It's the accountability, stupid.

Donald Trump has figured out the scam: The lesson he’s learned from the ballroom debacle, where he tore down the West Wing’s East Wing and then started building a giant ballroom, with no approval from historical preservation boards and no appropriated funding from Congress — a project that he started out claiming would be paid for entirely (and inappropriately) by bribes from private funders, including from foreign sources, but that now will somehow cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars — is that if he claims that something is required for “national security” than courts will give him all the leeway and benefit-of-a-doubt necessary.

Scammers are gonna scam.

On Sunday morning, he announced in one of his typically incoherent Truth Social posts that the next item on his megalomaniacal authoritarian wish list, the 250-foot-tall Trump arch at the gates of Arlington National Cemetery, will be cover for what sounds like a 12-year-old’s idea of a fortress.

As he wrote: “At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch […] into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

Leaving aside how insane that sounds — why exactly is the US military in need of a facility to hold “large quantities of sniper ammunition” in downtown Washington D.C.!? — the scam that the Trump Arch is somehow necessary as a national security facility is consistent with a series of events over the last week, in both politics and business, that underscore to me the most basic stakes of this fall’s midterms elections.

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who feels like he should be increasingly referred to as “Future Unindicted Co-conspirator #1” in what I hope someday will be the massive trials stemming from the destruction and abuse of America’s monuments and historical legacy across Washington, posted earlier this month that excavation work for the arch will begin imminently — long before the court fight over its construction has played out. And the Interior Department indicated that construction of the Trump Arch will run for 20 hours a day, basically working around-the-clock in order to ensure that the arch is finished before Trump’s term expires, or at least that it’ll be so far along that it’ll become unstoppable.

And therein lies the problem: So much of what we’re living through right now, in both politics and business, from DOGE and the destruction of USAID to the pending construction of the Trump Arch to the destruction of the White House East Wing to the creation of the “large language models” powering the giant AI labs, feels like it’s driven by an explicit strategy of “we just do the crimes so quickly that we can’t be stopped and by the time the courts weigh in, they have no choice but to accept our crimes.”

By now, with Trump, the playbook is clear: As Talking Points Memo described it, “Trump has repeatedly shown his ability to create irreversible facts on the ground before courts can or do act.”

Now many fear that the Trump administration is going to do the same thing to the Kennedy Center, which it has single-handedly and maliciously destroyed, for spite and personal pique, and now Trump is threatening to demolish without permission.  

We’ve lived through time and again in the Trump era — USAID was destroyed illegally without permission over the course of a weekend, “fe[d] into the wood chipper” in Elon Musk’s famous parlance, and so sure, you can argue about it in courts for months thereafter, but the damage is done. The East Wing was torn down without permission, and then Trump has argued in court subsequently that construction on the replacement ballroom can’t halt because the hole in the ground is too dangerous for national security. Now the Supreme Court has said construction can continue while it considers whether he had permission to build it in the first place — does anyone really believe that the Supreme Court is going to decide, after the ballroom is built, that it has to be torn down?

And Trump is not the only one using this playbook: On Friday, documents emerged from some of the lawsuits challenging the intellectual property theft of the frontier AI labs that showed the companies knew exactly what they were doing in “hoovering up” nearly uncountable copyrighted and trademarked material without permission. As one Microsoft director wrote, “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” That same employee wrote that the models’ scanning was perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.”

In a separate exchange with OpenAI president Greg Brockman, an OpenAI engineer bragged about figuring out a “hack to get around [the] nytimes paywall” and scrape the news publisher without its permission. “Ah nice,” Brockman responded.

As Jason Kint wrote on X, “Blood boiling”! I agree.

It’s not like any of this was a mystery to anyone who was paying attention: Even back in 2024, OpenAI and Sam Altman told the British Parliament that it would be “impossible” to build these models without relying on appropriating copyrighted material.

And yet the frontier AI labs forged ahead, stealing vast amounts of copyrighted material to feed into their own systems, never asking for permission or even attempting to secure licensing deals at first, to build systems that now are destroying the livelihoods and business models of the very organizations and people victimized by that “largest theft of labor in human history.”

Now publishers and authors are left arguing in court over scraps and pennies left in the wake of the multi-trillion-dollar AI enterprise.

Nearly everywhere you look right now in American life, it feels like our accountability systems are collapsing.

Case-in-point: The Epstein Files.

Or take a look at the eye-popping scoop this morning from ProPublica: “Sen. Susan Collins helped steer millions in federal defense contracts to Navatek, whose CEO illegally funneled thousands of dollars to her campaign. The FBI sought to launch a probe and was eyeing Collins and other lawmakers. Then Trump gutted the unit in charge.”

Or take a look at yesterday’s announced settlement of the $111 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, where first the US government completely abdicated its responsibility to enforce antitrust provisions and then, second, under pressure from California governor Gavin Newsom and against the wishes of other state attorneys general who were part of the lawsuit, attorney general Rob Bonta settled the case without the core provisions he had said were his top priority. As Oliver Darcy wrote at Status, “Strikingly, the deal did not include any structural remedies addressing Bonta’s antitrust concerns, which he had repeatedly said would be necessary for a settlement to happen.”

Or look at last month’s Wall Street Journal reporting about the Trump administration blocked the Justice Department from fighting Live Nation. Or the Trump administration’s neutering of inspectors general watchdogs.

Or how we seem to be living amid an epidemic of insider trading, both on the stock market and betting sites, based on foreknowledge of the Trump administration’s actions — including insider betting on the Iran war! And that Trump is now explicitly charging $100,000-a-month for “early access” to his market-moving decisions.

It’s not hard to experience all of this in modern society and see so much of the public frustration and political dissatisfaction in American life and conclude that there’s a simple message that would resonate with voters this fall, a 2026 version of James Carville’s big idea from the 1992 campaign: It’s the accountability, stupid.

The rich and the powerful, from the President to Silicon Valley, can’t continue to act with impunity everywhere, without consequences, without remorse, without accountability. Laws exist for a reason.

Sure, cost-of-living and gas prices matter, but part and parcel of that message is something more fundamentally American too: Restoring a sense of fair play. Regular Americans can sense the unfairness of our life and system right now — that if you’re rich enough and brazen enough, you can just do your crimes, often it seems quite openly and plainly, and our system is incapable of mustering a meaningful response. Americans aren’t stupid. They can sense that we’re living in a golden age of criminality. Collectively, we understand we’re the “marks,” the victims and suckers, of the Trump administration’s schemes, frauds, crimes, and grifts.

Democracies and economies can’t function like this — not for long, at least, before they collapse. Any electoral victories this fall on Capitol Hill — and in the White House in 2028 — needs to come with a long, long, long series of consequences.

We need to return to punishing people who do obvious crimes. Make Crimes Criminal Again.

GMG