The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reported a grim milestone this week: In Fiscal Year 2025, for the first time in history, the U.S. spent more than $1 trillion servicing the national debt. And the problem’s only getting worse: Given current spending trends, the group projects that annual interest payments will hit $1.5 trillion by 2032 and $1.8 trillion by 2035.

Now might be a good time for one of these parties—or hey, why not both?—to start treating this like the massive systemic problem that it is. Happy Friday.

District of Trumplumbia

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump arrived back in the White House with Caesarian aspirations, eager to bring the power of the entire government under his personal control. But lately, with his domestic political project on the rocks, he’s been acting more like Caligula—spending more and more time on a series of empty gestures intended to spite his enemies and feed his own ego.

Much of this is taking place at the White House itself, which Trump is busy tricking out as his own personal palace/man cave, paving over the Rose Garden to make himself a Mar-a-Lago-style patio and knocking down the East Wing to build himself a ballroom. This week, the president amused himself by installing trollish plaques beneath a row of presidential portraits at the residence, sketching out a brief narrative that reads all of U.S. history as mere prelude to the capstone project of his reign. (Sample text: President Andrew Jackson “was unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly and President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.”)

But even the White House has not presented a sufficiently large playground for Trump’s ego. His lackeys are suddenly splashing his name everywhere around D.C. Yesterday, Trump’s hand-picked board of the Kennedy Center, which he himself chairs, announced it would rename the historic venue the Trump-Kennedy Center. Earlier this month, the State Department announced it had renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace—or what remains of it after its dismantling by DOGE earlier this year—the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. And in true Roman fashion, they’re scheming up plans to put him on a $1 coin next year, which would break a century-old precedent against putting living presidents on U.S. currency.

The Kennedy Center renaming is a classic Trump-era story: One where the facts are so openly clownish that one struggles to know how seriously to take it. On the one hand, it’s silly frippery of the sort your correspondents have heartily endorsed Trump spending his time on. As I wrote back in March: “Every minute spent critiquing the upholstery in the Kennedy concert hall is one less minute the president has to search out new beefs with Canada or personally vet FBI agents to no-knock Liz Cheney’s home.”

On the other hand, there is something sinister here that goes beyond the ridiculous ego-polishing. It isn’t just that all this puts a torch to modest and noble old notions that the president is merely a citizen chosen to serve a term as the chief executive of the government.

These renamings are also just the latest assertion of a particular kind of presidential authority over truth itself. The name of the Kennedy Center isn’t supposed to be up to the president; it was established in U.S. law by act of Congress (just like the name “Department of Defense,” which Trump also claims to have changed). But in the strange law-optional world into which Trump is trying to usher us, that simple fact—words in the U.S. code—isn’t what matters. What matters is that the White House controls the actual power in question: They can update the Kennedy Center website to read “Trump-Kennedy Center.” They can put “Trump-Kennedy Center” up in big letters on the building. They can instruct staffers to start printing it on playbills and tickets. It’s a silly example of the phenomenon—but isn’t this how they’re running everything these days?

Even if he’s determined to stay in Caligula mode, Trump might want to pace himself. At the rate he’s going, he’s going to run out of satisfying things to rename long before he’s set to leave office. Things could get silly quick. Will we suddenly be looking at a Trump-Washington Memorial Highway running through Northern Virginia? The Trump-Lincoln bedroom in the White House? Trump’s name festooned on D.C.’s various golf courses? Or on the Pentagon McDonald’s?

We’re only a year down, after all. Who knows how far his ambitions will reach in three more? Let’s get the big guy’s name on the moon.

The Epstein Reckoning

by William Kristol

The Jeffrey Epstein files are scheduled to be delivered by the Trump administration to Congress today, pursuant to legislation passed urgently and almost unanimously a month ago. But neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate will be in session to receive or discuss them. Congress has gone home for the holidays.

This seems appropriate, in a way. The political establishment has never been interested in dealing with the Epstein matter. Nor have our elites in general. Over the past two decades, they’ve been conspicuously uninterested in knowing more. They certainly haven’t been eager to do more.