President Trump is threatening to derail a plan to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C., for the Washington Commanders football team unless the team changes its name back to the previous name.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should immediately change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account. “There is a big clamoring for this.”

The football team dropped the longtime name in 2020 after many years of criticism that it was racist toward Indigenous people.

Trump also called for the Cleveland Guardians baseball team to change their name back to the Cleveland Indians. That name change was announced in 2021.

“Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” Trump wrote, without offering evidence. “Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”

Suzan Harjo, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes who fought for decades to get the team’s name changed, told NPR in 2022 that the “R-word” was connected to racist attitudes that perpetuated “emotional and physical violence” against Native Americans. “When I was a girl, you barely could make it through your young life without getting attacked by a bunch of white people — whether they were boys or girls or men or women. And they would always go to that word,” she said.

In a later post, Trump threatened to scuttle the Commanders’ plans for a new stadium, which would move the team from its current location in Maryland back to the nation’s capital after renovating an antiquated stadium on federal property.

“I may put a restriction on them if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington,” Trump wrote.

Congress gave the city control over the site of the proposed new stadium last December, which former President Joe Biden signed into law in January. The D.C. Council is now considering a multibillion-dollar plan to redevelop the property for the team. It’s unclear how Trump could intervene with the project.

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office said in an email that the mayor had no comment. The Commanders did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment. The Cleveland Guardians declined comment.

Monday

Rightwing American conspiracy theories often circle the drain of lurid abuse stories. So it was quite a twist this week to see the chickens of this particular rancid online conspiracy culture come home to roost in the form of Maga faithfuls turning on Donald Trump for what the US president now refers to as the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax”.

Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, killed himself in prison while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, and Trump’s conspiracy-hungry supporters are now accusing the president of a cover-up. Specifically enraging to Trump fans is his decision to tread water on releasing the “Epstein files”, FBI files supposedly containing the names of the banker’s “client list”, which, last month, Elon Musk suggested Trump himself may appear on.

Until very recently, the Trump administration had been happy to throw meat to the lions by suggesting it would release the files. But in recent weeks the president has dropped that promise and instead recommended that everyone “move on”. Meanwhile, the FBI issued a memo last week saying it did not have evidence that would justify interrogating further suspects.

Well. Can you imagine? Across the US, the deep-state-is-lying-to-us klaxons went off like tornado warnings and before you knew it, the Maga megaphone Laura Loomer was calling for the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to resign, the Trump ally Steve Bannon demanded the dissolution of federal law enforcement, and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, called the FBI memo a “cover-up”. Which brings us to the domino run of events this week: Trump coming out fighting against his followers, who he described on Truth Social as “weaklings” and “my PAST supporters”, who “have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker”. And a partial, 11th-hour climbdown when he ordered Bondi to release testimony from the Epstein grand jury. As Trump himself might say: beautiful.

Tuesday

What do tarantulas smell like? Not chocolates, apparently; a useful piece of information to have had at Cologne Bonn airport recently, where news was released this week of a smuggling attempt thwarted by customs officials tipped off by a “noticeable smell”.

Or rather, the notable absence of a smell: officials inspecting a large haul of cake boxes noted they didn’t smell chocolatey, and on further inspection turned out to contain, not confectionery from Vietnam, as the customs paperwork promised, but – what are the chances? – 1,500 baby tarantulas in individual plastic vials.

Many of the tarantulas hadn’t survived the journey from Vietnam, which feels like the opener to a dark Pixar movie or the trigger for an odd conflation of responses: revulsion, fear and sympathy.

Wednesday

The 2025 Emmy nominations are in and with them, more importantly, the snubs. At the top of the list is Keira Knightley, overlooked for her role in the very patchy Netflix show Black Doves (notable detail: Sarah Lancashire’s bored face in the pilot), followed by Tina Fey’s also really quite bad Netflix show, The Four Seasons, overlooked in every category bar a single nomination for Colman Domingo.

Meanwhile, the parlousness of John Hamm’s suburban comedy drama, Your Friends & Neighbours, was recognised by Emmy voters with a nod for the theme music and nothing else. But while some media outlets pointed to Renée Zellweger being overlooked for her role in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – which found itself in the TV movie category since it went straight to streaming in the US – this wasn’t quite right. For a movie, show or performer to count as having been snubbed, voters must have approached it with reasonably high expectations in the first place.

Thursday

Crucial to Trump’s “Epstein hoax” about-face seems to be the existence of what, in a story broken by the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper described as a “bawdy” letter and cartoon, allegedly written by Trump to Epstein on the occasion of his 50th birthday and included in a special album compiled for Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell – names that fall like a fantasy dinner party list but where the object is to assemble the worst people in the world.

It is the Journal’s attempt to describe Trump’s alleged cartoon-drawing skills that particularly arrests in this new twist: the president’s alleged sketch featured the naked silhouette of a woman in which, wrote the Journal, “a pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts,” (the choice of “denotes”, here, really raising the tone), and Trump’s “signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair”.

The message, meanwhile, allegedly read: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.” And while Trump jumped on Truth Social to call the note a fake and threaten the Journal with legal action, the rest of us could only sit back and marvel at the way life mimics pulp fiction – or rather, Alice in Wonderland, in which the president’s difficulties aren’t authored by a bold defender of Truth, but by the man who arguably bears more responsibility for his rise than any other: Journal proprietor and sudden hero of the hour, Rupert Murdoch.

Friday

In a week of awkward missives, Pat Brennan has resigned from his post as a parish priest in Coventry and marked the occasion with what the Metro described as a “sassy poem”. In his blog, Humble Piety, the priest posted a verse entry entitled Not I Lord Surely!, in which he blasted parishioners for being, among other things, “unfriendly”, “disdainful”, “bored”, “gossiping” and “tutting for a living”, and nailed a rhyme scheme in which he paired “holier too” with “you know who”, and “Lord’s own seal” with “it can feel”. We can only hope this style of critique catches on.

An attorney tied to some of the most aggressive legal moves by the Justice Department this year is in line to get a promotion soon, if President Trump gets his way.

A Senate panel is preparing to vote Thursday to advance a life-tenured judicial nomination for Emil Bove. Bove, 44, previously served as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and defended Trump in a pair of criminal cases filed by the Justice Department.

The White House says Bove is an ideal nominee for an open seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Trump has posted on social media that Bove would “do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

But Bove’s record in and outside the Justice Department has fueled opposition from 900 former DOJ lawyers who identify with both major political parties and a group of more than 75 retired state and federal court judges who fear his intense loyalty to the president would carry over onto the bench.

“The rule of law is really only as strong as the institutions that enforce it and then interpret it — chief among them the DOJ and the judiciary,” said Stacey Young, who leads Justice Connection, a group that helps Justice Department lawyers find ethics and legal advice. “And it would be disgraceful to elevate someone who’s degraded one of those institutions to a lifetime seat on the other.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is charging full steam ahead on the nomination, despite requests from Democrats to investigate claims made against Bove by a department whistleblower.

Erez Reuveni, a longtime DOJ lawyer fired this year for acknowledging the administration had mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, recently came forward with allegations that Bove told government lawyers they might need to disobey court orders. Reuveni produced text messages, emails and other documents to back up his claims.

At his confirmation hearing, Bove told lawmakers he was not an “enforcer” or a “henchman” for the president. He denied that he had ever told subordinates to violate a court order. But he said he did not recall telling DOJ lawyers in a meeting that they might have to tell judges “f*** you” if the courts tried to block the White House’s effort to roll out speedy deportations of migrants, as was alleged in the whistleblower complaint.

That’s a red flag for former federal prosecutor David Laufman, who said Bove has taken a “wrecking ball” to the Justice Department this year by firing career prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on cases involving Trump and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The volume and quality of the evidence contradicting his failure to recall tells us everything we need to know about his contempt for the judiciary, his contempt for longstanding department norms,” Laufman said.

Laufman added: “Were he confirmed, we have every reason to believe that Mr. Bove would rubber stamp whatever the administration seeks to do and contribute to a majority ruling in favor of the administration with consequences for the entire country.”

But Grassley said in a letter to Judiciary Committee Democrats this week that he was unpersuaded by the whistleblower allegations.

“Following a comprehensive review of the additional documents that you published following the hearing and discussed in the media, I do not believe that they substantiate any misconduct by Mr. Bove,” Grassley wrote.

Grassley also has questioned why Reuveni’s complaint emerged on the eve of a confirmation hearing for Bove, raising the idea it might be a politically coordinated attack.

But Dana Gold, senior counsel at the Government Accountability Project, said she and other lawyers for Reuveni had been working for months, line by line, to navigate the whistleblower process and ethics considerations.

Of the timing, Gold said, “It had nothing to do with tanking Emil Bove’s nomination. It had to do with getting the truth out.”

Gold added: “We do think that the information is highly relevant to Emil Bove’s nomination, that’s clear. It’s really important in terms of how leadership within the Department of Justice has interpreted and asked career attorneys to pursue a political agenda over the rule of law.”

A DOJ spokesman called Bove “a highly qualified judicial nominee who has done incredible work at the Department of Justice to help protect civil rights, dismantle Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and Make America Safe Again.”

Michael Fragoso advanced scores of judicial nominations when he worked as a Republican Senate aide. Fragoso said all signs point to confirmation of Bove, along committee party lines.

“I don’t think Chairman Grassley would be calling the vote if he didn’t have the votes,” said Fragoso, who’s now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, and an attorney at Torridon Law PLLC.