Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
The Pentagon is enforcing waist-to-height ratios on troops who want to attend Trump’s UFC fight on the South Lawn. More than 10,000 government lawyers have walked out of the Trump administration in roughly a year. HUD told a fair housing nonprofit that enforcing the Violence Against Women Act doesn’t align with the administration’s priorities. And Trump is fast-tracking a $7.5 million plan to paint the granite Eisenhower building white.
Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair is making sure they know what happens if they don’t. And independent outlets are being bought out one by one. This is the news they don’t want you reading. AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. We exist because of you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please upgrade today.
Now, let’s get into it.
Troops Must Be Tall and Fit to Attend Trump’s UFC Fight
The Pentagon is now screening American service members the way a nightclub screens who gets let in, as it measures soldiers by waist-to-height ratio in order to decide who gets to stand near Trump at his birthday cage match on the White House South Lawn.
Internal memos seen by the Washington Post instruct troops that they “MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO” and wear short-sleeved uniforms. Another memo limits the invitation to junior-level officers only.
No heavyweights. No older troops. No generals. Just lean, young, short-sleeved bodies arranged behind the commander-in-chief at his octagon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent months publicly complaining about “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.” He has also banned beards, long hair, and what he calls “superficial, individual expression.”
Ironically, the one person guaranteed a front-row spot is the only man in the building who couldn’t pass the waist-to-height ratio check.
More Than 10,000 Lawyers Have Left the Trump Administration
Apparently the fastest way to drain the swamp is to make the swamp uninhabitable for anyone with a law degree.
One in five federal government attorneys who were on the job at the end of 2024 are gone. That’s more than 10,000 lawyers, according to a New York Times analysis. The Department of Education, which Trump is trying to abolish entirely, has lost more than half of the lawyers it had before he took office. The Justice Department is down 21 percent.
The only agency that gained lawyers was the Department of Homeland Security, which needed them because of the volume of litigation generated by mass deportation.
Career prosecutors who refused to indict Trump’s political enemies were removed. Attorneys who had worked on January 6 cases or on the president’s own prosecutions were fired. Others left on their own once the pressure to ignore the Constitution became routine.
The Justice Department is now offering $25,000 signing bonuses and lowering hiring standards. It is still struggling to fill seats. The Treasury Department’s top lawyer recently quit after the DOJ announced a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to pay taxpayer money to people who feel they were unfairly prosecuted. That includes the January 6 rioters Trump pardoned.
On the bright side, somebody’s office happy hour just got a lot less crowded.
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Trump Froze the Money Meant for Domestic Violence Survivors
The Miami Valley Fair Housing Center in Dayton, Ohio, applied for a $125,000 HUD grant to assist victims of domestic violence in federally supported housing. It is exactly the kind of work HUD was given authority to support when the Violence Against Women Act was reauthorized on a bipartisan basis in 2022.
The grant was approved. The money never arrived.
Eventually, the organization’s president, Jim McCarthy, got an email from his HUD contact explaining the holdup. “VAWA is not a activity that aligns with the current administration’s priorities,” it said. He resubmitted the application with the domestic violence outreach event stripped out. The grant was then approved.
The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act funds more than 2,000 domestic violence shelters and programs across the country. The Trump administration has not even released the notice of funding opportunity, which is the first step in a six-to-nine-month process.
About $200 million in Office of Violence Against Women grants from last fiscal year still hasn’t gone out. In a single day last year, local programs couldn’t fulfill more than 13,000 requests for help.
The administration’s position, in writing, is that the law protecting them is not a priority.
Trump Wants to Paint the Granite Eisenhower Building White
Another 19th-century landmark is about to get the Mar-a-Lago treatment. The White House is fast-tracking a $7.5 million plan to paint the granite facade of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. Final approval could come as early as July.
The 19th-century French Second Empire building sits next to the White House and houses Vice President JD Vance, the National Security Council, and the Office of Management and Budget. Nearly 900 granite columns line its exterior.
Trump first floated the makeover on Truth Social last August, posting renderings of the building in white stone. He said the building was beautiful, but “you have to get past the color because the stone they used was a really bad color.”
Preservationists sued. Painting unpainted historic masonry, they warned, traps moisture, accelerates deterioration, and causes stone to crack or spall. Trump’s proposed solution is what he called “magic paint with silicate.”
The National Capital Planning Commission, whose 12 members are Trump appointees, received more than 2,000 public comments. The overwhelming majority were negative. The DC State Historic Preservation Office called the plan “an act of architectural vandalism of the highest order.”
One of the renderings shows the entire building painted white, giving it the look of a tiered wedding cake — appropriate for a man who’s had three of them.
Nobody Owns This Newsletter but You
The FCC chair is openly threatening broadcast licenses over coverage he doesn’t like. Billionaires are buying up the last independent newsrooms and quietly editing them into compliance. Local papers are being hollowed out. National desks are being told what not to chase.
AlterNet America doesn’t have a license to lose. We don’t have an owner who can be leaned on. We have readers. That’s the entire business model, and it’s the only reason we can tell you that the Pentagon is measuring waistlines for a cage fight and that HUD wrote down, in an email, that the Violence Against Women Act is not a priority.
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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.
POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Kennedy Center Must Remove Trump’s Name From Building, Judge Orders. Trump’s handpicked board renamed the Kennedy Center after him last December, but a federal judge — in a 94-page ruling issued on JFK’s birthday — ordered Trump’s name scrubbed from the building within two weeks. It’s the kind of timing that makes you think the universe has a sense of humor. Trump responded by signaling he’d wash his hands of the whole thing and hand control back to Congress, which we’ll believe when we see.
Clarence Thomas Deals Republicans Temporary Legal Blow in Redistricting War. Alabama Republicans sprinted to the Supreme Court to save their redrawn congressional map, only to get stonewalled by Clarence Thomas, the one justice who has spent decades arguing the Voting Rights Act has no business touching redistricting cases in the first place. The man who called the court’s redistricting jurisprudence a disastrous misadventure declined to immediately rescue the very gerrymandering strategy he has championed his entire career, which is a little like asking the arsonist to investigate the fire.
Louisiana governor faces recall petition after canceling elections. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry canceled his state’s congressional elections after the Supreme Court struck down the district map for racially discriminatory gerrymandering. Voters responded by launching a recall petition, with lines snaking across multiple rooms at signing locations popping up from downtown Shreveport to a thrift store in Arabi. He canceled the elections to avoid accountability and accidentally created the most civic engagement Louisiana has seen in years.
Homelessness is down in California and across the country, says new federal report. Homelessness fell in California and across the country last year, the first national decrease since 2016, according to a federal report that HUD sat on for five months before releasing. The Trump administration responded by taking credit for a decline that happened under Biden, tying the drop to its immigration crackdown despite the full report never once mentioning sanctuary cities, and scrubbing all references to gender from the data. Nothing says “we solved homelessness” like making sure fewer people are counted.
