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A federal judge just blocked construction of Donald Trump’s 250-foot arch just hours after a federal panel packed with his own appointees approved it. Trump’s other vanity projects across Washington are also likely done after the election of Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is now warning that their plans to build more data centers will now be much more difficult after the midterms. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla have both lost more than $450 billion in market value since Election Day.
Before the news, independent media needs your support. As you’ll read below, the tech billionaires are in full-on panic mode after the election, which is being widely viewed as a referendum on data centers and the AI industry. All the money they were spending on the midterms will now almost certainly be spent on influencing public opinion. That means they’ll be flooding every news outlet and social media platform with disinformation. And that means independent media outlets that don’t take their money will be a critical resource for people who want the real truth.
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Triumphal arches have a long history, and it’s mostly a history of emperors. Rome built them to celebrate conquering generals, and Napoleon built one in Paris to celebrate himself. The founders of this country rejected that kind of monarchical vanity, but Donald Trump apparently missed that chapter.
Late Thursday night, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan temporarily blocked the administration from building Trump’s planned arch on Memorial Circle, which sits between Arlington Memorial Bridge and Arlington National Cemetery. Her order bars any construction, excavation, demolition, or road closures connected to the project for two weeks.
The ruling came shortly after the National Capital Planning Commission approved the arch on an 8-4 vote. The administration had said work could start almost immediately after that meeting.
The challenge came from the attorneys general of Washington, D.C. and Virginia, who sued on October 31. They argue the arch violates environmental and historic preservation laws, would snarl traffic for commuters and emergency responders at a key crossing between the two jurisdictions, and would block historic views between monuments. Chutkan combined their case with an earlier lawsuit from a group of Vietnam War veterans.
The Justice Department has claimed a century-old law authorizing two columns near the bridge gives Trump the power to build his arch. It also tried to argue the arch would support national security, which Chutkan found unconvincing. In her order, she wrote that the government’s “belated and unsupported assertion” of national security benefits doesn’t change her analysis.
This is the latest in a string of court losses for Trump’s efforts to remake the capital in his image, including rulings against renaming the Kennedy Center after himself and against his sprawling White House ballroom, though the Supreme Court is letting ballroom construction continue for now.
In 1789 a Senate committee wanted to call George Washington “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties,” and the House refused to go along, so the country settled on plain old “Mr. President.” That argument was settled before the ink on the Constitution was dry, and it shouldn’t take a federal judge to remind the executive branch that we don’t build monuments to men who still hold the office.
Those court fights are about to get some serious backup, too. With Democrats taking control of both chambers of Congress, Trump’s plans to physically reshape Washington are likely to hit far more roadblocks than they did during the first two years of his second term.
Trump doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. In his first public appearance after voters repudiated his agenda, he gave a tour of the under-construction ballroom and talked about columns, steel beams, and Corinthian designs.
California Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, has spent the past year investigating these projects. In a letter seeking support for the committee chairmanship, Huffman said Democrats had pushed back against efforts to turn treasured public spaces into gaudy tributes to Trump, and promised to use the committee’s full investigative power to uncover wrongdoing.
Virginia Rep. Don Beyer has also been a vocal critic. His spokesman, Aaron Fritschner, pointed out that Democrats will control the appropriations process starting January 3, which gives them real leverage over funding. Fritschner also said the new majority will pull back the power that House Speaker Mike Johnson was willing to hand over to the White House.
Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, which represents plaintiffs in several of these lawsuits, said the American people now have a tool beyond the courts. She said she expects Congress to fulfill its constitutional duty of checking executive overreach, including through hearings on how these projects are being funded.
The costs are still murky. The seawall alone at the East Potomac golf course Trump wants to remake could exceed $300 million, and a federal judge is now opening a formal inquiry into whether administration lawyers crossed ethical lines defending that project.
The last time a president decided the Treasury was his to spend or withhold as he pleased, Congress answered Richard Nixon with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and took the purse back. The power of the purse isn’t a favor the House does for the White House, it’s the reason there’s a House in the first place, and come January 3 it’s back in the hands of people who ran on using it.
The midterms are also rattling Silicon Valley. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal tech conference Wednesday, Meta president Dina Powell McCormick admitted that Democratic wins will make it a lot harder for companies to build data centers.
Data centers were very much on the ballot this year, as communities pushed back against facilities that drain water supplies and drive up electricity bills. Powell McCormick acknowledged the industry hasn’t done a good enough job explaining what it calls the benefits of these projects, and said the backlash is tied to how people feel about AI in general.
She described data centers as the visible face of AI, the thing people can point to and say they don’t want in their community. Meta currently has data centers in 23 states, with five of them, including one in Texas, planned at a gigawatt or more.
Going forward, she said, projects will face more review and be weighed against whether local residents actually want them. Meta’s pitch is that it pays for its own electricity, steers tax surpluses toward teachers and first responders, and hires locally. Whether voters buy that is another question.
Farmers in the 1870s faced the same thing with the railroads and the grain elevators, private monopolies that showed up uninvited, set whatever price they wanted, and called it progress. The Supreme Court answered them in Munn v. Illinois, ruling that when a business is clothed with a public interest the public gets a say in how it runs, and there’s nothing more public than the water people drink and the electricity that heats their homes.
Tell Congress: pass the AI Data Center Moratorium Act!
And nobody’s having a worse week than Elon Musk. Shares of SpaceX and Tesla dropped by roughly 9% and 11% on Thursday, as investors worried about new congressional investigations and tougher regulation. By the close of business, the two companies had lost about $456 billion in combined market value since Tuesday.
Musk was the single biggest donor to Republican candidates and causes this cycle, spending more than $470 million, according to the Financial Times. Most of the candidates he backed lost anyway. In Texas, home to both Tesla and SpaceX headquarters, Democrats James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa defeated longtime Musk allies Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott in the Senate and governor’s races.
Hinojosa campaigned on a moratorium on new data center approvals until the legislature passes stronger protections on water, electricity costs, and local control. That’s a problem for Musk, whose companies are planning a massive data center and semiconductor complex called Terafab in Grimes County, plus a supercomputer at SpaceX’s Starbase facility. Deutsche Bank analysts warned that SpaceX’s Texas computing plans could now face delays and higher costs.
There’s more. According to CNN, Musk and SpaceX have been told to preserve records about restrictions placed on a military version of Starlink in Ukraine, restrictions that hampered the country’s defense against Russian attacks. Musk is still the richest man on Earth, but his fortune has slipped below $800 billion.
Franklin Roosevelt had a name for men like this in 1936. He called them economic royalists, people who figured that owning the economy entitled them to own the government too, and that fall he told a packed Madison Square Garden that they were unanimous in their hatred of him and he welcomed it. Texas voters just sent the richest man alive the same message, and Wall Street did the arithmetic before he did.
Here’s the truth: stories about Trump’s vanity projects being put on ice, and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk realizing they can no longer lord over Americans and ram data centers through against the will of the people are the kinds of stories the billionaire-owned cable networks and newspapers refuse to cover. But because Raw America isn’t bossed around by an oligarch with a Mar-a-Lago membership, we can bring these stories directly to your inbox every day.
I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent journalism. If you haven’t yet, please be sure to hit the ❤️ and tap the restack button. Those two clicks are what help us reach the people who really need these stories.