Trump really has egg on his face due to the mess he has made of the Lincoln Pool. He seems so acutely embarrassed by this fiasco that he has set his attack dogs in the weaponized (in)justice department to arrest people whom he alleges have vandalized the pool and caused the coating to peel off and algae to proliferate. He has made extraordinarily detailed claims that they cut through the paint layer with sharp items.

“The 350 foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors, is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350 foot length. It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night, to create such a condition. Likewise, the small area at the bottom of the Pool was cut and powerfully lifted off the surface leaving very jagged, uneven edges.”

No evidence has been produced in support of this claim of vandalism even though the pool is in a very public space and monitored 24/7/365 by security cameras so if anybody did try to ‘vandalize’ it, or even just dip their hands in the water, the evidence would be easy to produce. The fact that we have not seen any is a sign that the vandalism charge may have been cooked up to take attention away from the mess that Trump himself has created.

[UPDATE: For the first time, a named top official at the National Park Service has made the charge in court, although his “statement does not say when exactly the damage occurred or whether it was a suspected case of vandalism and does not identify anyone who might have been involved.”]
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Owen Jones has no patience with those who are praising resigning UK prime minister Keir Starmer as a principled person of integrity who was unlucky and undone by circumstances.

No. This was not a decent man defeated by circumstance, a man of duty and integrity who was simply in the wrong job, a principled leader undone by events. This was an unprincipled politician who abandoned promises with as much enthusiasm as he trousered freebies from rich donors.
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Starmer was a frontman for a Labour-right operation whose purpose was clear: persuade a leftwing membership to hand the party back to those who despised everything it had just stood for. 
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To win over the membership, Starmer’s campaign promised tax hikes for the top 5%, public ownership of utilities, abolition of tuition fees, “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity”, human rights “at the heart of foreign policy”, and the abolition of the House of Lords. In power, Starmer has either failed to deliver on these promises or done the opposite.

Soon after being elected leader, Starmer suspended his predecessor from the party before finally expelling him in 2023, claiming that he and Corbyn had never been friends and distancing himself from his previous leadership pledges. This was deceit, not pragmatism. When he stood for leader, Starmer told the BBC that nationalisation of utilities was a pledge that would be in the next Labour manifesto. The following year, he denied ever saying this, and told the BBC: “I never made a commitment to nationalisation, I made a commitment to common ownership.”

The party would be a “broad church”, Starmer had promised. Instead, he suspended Labour MPs or prevented candidates from running for making comments critical of the state of Israel, and opposing the two-child benefit cap. His machine blocked leftwingers from standing, such as Faiza Shaheen and Lauren Townsend.
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As for his claim that he took over a Labour party that was “morally bankrupt”, he was the human rights lawyer who said that Israel had a right to cut off power and water to Gaza.
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His government broke promise after promise. Its housebuilding revolution failed to materialise. “No return to austerity” gave way to departmental squeezes. International aid was gutted. Meanwhile, Labour’s internal authoritarianism was exported to the country. Thousands were arrested for holding placards after anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action were proscribed as terrorists on the same legal footing as Islamic State.
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Starmer believed in little other than his own advancement, a trait hardly uncommon among Labour MPs. The danger is that his dismal, disreputable premiership laid the foundations for the hard-right agenda of Nigel Farage. We will soon discover whether the next occupant of No 10, Andy Burnham, believes the answer is simply to paint a northern, charismatic gloss over a failed agenda. If he fails to offer a decisive break from this useless travesty of a government then he, too, will sink.

Yes.

Meanwhile Burnham’s pick for chief of staff is not good sign and seems to indicate that he will try and continue the Blair-Starmer policies of catering to the right. If that turns out to be the case, Labour is doomed and we can expect Reform to win the next election and Nigel Farage to be the next prime minister.

I do not feel any sympathy for the collapse of Keir Starmer’s premiership. Apart from his abandoning his earlier pledges to help ordinary people and instead throwing them under the bus, one of his most despicable acts as prime minister was to declare war on the group Palestine Action. The group says that it is “committed to ending global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime” and was protesting Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, but Starmer’s government pushed through parliament a law branding it as a terrorist group.

Palestine Action, which was formally proscribed by the UK last July, is a British protest group founded six years ago. It says it uses “disruptive tactics” to target “corporate enablers” and companies involved in the manufacture of weapons for Israel, such as Israeli group Elbit Systems, Italian aerospace company Leonardo, French multinational Thales and Teledyne from the United States. The group has targeted British facilities linked to those companies.
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As widely expected, Keir Starmer resigned as UK’s prime minister and it is widely expected that newly minted MP Andy Burnham will become party leader and thus prime minister around September when the formal leadership process is completed. Burnham will then have about three years in office to try and turn around Labour’s fortunes before the next general election is due. The question is whether Burnham will take the lesson’s of Starmer’s fall seriously enough to drastically change course.

Starmer’s biggest problem was that he gained the Labour Party leadership in 2020 with his 10 pledges that outlined a progressive agenda and then, after winning the leadership, systematically abandoned them, as this document by disappointed supporters carefully details. This analysis compares his original pledges with his platform for the 2024 election and finds a significant shift towards neoliberalism.
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I have to admit that I am throughly enjoying the debacle over the Lincoln Pool. It shows the utter incompetence and grift of the Trump administration and how his grandiose schemes fall apart. I can enjoy this one because unlike his other debacles, this one has not cost lives nor injuries nor harm to ordinary people. True, it is a waste of taxpayer money but on a much smaller scale than his other colossal wastes and (as far as we know) it has not gone into his own pockets like his other grifts, though I would not be surprised to learn that he or his family got a kickback from the contractor, because we know that no amount of money is too small for him to try and get his greedy hands on it. What is best about this fiasco is that it cannot be easily covered up, like the way he had a tarp cover the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center. The pool in all its algae-infested green glory is visible to everyone.

It is not just the algae in the pool turning it green that is causing problems. It appears that the blue paint is peeling off like a layer of plastic. In their attempts to suppress information, they even arrested some random guy who merely tried to touch the peeling paint.
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The reviews are coming in for Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran and the general consensus seems to be that it was largely a capitulation on his part, a grudging recognition that the grand aims that he outlined at the beginning of his and Israel’s war could not be realized with force and that he had to scale back his goals, even to achieving less than what had been in the previous JCPOA that was signed in 2015 and that he threw out. As Patrick Wintour, the Guardian‘s diplomatic editor, writes:

Only a man with an unparalleled ignorance of history such as Donald Trump would have signed America’s peace treaty with Iran at Versailles, the byword for national humiliation. And only a man with an impish sense of humour such as Emmanuel Macron would have suggested it.

It is easy to cast Trump in the role of the humiliated and hurt German Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau. The treaty of Versailles after all was based on 14 points, just as the memorandum of understanding has 14 clauses.

But the memorandum is not a full-scale surrender document; it is an admission that America could not achieve what it sought through war.

If the memorandum, taken with Trump’s remarks at his hour-long press conference at the G7, is compared with the final document the Americans tabled in 2025, it is possible to see how far the US has been forced to retreat. Red line after red line has been erased.

The 2025 document was tabled by the US immediately before Israel – with US support – began the 12-day war culminating in the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. Under its terms, Iran would have had no domestic enrichment capabilities beyond the limited enrichment for medical and agricultural needs; all nuclear supply would be imported from outside Iran; all enriched uranium stockpiles would be shipped out of Iran immediately upon signing the agreement; all enriched stockpile material would be down-blended to 3.67%; Iran would not build any new enrichment facilities; and Iran would dismantle all programmes capable of uranium conversion. Instead, a consortium including Iran, the US and the Gulf states would undertake enrichment outside Iran.

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