The Trump Department of Justice going after people who make the president mad or even sad is nothing new, in this dangerous age when the presidency is increasingly about placating the desires of the old man in the Oval Office.

Leticia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff. Most recently, E. Jean Carroll, who sued President Trump personally and won a huge settlement on her claim that he sexually assaulted her. Now, the Department of Justice is investigating her for potential perjury.

It would be easy to think of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement Monday that the U.S. Department of Justice is now targeting his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, as just another addition to that list.

But this attack on Siebel Newsom (alleged attack, anyway — the Department of Justice has not confirmed she is a target) is something much darker in our slide into authoritarianism. While the details of what is being investigated are murky and the president hasn’t chimed in yet, it has all the appearances of the Trump administration seeking to stop a political rival who has a real shot at knocking MAGA out of the top office.

“It’s not just random or accidental that the wife of a major presidential candidate is being investigated,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of politics at Harvard University, told me Monday. “That’s the nature of selective prosecution and that is a pillar of authoritarian rule.”

Levitsky is an expert on authoritarian regimes, and how they take and keep power. His point that Newsom is a viable challenger may seem obvious — Newsom himself is already fundraising off of it. But this particular alleged investigation bears a moment of pause because it is not the regular decline of justice we have been witnessing to this moment.

“This is different,” he said. “This is forward-looking persecution.”

Until now, Levistky points out, Trump has screamed and hollered for the prosecution of those who have wronged him in the past, sometimes even the distant past. Yes, he’s disgraced the Department of Justice with the demand it function as his own personal hammer of retribution, even putting his own personal attorney, Todd Blanche, in charge when Pam Bondi wasn’t accommodating or successful enough at stomping perceived enemies and quashing the Epstein files.

But those prosecutions have largely been grievance-based, not aimed at keeping power.

Going after Siebel Newsom seems more like a forward-looking, preemptive strike targeting Newsom ahead of the 2028 election through every decent man’s Achilles’ heel, his family.

In fact, the right-wing media — which is closely tied to the whims of the White House — has been targeting Siebel Newsom for months.

In particular, Siebel Newsom has been attacked for her work as a documentary filmmaker who focuses on female empowerment and parsing how and why we have the gender norms that we do when it comes to masculinity and femininity. I’ll let you figure out how popular that is in MAGA world, where real women make sandwiches.

Conservative commentator Sean Hannity has gone after Siebel Newsom for saying she sometimes changes the gender of a book’s character from “he” to “she” when she’s reading to her children. Fox News has attacked her for daring to give her boys dolls to play with, leading some MAGA influencers to label her “psychotic” or “abusive.” Right-wing icon Megyn Kelly called her a “nutcase” for sharing the tragic story of her sister’s death when Siebel Newsom was 6.

And other media have focused on the fact that some of the films she has been involved with have been approved for use in California schools, leading to conspiracies that Newsom used his influence to force his wife’s “woke” agenda on kids, by which we are apparently talking about the liberal plagues of decency and inclusion.

Newsom’s office said that in recent weeks, relatives, friends and business associates of the family have been contacted by investigators from the FBI and IRS. Siebel Newsom also does work around online safety for children, but it seems likely that any attention would focus on these films, and related nonprofits, and the perennially popular MAGA boogeyman of schools forcing ideologies on kids. Throw in Siebel Newsom’s company making even a dollar, and the way the IRS can find problems with any tax return, and you’ve got about 10,000 hours of right-wing propaganda.

So whether the pressure to target Siebel Newsom came from the White House or not, Newsom’s announcement raises the troubling specter that this administration is getting more serious about remaining in control by kneecapping potential replacements before they grow too strong.

In his Monday video, Newsom urged Trump with mano a mano bravado to come after him as much as he wanted, but to leave his wife and family out of it. But I would not underestimate Siebel Newsom, who showed her strength when she testified against disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, laying out publicly a private, painful tale.

Siebel Newsom’s office told me she’s fine being part of any fight against Trump.

“There are clearly no boundaries to what Donald Trump will do to get his way or to challenge those who get in his way,” Siebel Newsom said in a statement.

The “governor and I will continue to speak truth to power because the American people deserve so much more.”

By coming out in advance of any official announcement of an investigation by the Department of Justice, Siebel Newsom and her husband may be able to take control of the narrative, something Trump detests.

That pushback, Levitsky said, is critical, not just for them, but more importantly for all of us. After last year, when so many institutions and individuals crumbled in the face of Trump’s power, the strength of our democracy increasingly depends on those with political capital standing up to him.

Coming out punching first does just that.

Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French-born engineer hired by George Washington to lay out the new American capital, proposed an ambitious idea: the whole city as a work of civic art. His vision, visible in the city today, included sweeping sightlines to the Capitol and subtle nods to the new democracy encoded in the street network.

And for much of the city’s history, that idea has been deliberately tended — a new monument here, an expanded park there, a solemn vista aligned just so. Washington is unlike any other city in America for this accumulation of carefully arranged details, many quietly referencing one another.

President Trump returned in his second term eager to leave his own mark on the capital at the nation’s 250th anniversary. In this often slow-moving city, his proposals have been urgent, including a ballroom, a triumphal arch, a garden of heroes, a championship golf course, a renovated Kennedy Center and more.

“He might be equated with Jefferson before he’s done in the impact that he had on the city,” said Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the president’s appointed chair of the Commission of Fine Arts charged with reviewing many of these plans (Jefferson looked over L’Enfant’s shoulder and steered design competitions for the Capitol and White House). Mr. Trump, he said, could help complete L’Enfant’s plan.

His arch would be the most prominent monument added to the capital in 80 years, his ballroom the greatest change to the White House grounds in at least as long. And his imprint could extend beyond any single construction site, altering faraway views and the framing of iconic sites.

Many historians, architects and planners fear that a president so confident in his own taste could disrupt in months what has been assembled here over two centuries. It’s not that Washington shouldn’t change, they say — rather, that change should be guided with a particular care that no other American city demands.

1791: The L’Enfant Plan

L’Enfant envisioned a city far more extensive than what the new federal government needed in 1791. Even then, he was thinking about how the capital would tell the story of the nation.

Thackara & Vallance engraving of the L’Enfant plan (1792), Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

L’Enfant sparred with the city’s commissioners and was fired before finishing the job. But the capital that rose here largely followed his plan, and the ideas he embedded in it give Washington its distinctive feel today. Manhattan’s street grid, laid out two decades later, was divided into uniform blocks that could be easily developed by private citizens. Washington’s shape, by contrast, is defined by what’s public: the key civic buildings, the wide avenues and squares, the central Mall.

“There’s a fundamental idea that the city conveys about public value being first and foremost over private interest,” said Thomas Luebke, the longtime secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts, which was created by Congress in 1910 to help shepherd the city’s evolution. “That idea that we come first as a group is somehow conveyed in the scale and design of the city.”

L’Enfant’s grand pedestrian mall, the centerpiece of his plan, became a jumble of buildings and disconnected gardens in the 19th century. The agriculture department ran experimental crop fields there. A railroad terminal was built on the Mall in the 1870s, its train tracks bisecting the green.

A monument to Washington was at last completed in 1884, although in slightly the wrong spot, off-center to L’Enfant’s axes (where the land could better support a giant obelisk).

By the turn of the 20th century, as the city was celebrating the centennial of the federal government’s relocation here, Washington’s core hardly resembled how Americans know it today. That transformation would happen thanks to the second great plan for the city.

1901: The McMillan Plan

The Senate Park Commission, proposed by Senator James McMillan of Michigan, was tasked in 1901 with unifying a new network of outlying parks and restoring L’Enfant’s idea of the capital as a coherent whole.

The commission, including the architect Daniel Burnham and the landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., claimed to study every part of the city. And in unveiling their proposal for its future, they warned, “No such undertaking should be allowed to invade, to mutilate or to mar the symmetry, simplicity and dignity of the one great composition” of the District of Columbia.

To dramatize its Mall plan, the commission exhibited this rendering in pencil, ink and watercolor wash. It’s more than nine feet wide.

To appreciate its details, let’s turn it on its side and look closer:

At the center of this kite shape, the commission proposed a circular pool and garden, which were never built. But much of the rest of the plan was: Union Station, the Lincoln Memorial, the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the Jefferson Memorial, the decluttered Mall framed by American elm trees and grand civic buildings.

Those changes would take decades. As late as the 1930s, the Mall still looked like this, with temporary World War I-era buildings and even a power plant:

Elsewhere in the city, parts of the McMillan plan and L’Enfant’s street grid were disrupted by urban renewal and highway construction. But the “monumental core” evolved into a place that is remarkably faithful to these two documents.

The tilted Mall is the kind of conscientious detail that now appears throughout the area. The monuments directly speak to one another. They each defer to the Washington Monument. The spaces left open are a part of the effect.

The more recent museums added to the Mall hardly match one another in architectural style or material. But they are unified in how they open onto a shared front lawn, and in how their similar heights convey that no one institution looms greater than the others.

“Even in the most extreme of their differences, they’re tipping their hat to the context,” said Elizabeth K. Meyer, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia and a member of the Commission of Fine Arts from 2012 to 2020.

In the resulting collection, much of the American story is right there on the Mall: art, war, ingenuity, protest, space exploration, the founding fathers, the great outdoors, the democratic ideal. The Mall has made space for parts of the story L’Enfant and McMillan didn’t anticipate (or celebrate), like Native American history. It has allowed new stories layered on top of earlier ones, like the way the Lincoln Memorial has become a civil rights symbol.

“It’s really unparalleled where you have a single idea that lies dormant for the most part for a century,” said Richard Longstreth, an architectural historian, of the L’Enfant plan. “Then in revised form — and aggrandized form — it slowly and with great effort takes shape as the McMillan plan, which is still the guidepost for our thinking. Until now.”

2026: The Trump era

President Trump returned to Washington with a distinctly different perspective from the architects, planners and preservationists who have shaped the capital. The president is a developer — and he describes his projects in the builder’s logic of underutilized land and maximized value. In West Potomac Park, his chosen spot for his garden of heroes, he sees a “totally BARREN field of Prime Waterfront Real Estate.”

And he believes he has found many such spaces in D.C.

Critics argue that these projects are in tension with the history around them, rather than at one with the “great composition” of the capital. And they say there hasn’t been much time or willingness to resolve that tension (a process that previously controversial projects still went through).

“The dilemma we have is we have a developer-in-chief who is object-oriented,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, who leads The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which has sued over the reflecting pool and the Kennedy Center. That means the president is attuned to paint colors and column styles, he said, not symbolic axes and century-old city plans.

Mr. Trump’s supporters, in response, stake a claim to history, too. Presidents have talked about wanting a ballroom for 150 years, administration officials say. And the 1924 Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission, they note, originally called for a pair of 166-foot-tall columns in the park at the bridge’s western end. The arch’s 166-foot height (below the gilded statues that bring it to 250 feet) is meant to nod to that proposal.

“The president is not talking about steamrolling D.C. and putting up high-rises, he’s talking about additions with a history,” said Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and the chair of the National Capital Planning Commission, which also reviews these proposals. “The ballroom, the arch, putting a monument in Memorial Circle — these are old ideas.”

Being a developer, he added, means Mr. Trump can finally bring those ideas to life “not at the speed of government.”

Mr. Cook, the chair of the Commission of Fine Arts, says L’Enfant always intended for the capital to include something like grand arches (Mr. Cook has for years been proposing where to put them). They’re not explicit on L’Enfant’s drawings. But Mr. Cook believes it would have been heresy for him not to complete his plan with such gateways to the city.

“Then let’s have a conversation,” said Rebecca Miller, the executive director of the DC Preservation League (they’re suing over the golf course, the Kennedy Center and Trump’s plans to paint the granite exterior of the Eisenhower building white).

Let historians debate Mr. Cook’s claim, and include the public, she said. Would L’Enfant’s arches have been 250 feet tall? Is “triumphal” the right tone for the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery? Is an arch the best way to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary?

That is the kind of raucous, public, potentially years-long process that has preceded other major additions to the capital. But just months after it was introduced, the arch has already been approved by the arts commission. The ballroom is already under construction. The president has his own deadlines — the 250th anniversary this summer, and then the end of his term.

Before Mr. Cook’s commission approved the arch in May, the panel asked the architect Nicolas Leo Charbonneau to consider removing the gilded statues on top and to add more openings to make it a less imposing mass.

The president, Mr. Charbonneau explained, elected not to adopt those revisions.

A top Alaska election official booted a same-name Republican challenger to Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, from the primary ballot Monday, ruling the campaign appeared designed to confuse voters. 

Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher disqualified Dan J. Sullivan from the state’s hotly-contested Senate race over concerns that his candidacy was “filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality,” in a letter published Monday.

Dan J. Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher who filed as a Republican Senate candidate despite having no prior affiliation with the GOP, can appeal the ruling, Beecher wrote. 

The letter caps weeks of outrage from the GOP, who argued the political newcomer’s entry into the race just days before the filing deadline was a covert attempt by Democrats to recruit a “sham” candidate into the race to confuse voters.

GOP FIGHTS TO STOP MULTIPLE DAN SULLIVANS FROM APPEARING ON ALASKA BALLOT, CALLS CANDIDACY A ‘SHAM’

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, if Dan J. Sullivan had been allowed to remain on the August primary ballot, both he and Dan S. Sullivan, the incumbent, could have advanced to the general election among the top four vote-getters.

Democrats are eying Alaska as a potential flip opportunity as the party mounts a longshot bid to retake control of the upper chamber during the midterms. The incumbent Sullivan is running for a third Senate term against former Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, who was recruited by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., into the battleground contest.

Beecher cited several details about Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign that led to her conclusion that it was not filed in “good-faith.”

The political newcomer requested to appear on the ballot as “Dan Sullivan” despite registering to vote under the name “Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr.,” according to the letter. The longshot candidate also attempted to register with the incumbent’s initial on one occasion, according to Beecher’s letter.

“‘S’ is Senator Sullivan’s middle initial, not yours,” Beecher wrote.

The election official also noted that Dan J. Sullivan had not registered as a Republican before launching his Senate campaign and that his new website used a “color scheme and overall theme” similar to the incumbent’s campaign materials. 

Additionally, Beecher discussed Dan J. Sullivan’s connection to Amber Lee, an Alaska Democratic consultant who has previously supported Peltola. Metadata from the campaign’s launch identified the Democratic operative as its author, Fox News Digital previously reported. 

FORMER DEM REP. MARY PELTOLA ANNOUNCES U.S. SENATE RUN: “PUT ALASKA FIRST”

“This consultant’s work on your behalf is, in isolation, innocuous,” Beecher wrote. “Alongside the other facts I have catalogued in this letter, however, it suggests a determined effort and a deliberate attempt to use the similarity of your name to confuse Alaska voters in the upcoming primary election.”

Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The incumbent Sullivan previously blasted his same-name challenger as a “far-left liberal” who was complicit in Democrats’ efforts to “rig” the election.

“Is Schumer or Gillibrand and their staffs or the DSCC or the staff at the DSCC — were they aware? Were they coordinating, orchestrating?
I mean, if that’s the case, that would be a huge scandal,” Sullivan told Fox News Digital last week.

Democrats have denied any involvement with Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign. 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, took a victory lap after urging Beecher to investigate the same-name challenger’s candidacy.

“Alaskans saw right through Chuck Schumer and Mary Peltola’s tricks to confuse and deceive them with a sham candidate,” NRSC Regional Press Secretary Nick Puglia said in a statement. “Nobody delivers for Alaskans like Senator Dan Sullivan, which is why Alaska Last Democrats like Mary Peltola are stooping so low.”

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Dan J. Sullivans’ attempt to qualify for the primary ballot also sparked sharp criticism from Senate Republicans, who are expected to aggressively campaign to defend Sullivan’s seat.

“Even by Chuck Schumer’s low standards, this was an outrageous attempt to trick Alaska voters and rig the election,” Senate Republican Conference Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Monday.