Donald Trump’s next Washington vanity project will be going up sooner rather than later.

The president told Politico Wednesday that he expects construction to break ground on his highly teased “Triumphal Arc” (yes, “arc”) within the next two months.

“It hasn’t started yet. It starts sometime in the next two months. It’ll be great. Everyone loves it,” Trump said. “They love the ballroom too. But they love the Triumphal Arc.”

The “Arc de Trump” will be erected nearby the Arlington Bridge, opposite the Lincoln Memorial, according to the president. It will be modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the historic monument that commemorates those who fought and died for France during the country’s revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

Earlier this month, Trump claimed that early models for his arc were so evocative that his former speechwriter, Vince Haley, cried at their beauty.

“Vince came in one day, and his eyes were teeming. He couldn’t believe how beautiful. He saw it, and he wanted to do that,” the president said at a White House Christmas reception.

The president’s arc campaign is the latest in a string of high-profile projects that he has pitched ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. He’s already hard at work on a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the construction of which apparently required the complete demolition of the White House East Wing, despite the fact that Trump pledged months earlier that the project would be “near but not touching” the presidential mansion.

Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise; gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transforming it from Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite office into a marble-slathered eyesore; and swapped the historic Palm Room’s lush green tones and tall ferns for white paint and framed photos of plants.

Meanwhile, his administration is doing some demolition of their own, reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

The president is thrusting some of the blame for Minnesota’s day care scandal onto Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.

State officials have come under fire since right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley reported Friday that empty or abandoned day care facilities were still receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

The Department of Health and Human Services paused $185 million in aid to the state in light of the video, despite the fact that elements of Shirley’s report were incorrect or inadequately reported. At least two of the centers featured in Shirley’s video had been closed for several years, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families told NewsNation.

But the nitty gritty of the situation didn’t matter to Donald Trump, who baselessly asserted on Truth Social Wednesday that Omar was one of the scammers sucking up undue funds.

“Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90 percent, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia,” Trump posted. “‘Congresswoman’ Omar, an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers.”

More than a dozen schemes have popped up in Minnesota’s safety net programs in recent years, many of them involving members of the state’s Somali population. They haven’t gone unchecked: more than 90 Minnesotans were charged in federal fraud investigations that began under the Biden administration, at least 60 of which have resulted in convictions.

But Omar, the first Somali-American lawmaker and one of the first Muslim women in Congress, doesn’t have any connection to the fraudsters beyond her heritage.

Instead, it was clear that Trump was singularly interested in attacking Omar’s ethnicity, drudging up an old right-wing conspiracy that the lawmaker had married her brother.

“Did she really marry her brother?” Trump asked rhetorically in his post. “Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother to bring him into the U.S. The conspiracy first emerged during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.

Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. At the time, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother to be “absurd and offensive.”

President Donald Trump has vetoed a bill that would expand the territory of a small Native American tribe in the Everglades because they didn’t support his “Alligator Alcatraz” plans.

“Despite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected. My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding projects for special interests, especially those that are unaligned with my Administration’s policy of removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the country,” Trump wrote in a message to Congress Tuesday night.........

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