On the menu today: How President Trump’s face is now plastered all over federal buildings in Washington, D.C.; a strange omission in the backgrounds of Iran deal negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff; the U.S. starts to put money in the pockets of the mullahs; the White House tells you to trust Al Jazeera; and an unnerving report about how advanced Iranian military drones have become. Read on.

Trumpington, D.C.

On the way to the Washington studio of CNN yesterday morning, I passed by the U.S. Department of Labor building at 200 Constitution Avenue, which currently has a pair of giant banners adorning it — one of former President Teddy Roosevelt, who former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer inducted into the Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor back in September.

(I’ll bet you didn’t know that the U.S. Department of Labor has a “Hall of Honor.” Its members include Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, and Helen Keller. It also includes the recently disgraced alleged sex abuser Cesar Chavez, although the webpage for his entry no longer works.)

The other massive banner on the Department of Labor building is of our current president, Donald Trump. Last year, a department spokesman said the banner cost taxpayers about $6,000. (If you find that kind of frivolous expense sobering, that may be the only part of Chavez-DeRemer’s time as secretary that was.) At an August cabinet meeting, Chavez-DeRemer said, “Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.”

To clarify, the giant Trump banner on the Labor Department building is different from the large banner of Trump’s face on the U.S. Department of Justice building at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue. No estimate for the cost of creating and installing that banner has been released.

This is separate from the large banner with Trump’s face that was put up on the U.S. Department of Agriculture building in May 2025 and taken down by August. According to FOIA requests filed by Bloomberg News, the banners and the supplies used to hang them cost taxpayers a total of $16,400.

Which is different from the large posters declaring “Thank you, President Trump” being put up at sites where the National Park Service is improving facilities, such as Columbus Circle and Logan Circle.

This is separate from the as-yet-uncompleted plan to put a large banner on the Hubert Humphrey building, headquarters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with the slogan, “Make America Healthy Again.” According to public records, “The contract for these banners was awarded August 6, 2025, to a small business in Texas with no apparent expertise or experience producing large banners. The contract award obligated $33,726.00.”

Note that Congress has never appropriated a single dime for these agencies to create banners featuring the president. In fact, the 2024 appropriations bill specifically included the provision, “No part of any appropriation contained in this Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by the Congress.”

This is different from the decision to put President Trump’s face on National Parks passes; the U.S. National Park Service announced that if you put a sticker over Trump’s face, the pass is no longer valid.

This is separate from the renaming of the U.S. Institute of Peace after Donald Trump. Or the adding of Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, which was recently removed.

This is separate from the new Trump passports. Or the U.S Mint’s new commemorative gold coin, which may be using gold from a Colombian mine controlled by a drug cartel. Or the president’s signature adorning U.S. currency for the first time.

Or the “Trump accounts.” Or the “Trump Gold Card” U.S. residency visa. Or the “TrumpRx” program to help people purchase prescription medication.

Or the Trump-class battleship.

Or the U.S. Air Force’s sixth-generation fighter, the F-47, named so because Trump is the 47th president.

Call it Orwellian, call it something out of North Korea, call it whatever you want, but massive posters of the leader’s face all over government buildings and seemingly every citizen interaction with the federal government is not American.

Yes, there are a lot of things in this country named after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And yes, some of these things were named after Washington while he was still alive: the capital city, what became known as Washington & Lee University, Fort Washington in New York, the locality of Washington, N.C., among a few others. But then again, he had just beaten the British Empire. Washington got his love from the country the way Smith Barney made their money: He earned it.

Almost nothing was named after Abraham Lincoln while he was still alive. One exception was the town of Lincoln, Ill., named so before he became president. Apparently, Lincoln initially discouraged the idea, purportedly stating, “Nothing bearing the name of Lincoln ever amounted to much.”

I notice the president didn’t want his face on IRS tax forms.

Literal Amateur Hour in the Iran Negotiations

A fun reminder for those who disputed yesterday’s edition of the newsletter: Neither Jared Kushner nor Steve Witkoff have a traditional security clearance for handling classified information or have passed a traditional background check for a top U.S. government position:

The announcement put Kushner in the same role as Steve Witkoff, who filed a public financial disclosure report after being appointed as a special envoy. Recently, Kushner has played a significant diplomatic role addressing Trump’s strikes on Iran and the ensuing war. Given Kushner’s significant power to set foreign policy — including on ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, the public urgently needs clarity on his role and his financial entanglements.

Kushner’s previous unofficial role raised substantial conflict of interest concerns given Kushner’s business and investments in the very countries and conflicts that he had been working on — and because Kushner had no defined position, he was not subject to any ethics laws, security clearance process or Senate confirmation. [Emphasis added.]

Back in 2017, “Kushner’s application for a top-secret clearance was rejected by two career White House security specialists after an FBI background check raised concerns about potential foreign influence on him.” That decision was overruled by the White House.

My point is not that Kushner and Witkoff are compromised, although many would argue that if you or members of your family have lucrative business deals with foreign states, you should not simultaneously play a role in U.S. foreign policy with those states. The point is that Kushner and Witkoff went into these negotiations with little or no experience or expertise regarding Iran and came away with a deal that was almost entirely U.S. concessions to Iran in exchange for promises.

The U.S. government has already taken steps to put money back into the mullahs’ pockets:

The U.S. Treasury on Monday issued a wide-ranging 60-day exemption allowing Iran to produce and sell crude oil, petrochemical and petroleum products in U.S. dollars through Aug. 21.

Under the so-called General License X, vessels and entities previously subject to U.S. sanctions are also cleared for transactions. The waiver also theoretically reopens the door to U.S. imports of Iranian crude, a trade which has effectively collapsed since the 1990s under the weight of heavy sanctions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In exchange, have the Iranians opened the Strait of Hormuz? Sort of; there are more ships transiting the strait than during the war, but the risk of mines has made the safe routes narrower:

The strait’s central route, long used by commercial ships, is laden with mines, forcing companies to take one of two alternative paths: the southern route close to the Omani coast or the northern route close to the Iranian shoreline.

From Saturday through Monday, 109 vessels passed through the strait, the largest three-day number since the war started in late February, according to Kpler, a global maritime data firm. Traffic is a fraction of the more than 130 vessels that transited the strait every day before the start of the war. A backlog of 500 to 600 ships remained, according to the International Maritime Organization.

Yesterday, one of the official White House accounts on X, RapidResponse47, re-posted Al Jazeera, calling its interview with Qatar’s PM Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani “the real story from people actually in the room,” in contrast to “a lot of biased media outlets and Democrats were pushing a fake narrative.”

The only good news — only somewhat sarcastic — is that both sides have already violated the memorandum of understanding, so in theory, the U.S. can withdraw from this terrible deal whenever it wants.

Drone Superiority Is Coming Very Soon . . . or Perhaps Is Already Here

Back on June 10, this newsletter noted that the rear admiral in that early scene in Top Gun: Maverick is correct that the era of manned combat aircraft is coming to an end — if not completely, then largely and gradually. “Unmanned aircraft, seacraft, and ground drones are reaching the point where they can do everything human beings do, without risk to life and limb, and without the possibility of flag-draped caskets. It doesn’t matter whether anyone likes or dislikes this development; it’s happening either way.”

This morning, CNN reports:

A US fighter jet pilot rescued by special forces after being shot down over Iran in April described a shocking sight before ejecting from his aircraft: multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving as one, in a formation that resembled a jellyfish, according to four sources familiar with the matter.

The account, which has not been previously reported, was shared by the F-15 pilot with intelligence officials during a debriefing after the incident. It immediately set off a firestorm of debate within the US intelligence community that has yet to be resolved.

If the airman really saw what he described — a formation moving in unison — it would be an alarming advance in Iranian drone capabilities.

“Multiple drones interconnected and moving as one with smaller drones below the bigger drones like legs,” one of the sources familiar with the pilot’s witness account told CNN. “Real alien sh*t.” . . .

The U.S. memorandum of understanding with Iran does not put any limits on Iranian drone programs.

And anything the Iranian military can do, the Chinese military can probably do better.

The PLA is attempting to develop a flying aircraft carrier drone that can deploy “88 ‘Xuan Nu’ autonomous fighter drones meant to operate at the upper edges of the atmosphere.”

ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, I look at the foreign World Cup soccer tourists, and how they’re helping us remember all the myriad ways that the United States is unique and wonderful. As you might expect, there are commenters over there who are very upset that I did not write about gun violence in America.