Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. If you’re watching this on Substack right now, help us break through the algorithm by tapping the ❤️ and restack buttons. That’s how we make sure independent journalism reaches the most people.
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.
This is why we need you. Because we don’t have an oligarch propping us up, we’re counting on readers who believe in independent media to chip in so we can cover the stories the billionaires won’t. A paying subscription amounts to just 22 cents a day. That’s less than a cup of coffee a week. Will you step up today to keep independent journalism alive?
Judge Halts Construction of Trump’s Arch After Panel of Trump Appointees Approved It
Let’s talk about triumphal arches. Roman emperors built them to celebrate conquering generals returning home from war. Napoleon built one in Paris to honor himself. America’s founders rightly rejected that kind of monarchical vanity after winning a war against a king. Apparently, Donald Trump slept through that part of history class.
On Thursday, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) — which is packed full of Trump appointees — green-lit construction of the proposed arch on Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery by a vote of 8-4 after a hearing to discuss it. The Trump administration pledged that work on the arch would start almost immediately after the hearing.
But on Thursday night, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — an appointee of former President Barack Obama — temporarily blocked construction despite the NCPC’s ruling. Her order officially bars any and all construction, excavation, demolition and road closures tied to the arch for at least two weeks while a legal challenge plays out.
That legal challenge was filed by Democratic attorneys general from both Washington, D.C. and Virginia, who sued on Halloween. They argue the arch is in violation of several environmental and historic preservation laws, would impede traffic for commuters and emergency responders at a major chokepoint between two jurisdictions and would block views between monuments. Chutkan combined their lawsuit with litigation filed by a group of Vietnam War veterans.
Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has claimed it has the right to build the arch under century-old law authorizing two columns near the Arlington Memorial Bridge. It also maintained that the arch was necessary for national security purposes, though Chutkan indicated she was unconvinced by that argument. In the order Chutkan handed down last night, the judge wrote that the administration’s “belated and unsupported assertion” of national security benefits had no impact on her decision.
This is merely the latest loss for Trump in a string of consecutive court defeats for Trump’s vanity projects in D.C. That includes courts striking down his attempt to rename the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself and against his $400 million White House ballroom (though the Supreme Court is allowing ballroom construction to move forward for now).
Back in 1789, a Senate committee wanted to officially refer to President George Washington “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties.” The House thankfully refused to go along with that, so the newly founded country decided to settle on simply calling him “Mr. President.” That argument was settled even before the ink on the Constitution was dry. It shouldn’t take a federal judge to remind the White House that in America, we don’t build monuments to men who are still holding office.
Trump’s Vanity Projects in DC Now in Limbo After Democrats Retake Congress
Court battles like the one that just played out over the arch are now about to get some serious backup in Congress. With Democrats now preparing to take over both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in January, the president’s hopes to remake the nation’s capital in his image are likely to hit quite a few more roadblocks compared to when Republicans were in charge of the legislative branch.
So far, it appears that Trump is plowing ahead undeterred. In his first public appearance after his party suffered historic losses at the polls, the president gave the press a tour of the White House ballroom construction and talked in depth about columns and steel beams. As reporters asked him about the new Democratic majorities, Trump would only say: “watch this beam go up.”
Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman of California, who will chair the House Natural Resources Committee in January, has spent more than a year investigating Trump’s vanity projects. In a letter asking members to officially get behind his bid for the chairmanship of the committee that oversees historical sites in D.C., Huffman said Democrats have been steadily pushing back against the president’s attempts to turn treasured public spaces into tacky tributes to himself. He also promised to use the committee’s gavel to investigative all wrongdoing.
Democratic Congressman Don Beyer of Virginia has also been a vocal critic of Trump’s various D.C. construction projects. Spokesman Aaron Fritschner observed out that Democrats will officially control the federal appropriations process in 2027, giving them actual leverage over what funds are spent on Trump’s projects. Fritschner also declared the new Democratic majority will reclaim the Constitutional power of the purse that outgoing House Speaker Mike Johnson ceded to the president.
Democracy Forward CEO Skye Perryman (who Raw America interviewed in June), whose group is representing several plaintiffs in those lawsuits, said that after the election, the American public now has a tool beyond the courts. She added that she expects Congress will now get back to its job of checking the executive branch, including by conducting public hearings on how these projects are actually being funded.
The costs still remain relatively unknown. The seawall alone at the East Potomac golf course Trump is aiming to renovate could cost more than $300 million. A federal judge in D.C. is now opening a formal investigation into whether White House attorneys violated ethics rules in defending the project.
The last time a president declared the Treasury was his own personal slush fund was Richard Nixon. Congress responded to executive overreach then by passing the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and took back the power of the purse. Spending power is the reason we have a legislature as spelled out in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. Come January 3, it’ll finally be back in the hands of people who ran on actually using it.
Meta Warns Data Center Development Now Much Harder After Midterms
Democrats’ midterm rout is also reverberating in Silicon Valley. While addressing a Wall Street Journal tech conference this week, Meta president Dina Powell McCormick admitted that the new Democratic majorities will make data center construction much more difficult across the country.
Data centers were on the ballot this year across the country, and as Raw America reported this week, data center-related initiatives were defeated in 38 of 40 races. Communities in multiple states pushed back loudly against facilities reviled for drain local freshwater resources and driving up residents’ electricity bills. Powell McCormick acknowledged the AI industry has done an insufficient job communicating what it believes are the benefits of those projects, and said the backlash to data centers is deeply linked to how people feel about artificial intellience in general.
She told attendees that data centers are the visible face of the AI industry, and have become a physical symbol people can point to and say they don’t want built in their backyard. Meta is currently operating data centers in 23 states, with five of them — including one in Texas — planned at a gigawatt or more (enough to power a major city).
Meta’s president said that going forward, data center projects will face far more public input and will depend on whether local residents actually want them built. The company is pitching its facilities to voters by promising to pay for their own electricity, putting property tax surpluses toward funding for teachers and first responders, and to hire maintenance staff locally. Though whether voters will buy that is another question entirely.
Farmers in the 1870s had the same complaints with the railroads and the grain elevators. These were built by private monopolies that showed up without invitation, set whatever prices they wanted and chalked it all up to the progress of man. The Supreme Court responded forcefully in the Munn v. Illinois case, ruling that when a business is insisting on operating in the public interest, the public gets a say in how it runs. There’s nothing more public than the water we drink and the electricity that powers our homes.
Tell Congress: pass the AI Data Center Moratorium Act!
Elon Musk’s Companies Lose Over $450 Billion After Election
To top off this morning’s news, no one is having a worse week than Elon Musk. Shares of his top companies, SpaceX and Tesla, dropped by roughly 9 percent and 11 percent on Thursday respectively, as investors fearing new congressional inquiries and tougher regulation sold off billions of dollars in shares. By the close of business Thursday evening, the two companies lost around $456 billion in combined market value since election night.
Musk was the single biggest donor to Republican candidates and affiliated groups in the 2026 campaign cycle, spending more than $470 million of his own money trying to influence races. Most of the candidates he backed lost by significant margins. In Texas, which houses both the Tesla and SpaceX corporate headquarters, Democrats James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa easily defeated longtime Musk allies Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott in the Senate and gubernatorial races, respectively.
Hinojosa campaigned on imposing a new moratorium on data centers until the legislature passes strict regulations on water use, electricity costs and more local control over data center projects. That’s a big problem for Musk, as his companies are currently in the midst of planning a sprawling data center and semiconductor complex called Terafab in Grimes County. He’s also building a supercomputer at SpaceX’s Starbase facility. Analysts with Deutsche Bank warned that SpaceX’s Texas computing plans may now get hit with delays and higher costs.
CNN is also reporting that both Musk and SpaceX have been instructed to preserve all documents pertaining to restrictions placed on a military version of his Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine. Those restrictions hampered Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russian attacks. Musk is still the richest man in the world, but his fortune has now slipped below $800 billion after briefly surpassing $1 trillion this summer.
Franklin Roosevelt had a name for people like Elon Musk back in 1936: economic royalists. He said these were people who assumed that owning the economy entitled them to ownership of the government as well. That fall, he famously told a packed Madison Square Garden audience that the economic royalists were unanimous in their hatred of him, and that he welcomed their hatred. Texans just sent the richest man on the planet the exact same message. Wall Street appears to have done the math 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.
