 years ago around the bicentennial as states put out red, white, and blue specialty plates for the occasion, then a specialty California license plate for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics popularized the idea of a specialty plate for an event or group outside of veterans or the disabled, says Jeff Minerd, of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association.

“Now, you know, there's everything,” he tells me.

As license plate design has grown more complex, the trend towards blackout plates or other minimalist, two-color scheme designs has caught on like a reaction against maximalism. Also they just look cool.

Colorado released simple black, red, and blue license plates in 2023 as a throwback to some of its own vintage designs, and the blackout plate became the most popular speciality plate in the state in its first month of its release. In Utah, blackout plates first released in 2023 to raise money for the Utah State Historical Society were so popular that lawmakers in March doubled the price to split the proceeds into three funds, including a grant fund for Olympic and Paralympic venues. Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, and North Dakota all released their own black plates last year, and if your state doesn’t have one yet, don’t be surprised if it does soon.

In Arizona, the Saguaros’s blackout 4AZKids plate isn’t the only new license plate to go minimalist. New license plates for the Gila River Indian Community, No One Fights Alone to raise funds for mental wellness for first responders, military, veterans, and their families, and Teen Lifeline, for teen suicide prevention, are all black except for a seal or logos. And the groups Executive Council Charities and Empower Coalition also have their own blackout plates, but with text in red or blue, respectively, in order to fund grants for youth programs and veterans and military families.

Branding is great, but sometimes unbranding is better. Arizona’s blackout plate shows the best results don’t always come with a logo.

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This national flag was redesigned with endangered species for a campaign to protect marine areas

Brazil is home to both the world’s largest forest, the Amazon rainforest, as well as the world’s longest beach, Praia do Cassino, but the forest is much better known. A new multi-part campaign is aimed at drawing public attention to Brazil’s coastlines and ocean by remaking the country’s flag with endangered flora and marine life.

“People don’t talk so much about the oceans,” Diego Limberti, chief design officer at the creative agency Droga5 São Paulo tells me, but one depends on the other since oceans influence global weather patterns and climate. “If you don’t have oceans, you don’t have forests.”

To make that connection more apparent, Droga5 São Paulo worked on a “No Blue, No Green” campaign for SOS Oceano, a group of non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, that advocate for expanding marine-protected areas in Brazil. The campaign is all about the colors of Brazil’s green, yellow, and blue flag. The first phase blacked out the blue and green from the flag to convey environmental loss. The second phase takes a different approach by combining blue and yellow to get green on screen prints that cleverly mash-up images of endangered species to make a point.

The flag designs show endangered marine species in blue, and the yellow diamond-shaped lozenge on the center of Brazil’s flag is stamped in the middle where it usually goes. A corresponding forest scene in green completes the image by mixing two primary colors to get a secondary color.

The idea is to show the link between living things, like a humpback whale and Araucaria trees that are paired in one of the screenprints, or a piraña fish and restingas, a bush, in another. If we don’t protect the ocean areas where marine life lives, plants on land could go extinct too, the graphics explain. The goal is to show “how one biome depends on another biome,” Limberti says.

A total of six flags were created, including one that shows an Amazon rainforest scene stamped over Atlantic Ocean waves, while others were made to correspond with different regions of Brazil. Designers worked with biologists who identified the most endangered species from different regions to depict, and each was made using natural mineral pigments developed with Black Madre Studio and Joules & Joules Laboratory.

“The project is rooted in color theory,” Black Madre Studio creative director André Maciel said in a statement. “When we say ‘without blue there is no green,’ we’re working with the fundamental logic of primary and secondary colors: blue and yellow create green.”

Helpfully for Brazil’s environmental advocates, the country’s flag’s colors offer widely recognized symbolism when it comes to visually communicating the planet, both the oceans and land. “No Blue, No Green” uses color to reinforce that message in a simple but clever way.

Have you seen this?

Messages to America. Every former living U.S. president said their message to America in an interview with a former first daughter at an event for everyone’s dad’s favorite channel, the History Channel. Plus: Madonna announced Confessions II in the best way. [Whig by Hunter Schwarz]

Hundreds of pro-Trump avatars emerge on social media. The artificial-intelligence-generated fake influencers have surged on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube in an apparent bid to hook conservative voters. [The New York Times]

NASA’s Artemis logo has a deep message you probably didn’t notice. The A makes an arrow that points beyond the moon. [Creativebloq]

Democratic primary challengers stockpile cash, putting House incumbents on defense. At least nine House Democrats and one Democratic senator, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, were outraised by their primary challengers in the first fundraising quarter of the year. [NBC News]

Maison Margiela’s “Future” sneaker returns strapped more than before. Originally introduced in the SS11 collection, the subversive mid-top silhouette makes a dramatic comeback. [Hypebeast]

To buy one of each item in President Donald Trump’s company’s online storefront today would cost you nearly six figures. The good news is you’ll qualify for free shipping for an order over $125.

The Trump Store sells a whole skincare line plus branded golf gear, robes, blankets, glassware, and more. There’s the classic red “Make America Great Again” hats for $47, an $80 Trump Home jasmine room spray and diffuser set, and Trump-branded coffee pods that sell for $18 for a 12-pack.

All told, there are 1,492 total items for sale at the Trump Store that together cost $91,145.12, according to a new review of Trump’s branded merchandising business by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the presidency, and it’s a growing revenue stream for Trump.

“We’ve never seen any president profit off of something like the Trump Store, or indeed, any of the numerous businesses that Trump has continued to profit from while serving as president,” CREW communications director Meghan Faulkner tells me. She says the merch along with things like Mar-a-Lago memberships or Trump’s cryptocurrency “normalizes the idea that the presidency is for sale.”

“The merch store is just the most obvious physical representation of how Trump has essentially put his office up for sale,” Faulkner says.

CREW found that this storefront, which Trump launched in 2017 during the first year of his first term, brought in about $8.8 million in 2024, the latest year of Trump’s financial records, which is more than double how much it made the year before. Of the shop’s currently available products, 662 of them were launched since he took office for a final term last year.

Congress could and should pass a law requiring presidents and vice presidents to divest from assets that could pose a conflict of interest within 30 days of taking office, Faulkner says, and there should be clear enforcement mechanisms to hold them accountable if they don’t divest.

The Trump Store isn’t the same thing as Trump’s since-shuttered online campaign store where he once hawked MAGA hats to fundraise for his presidential campaigns. It’s his company’s own storefront, which isn’t beholden to the same Federal Election Commission rules, like annual limits or a prohibition against any foreign purchases. This revenue also goes straight to him rather than being split up among other groups that his joint fundraising campaign revenue was once divided between.

The growth of Trump’s merchandising business comes amid a broader shift in his overall merchandising strategy. Though Trump continued his campaign shop for a time after taking office for a second term last year, introducing new products like a prop “Gulf of America” executive order, lately the focus has been on releasing new products on his company’s shop instead, like new “Trump 250”-branded items to profit off the anniversary of the U.S. founding this year. Meanwhile the campaign’s online shop is no longer accessible from Trump’s campaign website.

Before entering politics, Trump licensed his name to branded buildings and products like water and a board game, and his hotel and golf course business necessitated things like branded toiletries and robes that he still sells today.

But it’s unusual for a U.S. president to sell branded gear in office like Trump does. Jimmy Carter’s family put its peanut farm in a blind trust after he took office, and they didn’t start a peanut butter brand or sell peanut tchotchkes to supporters. And while some presidential libraries do have gift shops, those come after a president leaves office, and are nowhere near as robust as Trump’s efforts.

Trump’s merch isn’t just lifestyle stuff, it’s explicitly political too. He sells at least 99 items that reference his presidency, including a $55 Space Force hat and a $50 “Gulf of America – Yet Another Trump Development” hat. The shop also sells merch promoting an unconstitutional third term, like “Four More Years!” and “Trump 2028” hats and a shirt that says “Trump 2028 (Rewrite The Rules).”

Trump’s already rewriting the rules of how presidents profit off their office. By merchandising his presidency, he’s monetized political fandom into a personal revenue stream for himself.

This story was first published in Fast Company.

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For Confessions II, Madonna’s working with the creative agency behind brat

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For its 2026 MLB City Connect uniform, the Texas Rangers looked to influences from south of the border for inspiration. The Rangers announced their special-edition City Connect uniforms with Nike Thursday that the team says are meant to celebrate “the Mexican influences across the entire state of Texas.”

Hispanic Texans today make up roughly 40% of the state, which was famously once part of Mexico before declaring its independence and then joining the Union. With the new uniforms, the only MLB team ever owned by a future U.S. president (former President George W. Bush had an ownership stake in the team from 1989 to 1998) is paying homage to state and team history while reaching out to the largest demographic group in Texas.

The new “Viva Tejas” uniforms, for “Long Live Texas,” uses the state’s Spanish-language name on the front, while the bright red color of the jersey was chosen to match the color of a crimson dye made from cochineal insects, the oldest pigment in the Americas. There’s a Charro-style pattern around the sleeve inspired by the embroidery used by Mexican horsemen, and on the left sleeve, there’s a Texas map decal designed in the style of Mexican papal picado, or tissue paper art.

The blocky, athletic-style typeface on the jersey was designed as an update on the team’s 1980s uniforms typography, while the T on the ball caps is from the team’s original uniforms after relocating to Texas in 1972.

“Nike’s theme for us was reimagining tradition,” Travis Dillon, Rangers senior vice president of marketing, said in a statement. And in celebrating the state’s Hispanic heritage through design, it’s part of what Dillon described as a longer-running effort “to build what we think is an authentic and reciprocal relationship with our Hispanic fans.”

Major League Baseball introduced City Connect uniforms in 2021 as an initiative to commemorate teams’ local history and culture in creative ways with alternative uniforms that might otherwise clash with the official team brand guide. While it’s led to some fun, alternative jerseys, there have also been a lot of clunkers. The Milwaukee Brewers “Wisco” uniforms this year are corny, and no shade, but I thought the bisexual gradient Kansas City Royals uniforms were for Pride. GQ announced this week “It’s Time to Kill the MLB City Connect Jerseys” because they’re “youth-travel-ball-ass getups.”

Designers for the Rangers, though, hit a grand slam with a uniform that manages to teach a mini social studies lesson without being lame and fitting within the team’s visual brand universe while also establishing what could become a long-running alternative visual identity.

In 2005, San Francisco Giants wore “Gigantes” jerseys to honor Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, a Dominican Hall of Famer, while the Milwaukee Brewers debuted an alternative “Cerveceros” brand that year for “Cerveceros Day” to celebrate Latin American culture. Since then, other teams have added their own alternative Hispanic heritage brands. While these brands serve as marketing tools, they’ve been used before to make a political statement too.

After Arizona passed a strict, controversial immigration law in 2010, Phoenix’s NBA team wore “Los Suns” jerseys in protest on Cinco de Mayo during the Western Conference Semifinals. Steve Nash called the law “misguided” and a “detriment to our society and our civil liberties” and Amare Stoudamire said he wore the uniforms “to let the Latin community know we're behind them 100%.” The “Los Suns” brand has lasted more than a decade, and the team released “Noche Los Suns City Edition” jerseys in black in 2019.

The rollout of the Spanish-language Rangers uniform isn’t tied to protest, but to come following President Donald Trump’s ramp up in deportations and his administration’s white washing of U.S. history through the levers of the state on things like coins and national parks, it’s a reminder that sports has a unique ability to promote inclusion and diversity through the power of its example. “Texas” is a Native word for friend or ally. Viva Tejas.

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Nearly a quarter of Trump’s proposed arch height is statue

For months, President Donald Trump has shown off various prototypes of an arch monument he wants to build in Washington, D.C., and finally he’s landed on a concept: an extra-tall “Triumphal Arch” that he hopes will soon rise just outside Arlington National Cemetery overlooking the National Mall. Nearly a quarter of the arch’s 250-foot height is thanks to a gilded statue on top.

The Trump administration submitted renderings for the massive arch to the president’s handpicked Commission of Fine Arts on April 17. The renderings by Harrison Design, an architecture, interiors, and landscapes firm, show an arch and park that would stand in a roundabout between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.

The design carries some of the hallmarks of Trump’s second-term federal buildings initiative with its oversize, gold-accented classical architecture, which would look right at home at Mar-a-Lago. Harrison Design did not respond to a request for comment.

The height of the arch is a hat tip to the semiquincentennial anniversary of the nation’s founding, which will be celebrated in July. But like a skyscraper that adds a spire or antenna for a few extra feet, it gets there with some help from its ornamentation: a 60-foot winged Lady Liberty-like gold statue flanked by gold bald eagles. The rendering also shows gilded lions at the base and the phrases “ONE NATION UNDER GOD” and “LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL” inscribed on either side.

Trump wrote in an April 10 post on his social network that the structure would be “the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World. This will be a wonderful addition to the Washington, D.C. area for all Americans to enjoy for many decades to come!” Though he said the arch would be completed by Independence Day, construction hasn’t started.

Trump’s planned arch would tower above the 99-foot-tall Lincoln Memorial on the other side of the Potomac River. Architecture critic Catesby Leigh, who supports the idea of an arch monument in D.C. like those found in other Western capital cities like Paris, nevertheless told PBS that Trump’s proposal is “way out of scale” and “way too big.” Sue Mobley, director of research at the nonprofit public art studio Monument Lab, calls it “banal.”

“I believe it is traditional to have some sort of victory prior to erecting a triumphal arch,” Mobley tells me. “That said, one of the more exhausting traditions of authoritarians is to perform victory out of a loss, and to imagine that the aesthetic will overwrite the actual.”

As with Trump’s push to build a massive White House ballroom and add his name to any number of prominent structures, from the Kennedy Center to New York’s Penn Station, his proposal to build an arch has also drawn fierce scrutiny and lawsuits. Demonstrators marched on the site of the proposed arch during last month’s No Kings protest, and a group of Vietnam War veterans accused Trump of not getting the proper congressional approvals to build the arch in a suit filed in February by the watchdog group Public Citizen.

In their court filing, attorneys for the veterans said the arch, which would be roughly as tall as an 18- to 25-story office building, would obstruct “a line of sight” between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial “that was designed to represent the unification of the Nation following the Civil War and that has existed for nearly a century.” The filing further states that the plaintiffs believe the structure would “dishonor their military and foreign service and the legacy of their comrades and other veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and would degrade their personal experience when visiting Arlington Cemetery.”

Trump announced his plans for an arch last year, but if pushback to the project is anything like pushback to his ballroom, there could still be hurdles. A federal judge halted construction of the ballroom earlier this month.

This story was first published in Fast Company.

Have you seen this?

DoorDashing to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In an historic first, Trump got McDonald’s DoorDashed to the White House after deleting a sacrilegious social media post, and when he asked his delivery driver Sharon Simmons if she voted for him, all she could say was “maybe.” [Whig by Hunter Schwarz]

The brand tightrope of the summer: How to make a patriotic sales pitch for America250 that won’t make anyone mad. Brands are gearing up for America’s 250th birthday celebration. But invoking an all-inclusive patriotism that doesn’t alienate anyone in 2026 is a fine line to walk. [Fast Company]

Two of Keith Haring’s painted cars roll into New York for the first time. The vehicles' outing marks the release of the new book, "Keith Haring in 3D." [Artnet News]

Postal Service union launches ad campaign promoting mail voting as Trump assails the method. A major U.S. Postal Service union is launching a national TV ad campaign promoting voting by mail, stepping into a politically charged debate as skepticism about mail-in ballots has been raised by Trump and others. [Associated Press]

George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns used “W. Stands for Women” branding as part of its outreach to female voters. And his father was called George Herbert Women Bush. [hunterschwarz/X]

When this year’s hurricane season starts in June, the federal government’s hurricane and marine forecast office will have new, more colorful maps of its forecasts than ever before in the hopes of better communicating the risks posed by oncoming storms.

The National Hurricane Center, or NHC, announced updates to its operational hurricane track cone maps are coming. The old map shows a cone shape that charts the probable path of a storm over five days, as well as coastal areas likely to be hit. What it didn’t show was what happens inland or areas removed from the storm’s direct predicted path.

The new map, which NHC previewed with a recreation of 2024’s Hurricane Milton, seeks to remedy that with new color-coded graphics for inland areas. Tropical storm and hurricane watches are in pink and yellow to show where conditions are possible, and tropical storm and hurricane warnings are in red and blue to show where conditions are expected. The map was announced in March following an initial 2024 unveiling and pilot last year.

NHC, which is housed under the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, introduced the cone graphic in 2002. People have been confused about the cone’s size, though, falsely interpreting it as representing a storm’s size rather than the area of its potential paths, or mistaking it for showing the fullest extent of the storm’s reach. Over the years as NHC’s forecasts have gotten better, the cone has gotten smaller, and thus so has the confusion over what the charts actually mean.

The urgency for a redesign picked up in 2022 after maps were misinterpreted ahead of Hurricane Ian in Florida. University of Miami researchers that year found a majority of Florida residents falsely believed the shaded area of the cone represented areas the storm would affect, not the range where the eye of the storm could be, and a Miami TV news station changed how it displayed its hurricane forecast maps on its own.

NHC worked with social scientists to develop the new map template, according to USA Today. Experts advised to make changes gradually, and a major challenge was limiting the amount of information that goes on the map, since too much could end up making it more confusing. The new maps, for example, still don’t show storm surge.

The new colors on the map were tweaked following feedback during the trial phase, and NHC’s warning coordination meteorologist Robbie Berg told USA Today they plan to make more frequent updates from now on rather than sit on it for a decade or two.

Clear, accurate, and actionable government communication is never more important than during storms and other disasters that threaten human life. By updating their cone maps slowly and intentionally, federal forecasters are taking steps to communicate more clearly when it matters most.

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To rebrand Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, designers went with a wordmark because the house is “un-logoable”

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When Virginia’s independent U.S. Senate candidate Mark Moran announced his campaign in a short-form video last Thursday, he moved his arms in ways I don’t think arms have ever been moved before in a campaign launch video.

Shot outside St. John's Church in Richmond where Patrick Henry gave his most famous speech, Moran introduced himself with a walk-and-talk-style video popularized by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. With a mic on his collar and pep in his step, Moran talks in the cadence of a frat leader with gestures that look like a white dude trying to rap. Swinging his arm around to deliver Henry’s famous phrase, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Moran adds, “My name’s Mark Moran. 250 years later, I’m saying the same thing.”

Being a bro is no crime, but Moran’s bro-ey video has drawn nearly 8 million views on X and inspired mockery and scorn. It likely won’t be the last cringe attempt to campaign on social media we’ll see this year. The class of 2026 is entering politics in a period of transition as social media and streaming continues to overtake traditional television as the main platforms where potential voters spend their time and campaigns try to reach them. Adapting for this new reality, it’s clear not all candidates are quite sure what to do with their hands yet.

Democratic consultant David Plouffe wrote in a New York Times editorial Sunday that successful campaigns in 2026 “must operate like a full-time production studio” and that candidates “should center each day on content creation.”

It’s not a new concept to turn candidates’ daily itineraries into the raw material for content. In the television era, presidential campaigns for John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter scheduled events that could be clipped for TV ads or covered by the evening news. The difference today, though, is the sheer scale of output that’s needed to feed the content beast for more intimate, owned platforms and smaller screens in an attention age.

Mamdani’s 2025 campaign video style, with its quick cuts that show the candidate in motion as he talks, has inspired imitators both in the U.S. and abroad. Some politicians don’t even try to hide it.

“I know what you’re thinking, Marit Stiles is totally copying Zohran Mamdani with these fundraising videos,” a provincial lawmaker in Ontario, Canada, named Marit Stiles said in a Mamdani-style video late last year. “And you’d be right.”

Copying Mamdani isn’t the only way, though. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) did an unboxing video for her reelection launch. And after Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said he wouldn’t eat a food truck taco on camera during a conservative talk show interview, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) ate a taco on camera.

If it’s true that we’ll see a senator release an eyeshadow palette within our lifetime, it’ll probably be because they were a make-up artist influencer on TikTok first. Cutting through today is harder than ever, and candidates are getting creative.

In his landmark book The Image published in 1961, the year after the first nationally televised presidential debates, media theorist Daniel J. Boorstin wrote, “If we test presidential candidates by their talents on TV quiz performances, we will, of course, choose presidents for precisely these qualifications.” The platforms today are different, but the implications are the same. If we test candidates by their talents to make TikTok videos, we will, of course, choose candidates for precisely these qualifications.

Luckily, there are signs that fluency in short-form video making isn’t the end-all-be-all of skills needed for politics now. The best-testing ads that one Democratic group ran in 2020 when the trend from TV to smartphones accelerated with the pandemic were Zoom-quality and direct-to-camera testimonials from voters, according to Everytown’s senior director of communications Max Steele.

You don’t have to be able to dance on camera to run for office today, and a future President Jake Paul isn’t an inevitability. Being able to speak honestly and authentically over FaceTime is now a competitive advantage. But while the medium matters, the message matters more.

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These are Apple’s best ad in 50 years

Apple turned 50 on April 1 — the same day as the Artemis II launch — and like the best birthday present ever, the NASA mission’s crew has captured amazing views from space on Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro Max on their way to the far side of the moon and back. It’s the best ad for a smartphone ever.

The Artemis II launch is one of the first times NASA has allowed astronauts to take smartphones into space, but the devices the crew left with have limited capabilities. Though they can photos and video, they can’t connect to the internet or Bluetooth. These phones are meant as cameras, not for making calls.

The crew also has a Nikon D5, Nikon Z 9, and GoPro HERO4 Black on board, and photos from all have been updated to NASA Johnson’s Flickr photo stream and social media. While the Nikons are getting some of the mission’s most jaw-dropping shots, the iPhone pics connects mankind’s farthest-ever voyage from Earth to the bestselling consumer product in the U.S. Shots taken of crew members looking out the Orion window at Earth were selfies taken from the phone’s front-facing camera.

More than 50 years after the Apollo 11 crew wore Omega Speedmaster Professional watches to the moon, the watchmaker still promotes that fact and calls the model the “Moonwatch.” For Apple, the Artemis II snaps gives the company its coolest “shot on an iPhone” assets at a moment when it’s celebrating its storied history and smartphone sales are red hot.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max is Apple’s newest and most expensive model, priced starting at $1,199, but still, it’s far more accessible than a Moonwatch, which is seven times as expensive at its cheapest and can only tell time. Apple announced all-time revenue record for its iPhone of $85.3 billion in the last quarter of last year, and with reports for a foldable iPhone coming this September, the 17’s shape and size could one day soon feel vintage. It’s already historic.

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To the moon. After blasting off last Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for NASA’s Artemis II mission around the moon, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen made history. [Whig by Hunter Schwarz]

Melania Trump’s unexpected Easter look. If it wasn’t fully red, white and blue, it was at least white and blue; if it wasn’t exactly pastels and chickadees, it was very Hyannis Port, yacht-club-coded. And the name on the label was the most American of all American brands: Ralph Lauren. [The New York Times]

Here’s the American Egg Board commemorative egg for FLOTUS. The industry checkoff group has created commemorative eggs for the first lady for 49 years. The latest, for first lady Melania Trump, was made by Ohio egg artist Mark Malachowski, whose design pays homage to the U.S. semiquincentennial.

TikTok isn’t changing political views, a new study suggests. Research published in Political Studies Review in March found that college students who were exposed to TikTok content from political influencers reported experiencing more negative emotional states: anxiety, anger, depression and the like. Perhaps even more striking: the content didn’t appear to have a noticeable influence on participants’ political positions. [Campaigns & Elections]

The Coachella billboards are here. Billboard from artists including Sabrina Carpenter, Katseye, Justin Bieber, Addison Rae, and more have gone up ahead of weekend 1 for the California festival. [Hypebeast]

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Editorial:

Hey, it’s Hunter. President Donald Trump called himself “an important designer” during a fundraiser for his planned White House ballroom last year, but with his approval tanking and the ballroom now on ice, I can’t help but wonder how badly his preoccupation with his extra-constitutional role as designer-in-chief is hurting him politically.

A federal judge ordered construction on the ballroom to halt on Tuesday, the day after the art group The Secret Handshake installed a gold-and-marble bathroom installation on the National Mall (see today’s “Street Art Sightings”). As Trump works to Mar-a-Lagoify Washington, D.C., his aesthetic now makes for an easily-understood punchline, not to mention it feels increasingly out of touch in a country that’s growing more uneasy about the economy.

Consider: while Trump works to renovate his temporary home, Home Depot reported in its most recent earnings call that home improvement activity is down, and the company cut its full-year outlook. Read the room.

A wartime president, Trump nevertheless spends an inordinate amount of time talking about his elective construction work. During his White House address to the nation Wednesday night, Trump failed to clearly articulate a rationale for the Iran war, but after architectural critics criticized his bad ballroom design, he brought props on Air Force One to defend the project.

As I’ve covered the Trump administration’s efforts to put Trump’s name, likeness, and design preferences front and center on everything from currency to buildings since he took office for a second term, it’s clear no one really wants this but Trump. Still, these efforts are ramping up in earnest as Trump’s approval sinks. Trump posted a video this week imagining a future presidential library that’s a Miami hotel tower with Air Force One in the lobby and golden statues of him even as polling from YouGov and the Economist found his approval at 35%.

The people are certainly in no mood to build statues to Trump, so he’s pushing to build them himself.

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History of American design:

Earth Day poster (1970). The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, and this poster, for an event at Union Square in New York City, was put out to promote it by the group Environmental Action Coalition. It’s estimated 20 million people in the U.S. participated that year, making it the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

Fallingwater (1936-1937). Construction began 100 years ago this month on architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous home, which was built over a stream southeast of Pittsburgh. The building became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019, and there’s a livestream on YouTube you can watch 24/7.

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Street art sightings:

“A Throne Fit for a King.”A faux gold-and-marble toilet went up on the National Mall from the public art group the Secret Handshake, which was behind a statue of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein there last month. The installation pokes fun at Trump’s reported renovation of the Lincoln Bathroom. Yes, you can sit on it, and yes, tourists love it.

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Social media companies were handed a major loss Wednesday after a California jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing their platforms to be harmful for kids. Do democracy next.

This week’s verdict was reached following a novel line of attack from the plaintiff. Online platforms have long been shielded by Section 230, federal law that protects sites and apps from being liable for third-party content, but in this case, lawyers argued it’s really a design problem. Companies engineer their apps to be purposefully addictive for young users with features like “infinite scroll,” “autoplay,” and “filters,” attorneys for the plaintiff argued, and the jury agreed.

“These companies built machines designed to addict the brains of children, and they did it on purpose,” attorney Mark Lanier said during the case. “When you’re making money off kids, you have to do it responsibly.” The same might be said of making money off our politics.

While the landmark case decided this week was about a young woman and thus focused on predatory design features that especially target girls, like Instagram’s beauty filters, consider how social media’s dark design patterns affect our most hyper-partisan posters, podcasters, and politicians. Social media might not be giving them body dysmorphia, but it’s warping their worldviews and incentives in other ways.

Designed for engagement, optimized for rage

Social media is designed for engagement. The longer you stay on, the more ads apps can serve you, and as evidence in the case that they’re optimized to keep you on longer, Lanier showed the court one 2015 email from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling for a 12% increase in time spent on the app. When it comes to politics, one surefire way to boost time in-app is anger and rage.

The engagement-based algorithm for Twitter, now known as X, amplifies posts that are emotionally charged and hostile to out-partisans, one study published in 2024 found. On Facebook, the app shaped the way elected officials lead their countries: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said in 2021 that an internal company report found after an algorithm change, European political parties “feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook… leading them into more extreme policy positions.”

The precedent set by the California case now looms over thousands of other suits challenging social media companies because of design choices they say harm young people. It also puts social network UX and UI under greater scrutiny.

There’s a growing sense in the U.S. that social media is bad. The percentage of U.S. teens who view it as mostly negative grew from 32% to 48% from 2022 to 2024, according to Pew Research Center, and Pew also found a 64% majority of U.S. adults view social media as a bad thing, higher than in any other country polled. Maybe a redesign could help.

For now, social media companies seem designed to suit the needs of their owners. Whether that’s nudging the ideological alignment of the algorithm in a certain direction or increasing engagement time even if it corrodes the national discourse, scrolling and posting today can feel more designed to benefit billionaires like Elon Musk (X), Zuckerberg (Meta), and President Donald Trump (Truth Social) than provide a positive user experience that strengthens our community, nation, and world.

Voters and donors don’t reward lawmakers for optimizing their public speech to go more viral online, but X does. Redesigning social media to bridge people together rather than drive them apart could be just the fix we need.

Is it ethical to put words in someone’s mouth with A.I. in a campaign ad if they wrote them?

Political professionals are split.

Political admakers know it’s best to have a clip of their clients’ opponent saying something damaging on camera for an attack ad rather than just written in text. With a clip, viewers can see it, hear it, and read it, which is better for capturing attention on visual channels like television or YouTube. It’s why opposition researchers have used “trackers” that record candidates at events on camera, and it’s why more recently, some admakers have turned to artificial intelligence.

Is it OK to put words in someone’s mouth that they wrote but didn’t actually say? Political professionals are divided, according to a new survey conducted this month by the American Association of Political Consultants, or AAPC. The survey of its members found that 48% believe that “realistic audio of candidate’s printed quote” is ethical when disclosed, 40% believe it’s not, and 12% say it depends or they don’t know.

Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico is the latest to have his likeness recreated in an A.I.-generated spot. The National Republican Senate Committee, or NRSC, released an A.I.-generated video earlier this month depicting Talarico saying some of his most woke takes that previously were only posted to X. Though the video is labeled A.I. at the beginning, for the majority of the clip, a small label is barely visible in the corner, and there’s also some added commentary that the A.I.-generated Talarico says that the real one didn’t write when he praises his own tweets. Some liberties were taken.

Texas state law bans A.I.-generated “deepfake” political ads within 30 days of an election, and the Talarico video inspired some pushback. “These deepfakes are dangerous and wrong. We need protections not just for politics, but for all Americans that could be targeted,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J) wrote on X. Could this be the direction political advertising takes? Potentially. But there’s also evidence political professionals and voters have concerns.

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Trump’s plans for a Washington, D.C., golf course built on East Wing rubble

Trump’s burying the East Wing at the site of a municipal golf course he wants to redesign.

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Hello, from Yello, a newsletter about political aesthetics, persuasion, and design by Hunter Schwarz. Subscribe:

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What is American design? More than 1,000 artists worked to answer that question on a scale never before attempted nearly a century ago by producing a handmade visual encyclopedia of U.S. material culture called The Index of American Design. It’s a national treasure.

The index is extensive, made up of more than 18,000 watercolor drawings plus photos of objects including textiles, toys, furniture, clocks, clothing, dish wear, decor, and weather vanes from colonial times through the 1800s. Today, it’s available as an online resource for learning about early American design and a testament to the American heritage aesthetic.

The Index of American Design was part of the Federal Art Project, the U.S. government’s Great Depression-era New Deal visual arts program, and it started in 1935 after a conversation between textile designer Ruth Reeves and New York librarian Romana Javitz about the difficulty in finding examples of traditional American craftwork. Though the fashion magazines of their day showed clothing and designs from Europe and the upper class, they left out the material culture of American every-men and -women, like the American sunbonnet, which was cut uniquely.

“I couldn’t find decent pictures of sunbonnets,” Javitz said in 1965 in an interview for the Archives of American Art. “We had any amount of material on society because of… Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and Vanity Fair, all those magazines… We can give you what a society woman would wear in the Riviera, and what her dog looked like in South Hampton. But we couldn’t find a sunbonnet.”

Reeves proposed the idea of an American design index to officials, and the resulting project eventually included offices in 34 states and D.C. It employed state administrators, artists, and researchers cataloging and drawing entries, according to the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art, or NGA, where The Index of American Design is housed today and makes up some 12% of its entire collection.

Objects were collected from antique shops, homes, churches, and elsewhere, but it omits include work from Indigenous, African American, and Asian American people and in fact, the index was never fully completed, per NGA.

Funding was cut in 1939 when about half of the drawings were created, and plans to produce physical volumes of the index, or “portfolios,” to distribute to schools, libraries, and museums were never realized. Workers began digitizing the index during the Obama administration in 2013, and today there are more than 1,500 searchable webpages worth of results that NGA says is still a resource for students, researchers, and designers almost 100 years later.

“We did not have any museums of folk art then,” Javitz, the librarian, said. “I mean, you would talk about American weather vanes and this and that, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing, and it's from that was born The Index of American Design.”

It used to be impossible to find examples of early American weather vanes and sunbonnets. Thanks to the artists behind the index and those who digitized their work, there’s gorgeous handmade watercolor illustrations of all that and more, and it’s all free and in the public domain.

You can’t put a living president on U.S. currency. Here’s what happened the last time a president tried.

The last time a living president was on a coin, it didn’t work out so well.

On March 19, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts voted to approve a commemorative gold coin that flies in the face of the law. On one side of the coin, President Donald Trump is seen scowling as he leans with his fist on a desk; on the other, a bald eagle carries the Liberty Bell.

Designed for the United States’ semiquincentennial, the coin would break a long-standing U.S. tradition established via an 1866 law that bans living presidents from appearing on currency. Only one other living president in history has appeared on a coin. That was 100 years ago, when then-President Calvin Coolidge’s profile was depicted alongside George Washington’s on the 1926 Sesquicentennial half dollar, to mark the 150th anniversary of the U.S.’s founding.

How the Trump coin got approved

Last year, Trump fired the Commission of Fine Arts board and replaced it with his own nominees who could rubber-stamp his design agenda. This is the commission who approved the coin’s design.

The president and administration have taken unprecedented action to stamp his name and likeness across the federal government in a way that mirrors propaganda campaigns of foreign authoritarian regimes.

The Mint has provided a work-around to get Trump on a coin by saying the Treasury secretary is authorized to mint and issue new 24-karat gold coins. They also might be trying to exploit a technicality in the law that allows commemorative coins to be minted for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. founding this year. The Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 specifically prohibits the portrait of a living person on the reverse (tails) side of a coin, but there is no mention of the front of a coin. Trump’s likeness will be on the obverse (heads) side.

There’s no word on the size or production run of the Treasury’s commemorative Trump coin, but architect James McCrery II, who is a Fine Arts Commission member and former ballroom designer, said, “I think the president likes big things.” A Mint official said the run would be “very limited,” according to The Associated Press.

The Coolidge effect

Trump’s desire to stamp his likeness on a coin might not have the ending he’s hoping for. Like the Trump coin, the Coolidge coin was commemorative and not for general circulation. Its design was also selected by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. The coin was produced to defray costs for the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and though the design reportedly inspired some criticism, The New York Times reported at the time, it was ultimately met with indifference because no one really wanted it.

Of the 1 million Coolidge half dollars that were produced, 86% ended up being returned and melted, according to the American Numismatic Association, an educational nonprofit dedicated to coin collecting.

Whether a future Trump coin receives the same reception as Coolidge’s remains to be seen—but Trump’s track record in other currency-inspired collectibles hasn’t had great returns thus far. His cryptocurrency crashed while still netting him $1.2 billion. And while Trump’s likeness has long been a fixture of commemorative medals and coin-like keepsakes, such as the ones they sell on Fox News, coin dealers recommend buyers collect them for fun, not as an investment.

This story was first published in Fast Company.

Here’s what actually happens to a politician’s fundraising numbers when they get mean

Personal attacks get attention, but that’s mostly it.

The biggest flame throwers in politics really just do it for the attention.

It’s no secret lawmakers who engage in personal attacks generate media coverage for their rhetoric, but it turns out that divisiveness in public speech doesn’t similarly translate into better fundraising, higher vote margins, or a more successful legislative record.

A review of 2.2 million public statements made by members of the previous 118th Congress (2023 -2025) found a vocal minority of members dubbed “conflict entrepreneurs” get outsized mentions on cable news for their antics. That doesn’t improve outcomes elected officials typically pursue, however like increased campaign contributions. Instead, the authors of the study’s findings published this month in PNAS Nexus suggest this new class of politician optimizes for fame.

Researchers from the University of Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth College fed lawmakers’ social media posts, floor speeches, newsletters, and press releases into an LLM that looked for personal attacks, which they defined as criticism directed towards a person or group that attacks their personal characteristics, motivations, or integrity rather than policy positions.

The way criticism was worded mattered in the study. As an example, the study’s authors said criticism of a lawmaker over their actions on Jan. 6, 2021 could be worded as “Senator X’s vote to reject certified election results undermined democratic institutions” just fine, but if they instead said, “Senator X is antidemocratic,” it would get flagged as a personal attack. Even if there’s merit to the attack, criticizing a specific claim is different then name calling.

The research found:

• personal attacks are more likely to come from Republicans than Democrats, although the majority of Republicans prioritize policy over personal attacks (the study doesn’t mention it, but since it took place during then-President Joe Biden’s administration, that could also say something about why Republicans were especially peeved at the time, Brandon Derangement Syndrome and all)

• personal attacks are three times more common on X than the House or Senate floor, go figure

• the more a lawmaker engages in personal attacks, the less they talk about policy

• attacks are mainly aimed at nationally well-known figures and organizations: Biden (48%), then-Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump (each at nearly 17%), followed by Democrats and Republicans generally (less than 5%), and others likes Minnesota Gov. Tim Walt and Elon Musk.

Researchers looked into whether negative attacks correlated to an increase in personal wealth and found no link, though they noted accruing celebrity capital could be valued further down the road post-Congress with work like cable news host. Lawmakers who engage in more personal attacks also seem to be taken less seriously by their peers. In the House, they receive fewer assignments to prestigious committees and they co-sponsor less legislation.

With no real political benefit to ̶b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶u̶r̶d̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ divisive personal attacks that degrade the quality of our national political conversation (sorry, I’m working on elevating my political speech), conflict entrepreneurs really seem to be doing it for the love of the game, tracking for key performance indicators like cable news mentions and retweets like it’s their job instead of legislating, logging out, and touching grass.

Voters can disincentivize conflict entrepreneurs by voting them out of office. Or maybe elected officials will just grow up and out of it. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), whose coworkers once tried to censure her in part over some of her most divisive tweets, realized last fall “that I’m part of this toxic culture” inspired by Trump’s approach to political fights.

“You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what,” she told The New York Times. “And as a Christian, I don’t believe in doing that.”

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FLOTUS plans a summit. The First Lady is hosting representatives from around the world this week to the White House to talk about kids, technology, and education (there was a robot) while over on Capitol Hill, Kim Kardashian just endorsed a piece of legislation she was moved to support following the Los Angeles fires. [Whig by Hunter Schwarz]

Inside Trump’s daily video montage briefing on the Iran war. The montage, which typically runs for about two minutes, has raised concerns among some of the president’s allies that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war. [NBC News]

A first look at the vibrant branding for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The designers behind LA28 reveal the superbloom-inspired look that’s coming to TV screens, stadiums, and L.A. streets. [Fast Company]

To test the effectiveness of digital political ads, researchers removed them completely for tens of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users in the U.S. in the weeks before an election to see what would happen. It turns out an ad blocker for political ads didn’t do much, but it could be because of who sees the most political ads online.

Participants in the study, which was published this month in Nature Human Behaviour, included nearly 37,000 Facebook users and nearly 26,000 Instagram users. All of them opted into the study knowing that their feeds may be modified in some way, but they weren’t told how. What they didn’t know was Meta blocked all political ads for them for six weeks before the 2020 election to test for measurable traits like political knowledge, campaign donations, and turnout.

The study was part of Meta’s 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (a previously published paper from the study looked at what would happen when people were paid to log off Facebook and Instagram altogether) and it gives an inside look at how campaigns use the social media giant’s biggest apps.

The study found something surprising: removing political ads from users’ feeds had no detectable effect on the tested outcomes like turnout, donations, political knowledge, candidate favorability, or polarization. If a feed without political ads doesn’t change behavior, though, it might have something to do with the fact that those who see them the most are among the most partisan and politically engaged already.

The average user over the study period was served 72 unique political ads on Facebook with a total of 132 political ad impressions, since some were shown more than once. Ads were shown more heavily among a few specific groups, though.

Most ads on Facebook and Instagram are shown to co-partisans, the study found, which is to say Democrats were mostly shown Democratic presidential ads and Republicans were mostly shown Republican presidential ads. Meanwhile independents were shown the fewest ads while undecided voters saw fewer ads than those who already had their minds made up. Users in swing states or who voted in the previous presidential election also saw more ads than people who didn’t fit those conditions. These ads are going after partisans and regular voters the most.

The picture that emerges of digital political advertising from the research isn’t one of persuasion, but of preaching to the choir and passing around a collection plate. The study found 46% of presidential ads were seeking donations, while 26% were persuasive (these were the ads more aimed at out-partisans), 17% were seeking user information, and 5.5% were for merchandise sales.

While much of digital campaign advertising is fundraising, researchers said seeing political ads over the study period didn’t increase donations by more than $2.50 per person, nor did it increase the probability of someone making a campaign contribution. The effects on contributions weren’t zero, but they also weren't much, and the study’s authors say it suggests that people who donate make contributions, just not through donation ads. Still, don’t expect campaigns to abandon paid platforms like Meta ads altogether if professionals still see value in reaching voters there.

“Digital ads let campaigns speak directly to voters with precision, not guesswork,” Sandra Cardenas, vice president of the Colibri Collective, a marketing agency that’s worked with clients like the Arizona and Georgia Democrats, tells me in an email, and it’s how campaigns can target and test winning messages.

“If you're not communicating with your supporters, misinformation will,” she says. “Digital ads ensure voters hear accurate information first, stay engaged, and turn out.”

Even if you block digital political ads, the fact they’re seen most often by the most partisan and engaged users means these people will just get their politics elsewhere. Blocking digital ads doesn’t prevent social media users from seeing political ads on other channels, nor from seeing other non-paid political content in their feeds. No platform is a silver bullet.

Kash Patel’s garish custom shoes weren’t customized by Nike

The FBI director’s style is a departure for a job that once was represented by a strict professionalism in dress.

When FBI Director Kash Patel arrived at a joint training session with the mixed martial arts league UFC over the weekend at the FBI Academy in Virginia, he was wearing a custom pair of Nike sneakers that past directors wouldn’t have dared to step out in.

Patel’s bespoke shoes were black, white, and yellow, and featured a number 9 on the side to signify that he is the bureau’s ninth director. A “K$H” logo on the tongue is Patel’s personal logo (FBI directors have personal logos now), and a skull from the Marvel character Punisher appeared across the back of the shoe, along with the FBI’s slogan “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity,” according to images that a source sent to William Turton, a reporter for ProPublica who covers federal law enforcement. However, Nike didn’t design or produce the customized embellishments, I can confirm.

A photo from a LinkedIn post that’s no longer public showed Patel color-coordinating his Nike shoes with a matching black-and-yellow hoodie and hat. The casual outfit was typical for Patel, who sold branded merch like hats and socks before taking his current job, and who showed up to the Winter Olympics in a team jersey, like one of the guys. It’s a stark departure from how his predecessors dressed, though. The FBI’s dress code, as set at the top of the organization, once symbolized strict professionalism. Now it screams podcaster-occupied government.

When former FBI Director Robert Mueller served under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, not only did he not stray from his uniform of dark suits, white shirts, and red or blue ties, but he would chide aides who ever wore shirts that were pink or blue, according to Garrett M. Graff, author of The Threat Matrix, about the FBI under Mueller.

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Trump’s getting architectural redesign recommendations he didn’t even ask for now

Could the White House columns get a makeover to match the other branches?

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After a former New York governor spent roughly $20 million in state funds on ads he starred in, lawmakers there passed a law banning the practice. Nearly 20 years later, two elected officials have found creative loopholes at a time when the lines between public service announcements and political ads funded by taxpayers in the U.S. can seem as blurred as ever.

New York’s former Republican Gov. George Pataki appeared in five ads paid for by city agencies in 2000 promoting things like children’s health care and energy conservation, the New York Times reported at the time. Seven years later, a public officers law was passed prohibiting “advertisements by elected government officials and candidates made with public funds” to make sure it couldn’t happen again. There appears to be a few ways around it, though.

New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Mamdani make appearances in new campaigns this year promoting her administration’s homebuilding agenda and his city’s pre-K enrollment, respectively. Hochul doesn’t directly appear in her ads, but the ads do point to a state-run site where she’s prominently featured, and a state Republican Assemblymember characterized it as skirting the intent of the law.

For Mamdani, whose spot promoting pre-K enrollment was shot to look like a classroom and appears on LinkNYC kiosks and on TaxiTV, the loophole is that no public funds are being spent to run the ads, as the city is given free monthly screen time on the kiosks and screens.

Public officials using their office to nab some screen time isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1972, then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan appeared in PSA for state’s Office of Traffic Safety alongside Joe Higgins, a character actor, who played an officer stopping him for a vehicle inspection. But it has been taken to new extremes.

Before she was fired earlier this month, outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem starred in an incredible $220 million worth of ads thanking President Donald Trump and calling on people in the country illegally to self deport. It was the most expensive political ad of 2025, Axios found, while two years ago in Florida, a pair of ballot measures that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis opposed about marijuana and abortion faced $50 million in state-funded ads and were defeated.

“There is a fine line between political promotion and policy promotion,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston who’s researched public opinion and political communication, tells me in an email. “Politicians walk it all the time.”

At the national level, the Hatch Act is meant to prohibit federal employees from using their jobs for political activities, though it’s rarely enforced and frequently ignored, he says. At the state level in New York, its Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government adds teeth to enforcement when it matters most. The commission can fine any public official who intentionally appears in a PSA within 90 days on an election, even if it’s about worthy causes like breast cancer screenings, disaster relief, or domestic violence awareness.

In Congress, taxpayer-funded ads are seemingly baked into the job. Franking, which allows lawmakers to send mail without postage, is meant to allow members of Congress to communicate with their constituents, but all too often, this communication appears overtly political and can give incumbents an advantage. Data from AdImpact found House members spent $5 million during the 2024 campaign cycle on broadcast and digital ads through their franking privilege, according to Punchbowl News.

Rottinghaus says to restore trust in government and help separate the public from the political, more robust monitoring would help, but he notes that these days, everything can feel political, so it’s hard to disentangle official policy promotions for the public good and overt political advertising.

“It’s possible the truth is in the eye of the beholder,” he says. “Neutrality is the watchword for policy promotion. Politicians should be careful to strain the politics out of the promotional process as much as possible.”

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix will bring street racing to Washington D.C.

The circuit looks like a video game.

The route for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, the first-ever street race on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., planned for August, was drawn to pass as many tourist attractions as possible in a part of town that’s dense with them.

In renderings, the route looks like something out of a race car arcade game, with cars whizzing past unmistakable U.S. monuments and Smithsonian museums. It’s an unlikely sight for a city whose standard speed limit is 20 mph (NNT IndyCar Series cars can reach speeds exceeding 200 miles per hour).

The 1.7-mile circuit opens with a front stretch along Pennsylvania Avenue by the U.S. Capitol and heads northwest past the National Gallery of Art and Canada’s U.S. Embassy where cars can get the most speed.

The circuit then takes a sharp left turn after the National Archives and cuts south through the National Mall at 7th Street, giving viewers there backdrops of race featuring the Capitol or the Washington Monument.

After passing between the Hirshhorn Museum and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, it then takes a left at Independence Avenue and heads back towards the Capitol. The pit lane is located on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“The circuit is unlike any other street race we’ve seen,” back-to-back Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden said in a statement after touring it Monday. “Racing through the heart of American history, with those amazing landmarks lining the course, is going to be incredibly powerful.”

The route was announced last week by NNT IndyCar Series, the open-wheel car racing body that runs the Indianapolis 500. The race is being put on in partnership with Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns the region’s NBA, NHL, and WNBA teams, and will be aired nationally live on Fox.

Open-wheel racing has found new audiences in the U.S. with the growing popularity of F1, while the Las Vegas Grand Prix, first held in 2023, showed the possibilities of street circuit in an iconic U.S. city with recognizable landmarks. Whereas the Las Vegas race was closed from public view, in D.C., the Freedom 250 Grand Prix will be open for anyone to watch, fitting for a race in which cars will zoom between Smithsonian museums famously known for their free admission.

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The bald eagle in the new dime was designed without olive branches for peace. Here’s what the artist says.

The limited-time dime will be replaced again next year.

A limited-time dime design that the U.S. Mint is releasing this year is drawing attention over a very symbolic omission. The Emerging Liberty dime, created for the U.S. semiquincentennial, shows a woman who personifies liberty on the heads side; on the tails side, there’s a bald eagle holding arrows in its talons for war, but it’s missing olive branches in its other talons for peace.

The coin design was announced late last year, but those missing olive branches seem especially glaring as the Iran war enters its third week.

During his presidency, Trump has used the Mint to make a statement about his priorities. The administration has been trying to put Trump’s visage on a commemorative $1 coin, despite a U.S. law barring living former and current presidents from appearing on coins. Meanwhile, the four-year American Women Quarters program ended last year and wasn’t renewed. Trump’s Mint also scrapped plans from the Biden administration for commemorative 2026 coin designs that would have depicted advancements in civil and voting rights in U.S. history. Instead, the coin designs will focus on the U.S. founding and the American Revolution.

The new Emerging Liberty dime will temporarily replace the classic Roosevelt dime showing Franklin D. Roosevelt on one side and a torch, olive branch, and oak branch on the other side that represent liberty, peace, and strength. The Roosevelt dime will return in 2027.

Critics say that the new dime design sends a pointed message, and given the administration’s track record, that’s a fair read of the situation. Trump hasn’t pursued a foreign policy of peace in his second term, despite campaign promises to do so. Still, he has been an effective marketer of the idea.

Trump used logos for initiatives like the so-called “Board of Peace” and “Shield of the Americas” summit, and after forcibly taking over the U.S. Institute of Peace last year, his State Department put his name on it. His push to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War is estimated to cost as much as $2 billion, and after after wearing a branded “USA” hat to the dignified transfer of six U.S. troops, his political action committee used a photo from the event in a fundraising email promising donors they’d get “private national security briefings.”

For its part, the Mint says the new dime was designed to symbolize the past, not the present. It said the eagle’s arrows represent “the American Revolution and the colonists’ fight for independence.” Eric David Custer, the Mint medallic artist who created the image, told WPSU Public Media that he left out the olive branches to represent the fact that colonists didn’t yet have peace at the time. The eagle’s talons are left open, though, to show that it’s waiting for peace, he said.

Custer’s past work includes designs for the 2022 Negro Leagues Baseball Commemorative Coin Program, 2023 American Women Quarters Program, and 2024 Harriet Tubman Commemorative Coin Program.

The Emerging Liberty dime is up against some tough optics, even with its intended meaning. Ditching the olive branch might be a story about the country’s founding, but doing so as the country embarks on a deeply unpopular war creates an irony that’s hard to ignore. The bald eagle on the Emerging Liberty dime might be waiting for peace, but in this moment, it seems primed for war.

This story was first published in Fast Company.

Have you seen this?

Somebody get this man some deodorant. Trump endorsed influencer Jake Paul for future office during an event in Kentucky last Wednesday where Paul appeared in a tan suit absolutely pitted out with the gnarliest pit stains I’ve ever seen. [Whig by Hunter Schwarz]

Traffic safety improvements frequently die by popular vote. It’s time to stop that. We don’t hold referendums on airplane safety. The same logic should apply to street design. [Fast Company]

Meryl Streep makes seven-figure donation to National Women’s History Museum. The museum has established the Meryl Streep Educator Award in honor of the actor’s gift. [Artnet News]

Hello, from Yello, a newsletter about political aesthetics, persuasion, and design by Hunter Schwarz. Subscribe:

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In his book Damaged People published late last year, author Joe McGinniss Jr. writes about what it was like growing up the son of a famous author.

The year before McGinniss was born, his dad published his first book, The Selling of the President 1968, about the image-making machine behind Richard Nixon’s comeback campaign to win the presidency. The book introduced readers to figures like Roger Ailes, Nixon’s campaign media advisor who would go on to become the CEO of Fox News, and it popularized for the first time the idea that consumer television advertising methods were being applied to a presidential campaign. The book was groundbreaking and popular, spending 31 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and it made its author a star.

“No one had examined television and the visual medium and its impact on politics,” Joe McGinnis Jr. tells me. “It had never been done before.”

Nixon’s 1968 campaign came following his loss to JFK in the 1960 race, which was shaped by television’s growing influence. To try again eight years later, Nixon structured his campaign around TV. He hosted a traveling televised question-and-answer show, let a documentary filmmaker produce his ads, and made a cameo on a sketch comedy show, paving the way for decades of presidential candidate appearances on Saturday Night Live.

McGinniss’s dad documented his view of it all from inside the campaign itself after convincing Nixon’s team to let him embed with them, and the era of showbiz politics the book helped define continues to this day even as TV viewing time has given way to more social media, streaming platforms, and user generated content. In future books, his dad would cover other politicians and true crime stories, and before his death in 2014, his publisher pitched him on a book that was never written about the rise of right-wing populism in Arizona and what it said about the country. “I think that would have been a brilliant book,” McGinnis says.

McGinniss calls his Damaged People “an inside look at the cost of passion and obsession and addiction” through a father figure who found fame at a young age and didn’t know how to process it. Ultimately, it tells a universal story about loving and learning from a flawed, human parent.

“He came from a very difficult childhood emotionally,” McGinniss says, but still, “he figured out a way to parent differently. Now, not well, but differently. Better than he had experienced.”

His dad passed down a love of politics after coming back from a reporting trip for Rolling Stone with campaign paraphernalia, and he once called in a favor to get Ailes to go to his son’s college class on race, ethnicity, and public policy at the liberal Swarthmore College where students did their best to try and stump and expose him. “My professor was just giddy,” McGinniss says. “He was like, ‘This is hilarious.’”

McGinniss writes about a father who put his writing first and got close to those he wrote about. For his dad’s final book, 2011’s The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, he moved next door to the book’s subject in Wasilla, Alaska, after a neighboring rental property became available. And for 1983’s Fatal Vision about Jeffrey MacDonald, a U.S. Army captain convicted of killing his wife and kids who claimed innocence and sought out his dad to write his story, his dad lived with MacDonald.

“He would go as far as he had to go to get that access, to get to the emotional truth of someone, to bring that to the reader” McGinniss says.

The cover of the first edition of The Selling of the President 1968 was designed by graphic designer Lawrence Ratzkin, who also did Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It spells out the title and author name in Futura and shows Nixon’s face on the front of a carton of cigarettes during a time when cigarette ads were legal on TV. Nixon would go on to sign a ban on cigarette ads on TV in 1970 and use Futura as his 1972 reelection campaign font.

The cigarette cover visually reinforces the takeaway from the book about the health hazards of modern marketing techniques and political TV ads to the body politic. It’s a message that could leave readers deeply disillusioned. Yet McGinniss describes his dad as a “cynical optimist.”

“He understood that everybody was sort of bought and paid for,” he says. “He understood that so much of it was just lowest-common-denominator communication and packaging.” Still, “he could definitely sniff out the authentic ones,” he says.

Nixon’s 1968 ads were well produced but misleading. They sold the candidate who would go on to escalate war as a peacemaker and presented a future president who would be named an unindicted co-conspirator as a bringer of law and order. They were paranoid and fearmongering. But Nixon’s decision to master the leading communications technology of his day obviously worked.

Political marketing is often dismissed as manipulative or a con game, but at its heart, it’s a promise to voters that a better future is possible. It’s how Ronald Reagan convinced America it was morning again and Barack Obama showed hope and change were within reach. That’s not to say it’s always true or fair. All too often it’s not.

At its best, though, political advertising and communications can reach voters where they are and speak truthfully with a message that resonates and inspires. The real lesson of The Selling of the President 1968 wasn’t that political ads are bad. It’s that political ads should be honest.

In its end-of-year spending, the DOD bought some new Herman Miller chairs

In the Defense Department’s defense, they need a lot of chairs, and Herman Miller has a long history with the federal government.

During an end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree last year, the Department of Defense, or DOD, dropped some dough on new Herman Miller furniture.

The DOD spent $60,719 for chairs from the Michigan furniture manufacturer last September, according to the report from the watchdog group Open The Books, including at least one $1,844 Aeron Chair, the brand’s popular, ergonomic, fabric-meshed office chair.

The Herman Miller purchases were just a small fraction of the record $93 billion detailed in the report, which was more than the DOD has spent in a single month since the group’s data goes back to 2007. For Herman Miller, its share was peanuts, considering the company is the longest holder of a federal government contract for office furniture, at more than 40 years (Herman Miller did not respond to a request for comment by publication).

The DOD goes on an annual spend-it-or-lose-it buying spree every fall no matter the president or party, Open The Books found over a decade of tracking it. The group called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rein in the use-it-or-lose-it approach the agency takes to its budget. Instead, 2025’s spending was a record.

While some line items highlighted in the report seem like clear attempts to run up expense reports before the time runs out, like $98,000 on a Steinway & Sons grand piano and $2 million on Alaskan king crab, office furniture purchases at least make practical sense.

With nearly 3 million military and civilian employees, the DOD is one of the largest employers in the U.S. That’s a lot of butts in seats, which means a big budget for chairs and other office furniture. Open The Books found furniture purchases spike 564% every September over the monthly average across the other 11 months of the year. Last year, the DOD spent $225.6 million on furniture in total.

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The next generation of emoji give me language for feelings I don’t even think there are even German words for yet

In the proposal for the new Distorted Face emoji, proponents say it fills a cartoonish gap in the emoji keyboard.

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President Donald Trump’s family company is preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. founding with merch bearing the president’s name.

DTTM Operations, a company that manages trademarks for Trump and the Trump Organization, filed trademarks Friday with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, for a “Trump 250” mark for use on stickers, tote bags, hats and apparel, drink ware, and golf balls, according to a filing first reported by NOTUS. A trademark was also filed for a secondary mark that shows five jets with contrails that says “Trump 250.”

The trademarks will give the Trump Store a chance to monetize the anniversary among Trump’s fans and collectors with merch, and it’s just the latest example of those in Trump’s orbit and administration centering him in this year’s celebrations.

Ephemera like federal building banners and the National Parks passes have pictured Trump alongside historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and late last year, the White House launched “Freedom 250,” a public-private initiative planning competing events to America250, the group established by Congress for the commemorations.

The potential for “Trump 250” merch shows an apparent shift in focus for one of Trump’s long-term revenue lines: branded apparel and products. Though Trump’s presidential campaign website donaldjtrump dot com now directs straight to his campaign shop, its digital storefront is stale. There’s still “Trump-Vance 2024” hats, shirts, and lawn signs for sale. An attempt to turn executive orders into $43 collectibles after Trump took office only made it market twice, for his EOs establishing DOGE and “Gulf of America Day, both now more than a year old.

Instead, the product innovation in Trump world these days is coming from the Trump Organization. Its online storefront not only includes the all-time bestseller, the “Make America Great Again” hat, but more. You can buy red “Trump 2028” and “Four More Years” hats on trumpstore dot com, but not Trump’s eponymous political website, plus there’s products like an $18 MAGA Hat pot holders, $38 “Kiss Me I Voted for Trump” tees, and branded golf gear. It not only sells Trumpism as a political movement, but as lifestyle, which is where Trump’s brand got its start anyways in hotels and casinos.

For the term-limited president, the decision comes down to business. His political merch sales have to be split among the RNC and his Vice President J.D. Vance’s Working for Ohio PAC. A MAGA hat or “Trump 250” shot glass sold at a Trump hotel gift shop doesn’t.

Trump might sell apparel and headwear that attempts to brand the country’s anniversary as his own or references a third unconstitutional term. But as his operation prioritizes his company’s bottom line before political fundraising, the sales strategy here seems like it’s more for a man staring down retirement than one gearing up for a fourth consecutive run.

When the cost of the Iran war touched down on U.S. soil for the first time, Trump wore a ball cap

Donald Trump dressing down.

The remains of six U.S. service members killed in Kuwait following the U.S. strike on Iran were returned home Sunday during a dignified transfer at the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Trump wore a branded hat for the occasion.

Dignified transfers are solemn movements for military members who lost their lives overseas. They involve flag-draped caskets for the fallen and a trained carry team of seven people who execute precise movements to bring the casket off an aircraft at Dover, home of the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations and America’s sole port mortuary.

For the nation’s commander-in-chief, it’s usually a sartorial moment for showing respect. On Sunday at Dover, though, Trump dressed the same way he does for a campaign rally, wearing a blue suit, a red tie, and a hat you can buy for $55 on his company’s website. The white baseball hat had “USA” embroidered in gold across the front and “45-47” on the side.

The reaction was swift and negative. “I know what Republicans would have said if Obama had done this,” former Republican National Committee communications director Doug Heye wrote on X. “Shameful.”

On Fox News, they didn’t even show the image, instead using footage of a previous dignified transfer where Trump was hatless. The network later apologized and claimed it was an accident.

It’s not as if Trump doesn’t know what to wear. He’s dressed appropriately for the occasion before, at a dignified transfer in December for two Iowa National Guardsmen and a U.S. civilian interpreter killed in Syria. On Sunday, his wife and most of his traveling party managed to dress without distraction.

First lady Melania Trump wore a long black coat and black gloves, Vance wore a dark suit and tie, and others in the administration also dressed conservatively, while military leaders wore full dress uniform. Only Trump and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who wore a white overcoat and big, round sunglasses, looked like they were dressed for a different occasion.

Trump wore his white “USA” hat last month when he announced the Iran war in a video statement. Since then, it has become a symbol for a war that is unpopular with the majority of Americans. Still, the hat has proven popular with his base. A note on his shop reads: “Due to high demand, this hat may take an additional 7-10 days to process and then ship.”

This story first appeared in Fast Company^..

Trump’s latest branded foreign policy initiative takes its name literally

Trump brands his battle against drug cartels in gold.

When Trump announced on March 5 that he was firing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, he said she would be named special envoy for “the Shield of the Americas,” which sounds like it could be an eighty-sixed Marvel movie but is, in fact, the unofficial name of a new multilateral initiative targeting drug trafficking and cartels. On March 7, it was brought to life in the form of a summit held in Doral, Florida.

The summit included representatives from some Latin American and Caribbean countries, and was held at Trump’s golf resort just days after he ordered U.S. troops into Ecuador as part of a joint narco-terrorism operation. It was also held about two months after the capture of then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. At the summit, Trump called the group a “military coalition to eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region”; 17 nations signed on, paving the way for the U.S. to do elsewhere what it did in Ecuador.

In a presidential proclamation about the initiative, Trump said the U.S. will “train and mobilize partner nation militaries to achieve the most effective fighting force necessary to dismantle cartels and their ability to export violence and pursue influence through organized intimidation.”

It seems Trump felt this new war on drugs, which is expanding throughout the Western hemisphere, needed a brand to match.

The logo is a red shield that frames a golden map of North and most of South America (its most Southern region is cut off by the initiative’s name, “Shield of the Americas,” in all caps). “Doral 2026” appears in metallic silver directly underneath the main wordmark, and angled red, white, and blue stripes sit directly below that. All the typography is set on a curved baseline, which is a common treatment for sports team logos. Gradients abound, although none share the same focal point.

While Trump’s domestic policy is getting a unified treatment under the National Design Studio, his foreign policy so far doesn’t have the same slick and standardized aesthetic. It does, however, follow a familiar theme of Trump’s personal brand: Make it gold.

A second example comes from Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, which he rolled out in January with a logo inspired by the United Nations emblem. Its visual identity borrows from the U.N. to give itself a look that aims to convey credibility, even though the group’s membership lacks longtime democratic allies and includes authoritarian regimes. But compared to the U.N.’s version, this map again has a gold, metallic wash that’s more visually indicative of Trumpian myopia than of long-standing democratic norms like governance through coalition.

The Shield of the Americas logo gives Trump’s hemispheric drug war its own visual brand, though the group’s name as it appears in the summit logo doesn’t actually show up anywhere in the president’s proclamation, which instead calls it “the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.”

Technically, “Shield of the Americas” was the name of the summit, but helpfully for Trump, that name lends itself to more literal and evocative graphic design than the mouthful that is “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.” While self-obvious, a graphic shield makes the idea of protection impossible to miss. All together, it’s exactly the sort of staging you’d expect from a reality-TV-producer-turned-president: flashy and direct.

With Shield of the Americas, Trump makes what’s actually an expansion of U.S. military force seem defensive, and gives his flagging foreign policy a newly gilded sheen.

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This story was first published in Fast Company.

Have you seen this?

Ex-POTUSes gather. Three Democratic former U.S. presidents spoke at Jesse Jackson’s funeral services in Chicago on Friday, and it won’t be the last time ex-POTUSes gather in the city this year knowing W. was invited to the just-announced Obama library opening later this summer. [Whig by Hunter Schwarz]

After a three year delay, Jan. 6 plaque honoring police officers installed at the Capitol. “On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6, 2021,” the plaque says. “Their heroism will never be forgotten.” [NBC Washington]

The most popular MAGA influencer you’ve never heard of is an A.I. foot fetish model. A fake soldier duped a million patriots for OnlyFans cash. It’s a sign of more worrying things to come. [Fast Company]

Texas state Rep. James Talarcio won Tuesday’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, but his campaign’s real mission is even more ambitious. “We are not just trying to win an election. We are trying to fundamentally change our politics,” Talarico said during his election night speech in South Austin, where he touted the more than 28,000 volunteers the campaign recruited and the impressive amount of funding it raised without taking money from corporate PACs.

It’s a message his campaign isn’t just saying with words, but with the letterforms that shape them, too. Talarcio won the primary with typography that’s intentionally imperfect.

Contemporary political typography tends toward fonts that are loud and bold, especially when it comes to campaign logos. Those used for candidates like President Donald Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris set their last names in all-caps, sans-serif typefaces that could be read clearly and at a distance, like an athlete’s surname on the back of a jersey. In contrast, the Talarico campaign’s visual identity looks a little rough around the edges.

The politician’s primary campaign slogan, “Talarico for Texas,” is far from precision set. It’s subtle at first, but upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that the letters’ strokes aren’t straight (most evident in the letter C, which has an especially uneven weight). And where another designer might have used clean and crisp Texas Lone Stars, this wordmark features rounded, ornamental asterisks to set apart “For Texas.”

Talarico’s black-and-white palette recalls the one used for former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat, but their approaches to typography are different. O’Rourke’s type was tall and condensed. Talarico’s looks handmade.

A secondary “Talarico for Texas” logo arranges the words within the shape of a letter T. It uses slightly different but still notably imperfect typography that draws a contrast to previous political branding standard bearers. Whereas then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s iconic, corporate-style “O” logo was geometric, balanced, and precisely designed, the “O” in “Talarico” is not at all perfectly round.

Talarico deploys that look at scale with Birdie, a handmade, vintage-print-inspired typeface by designer Taylor Penton, who says on his website that he designed the font to be “a little off.” Those slight imperfections have proven popular. Penton calls Birdie the “most-used, most-downloaded, and least-regretted font” he’s ever released. Neither Penton nor the Talarico campaign responded to a request for comment.

Overall, the effect of the typography gives Talarico’s campaign brand voice a sense of humanity. This type wasn’t whipped up by a computer, it suggests, but made with a human touch. It’s not unlike the hand-drawn logo New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign used last year, which was inspired by city street signs and Bollywood movie posters. In Talarico slogans like “It’s Time to Start Flipping Tables” — a Biblical reference about righteous moral outrage toward the sins of the Trump administration — the type style gives the letters life.

Talarico is running to change politics as we know it, and much like Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before him, he’s doing it with typography that doesn’t look like typical political branding. As campaigns have grown more digital, fonts that feel analog can help candidates communicate authenticity through type.

This story was first published in Fast Company.

A new license plate was designed to be easier to read. Toll cams keep misreading it.

Pennsylvania’s “Let Freedom Ring” plate used a slashed zero to distinguish the number from the letter O.

The numbers on a new patriotic Pennsylvania license plate were designed to be easy to read, but they’ve actually introduced a new point of confusion.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro announced the “Let Freedom Ring” specialty license plate last summer to promote the commonwealth’s role in America’s founding 250 years ago. The cream-colored plate depicts a dark blue Liberty Bell in the background, along with the previously mentioned slogan and commonwealth’s name in red. None of that is at issue, though: The problem is the style of the zero.

The number has a slash through its counter to prevent confusion with the letter O. Now, however, Pennsylvania toll cameras—not to mention locals—are confusing the zero for an eight.

The mix-ups are occurring even though the lettering follows industry best practices to differentiate characters that can sometimes look alike.

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Why Kristi Noem’s state-funded ad campaigns ended up dooming her

From South Dakota to DHS, Noem mastered the art of attention to her benefit. Then it became a liability.

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