Tag: Art

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Trump’s Strange Pick For Navy Secretary

On the February 9, 2026 edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow took a close look at President Trump’s highly unusual choice for Secretary of the Navy, zeroing in on how far outside the norms this pick appears to be—even by Trump-era standards.

As Maddow noted, the law requires that the secretary of a military department be a civilian, so the fact that Trump’s nominee, John Phelan, never served in uniform is not itself disqualifying. Past presidents from both parties, however, have typically chosen civilians with at least some grounding in military affairs, national security, defense policy, or government service. Phelan’s background offers none of that. His career has centered on finance and high-end art collecting, not naval operations, defense management, or public service.

What raised additional red flags during Maddow’s segment were details about Phelan’s personal world that have already surfaced publicly. Maddow reported that Phelan and his wife have previously spoken to the press about their home featuring a mirrored living-room floor used during elaborate parties. According to those accounts, the mirrored flooring was part of an intentionally provocative aesthetic, meant to add a sexualized visual element to social gatherings. Maddow emphasized that this is not about taste or prudishness, but about judgment—particularly when paired with the seriousness of overseeing one of the largest military institutions in the world.

That same living room, Maddow noted, was reportedly the site of a Trump fundraiser during the 2024 campaign, further underscoring the closeness between Phelan and Trump. Maddow also reported that Trump was said to have traveled to that fundraiser aboard an aircraft previously associated with Jeffrey Epstein, a detail that adds another layer of discomfort given Epstein’s notoriety and the persistent questions surrounding his network.

The most consequential revelation, however, came when Maddow stated that John Phelan’s name appears in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. Maddow was careful to stress that appearing in those records does not, on its own, establish criminal conduct. Still, the appearance of yet another Trump-associated figure in Epstein-related documents is difficult to ignore. Maddow reported that MSNBC contacted the Navy for comment regarding Phelan’s presence in the Epstein files, and that the Navy declined to respond.

That silence naturally invites questions—chief among them whether Trump was aware of Phelan’s documented association with Epstein before selecting him for such a sensitive post. Maddow drew a comparison to the political fallout in the UK surrounding Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s controversial appointment of Peter Mandelson, where questions of judgment and vetting have similarly dominated the conversation.

What emerges from all of this is a familiar and increasingly troubling pattern. One by one, individuals in Trump’s orbit continue to surface in the Epstein files. This does not mean they are all guilty of Epstein’s crimes, and responsible commentary must stop short of making such claims. But it is entirely reasonable to observe that an unusually high number of people connected to Trump—past and present—have documented ties to Epstein or his social circle.

Much like the recurring theme of corruption that has followed Trump for years, the Epstein connections form a pattern that refuses to disappear precisely because it keeps repeating. At some point, the issue is no longer about any single name on a flight log, but about what these repeated overlaps say about the company Trump keeps, the vetting he does, and the standards he applies when handing out power.

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Trump Admin’s Troubling Art Of The Label

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An illuminating segment on MSNOW’s Weekend Primetime examined how the Trump administration has refined what can only be described as the art of the label—an exercise in branding human beings as threats and then using that label alone to justify the application of overwhelming military force. Host James Sample walked viewers through how this practice operates in real time: individuals or groups are branded with ominous-sounding designations, and those designations, largely untested and unchallenged, become sufficient grounds for detention, deportation, or death. The alarming part is not merely the labeling itself, but how seamlessly these hollow classifications are converted into acts of state violence, often without any discernible legal foundation or meaningful oversight.

For a country that endlessly invokes the rule of law and treats “due process” as a sacred principle, it is chilling to watch how easily government officials can, on little more than assertion, affix a label to a person and render that individual a legitimate military target. Once the label is applied, the usual safeguards—evidence, hearings, accountability—simply vanish. Even more disturbing is the near-total absence of resistance from Congress or sustained scrutiny from the media, allowing the executive branch to operate as judge, jury, and executioner based on nothing more than its own say-so.

Sample illustrated how this tactic has evolved and expanded. It began, he explained, with migrants being labeled as members of the dangerous gang Tren de Aragua, a claim often unsupported by evidence, and then using that unvetted designation to justify sending them to CECOT, where they were subjected to brutal conditions and torture. The label alone did the work; no adjudication was required, no proof demanded. From there, the administration escalated, branding people aboard boats in the Caribbean as “narcoterrorists” and then using that designation to justify blowing the vessels out of the water, killing those on board. Beyond the invocation of the narcoterrorism label itself, the administration offered little to persuade the public that the people killed actually met that definition.

According to Sample, the most recent and perhaps most dangerous iteration of this practice has emerged in Africa, where the administration has labeled certain regions in Nigeria and Somalia as ISIS-controlled areas and then relied solely on that characterization to carry out military strikes. In Nigeria, one such attack reportedly occurred on Christmas Day, underscoring the moral numbness that accompanies this kind of empty labeling. When entire regions can be reduced to a single word—“ISIS”—and that word becomes a license to kill, the line between lawful military action and lawless violence all but disappears.

At some point, Congress must intervene and reclaim its constitutionally mandated role. That intervention should begin with demanding answers about these labels: how they are defined, what evidence supports them, and what legal reasoning is used to transform them into justifications for lethal force. The military lawyers who sign off on these actions should be required to testify publicly and explain their rationale to the American people. Only sustained oversight and transparency can halt the dangerous slide toward governance by label, where words replace law and accountability is an afterthought. One can only hope Congress acts before more lives are lost to this reckless and hollow exercise of power.