George Washington

Feb. 19 (UPI) — Workers are restoring a slavery exhibit at the site of the nation’s first presidential mansion in Philadelphia ahead of a Friday deadline to do so.

U.S. District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania Judge Cynthia Rufe on Monday ordered the Interior Department to restore the exhibit, which was removed in January amid the Trump administration’s anti-DEI policy.

The exhibit features nine panel illustrations of nine slaves, whom President George Washington brought with him to the mansion while serving as president.

Rufe likened the slavery exhibit’s removal to author George Orwell‘s novel “1984” and said the exhibit supports “historic truths,” The Hill reported.

The Trump administration on Wednesday filed a motion to stay Rufe’s order to reinstate the exhibit, but workers began reinstalling it on Tuesday.

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker welcomed the change and vowed to oppose efforts to remove the exhibit.

“Today, we celebrate the return of our history at this important site,” Parker said in a post on X. “We are thankful for all the supporters across the city to get us to this point.”

Parker said the legal challenges have not ended and said they will be handled with “rigor and gravity” as they arise.

The exhibit features panels depicting slavery in the United States from the time of the Revolutionary War through the Civil War and the eventual outlawing of slavery upon the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

The President’s House formerly was the official residence for Presidents George Washington and John Adams when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital and is located at the corner of 6th and Market streets.

Adams did not own slaves, which is why the panels focus on Washington’s ownership and use of slaves while living at the presidential home.

The house was demolished 32 years after the nation’s capital moved to Washington in 1800, but its foundation and footprint remain.

The site been converted into an outdoor exhibit that features the dichotomy of slavery in a nation that was founded on the principles of freedom and equality and is managed by the National Park Service.

Where are the statesmen when the state is under siege by the current head of state?

I’ve been mulling that question, hardly for the first time, but on three occasions just in the last few days.

On Monday, the federal holiday celebrating George Washington’s birth, former President George W. Bush posted an essay on the first U.S. president as part of a civic project commemorating the nation’s 250th year. Simply by hailing Washington for traits that Donald Trump utterly lacks — humility, integrity, dignity, self-restraint, willingness to forfeit power — the piece was widely read as a sneak attack on the current president. Bush never named Trump. He thus maintained his years-long, stupefying silence about the man who’s trashed him, his family, his party, his legacy PEPFAR program and, most of all, his country.

As Jonathan V. Last wrote for the right-of-center, anti-Trump Bulwark, if Bush’s words were a veiled attack on Trump, “the veil is so powerful that even light can’t escape it.”

Bush’s essay came two days after former President Obama finally responded to Trump’s week-old racist post that caricatured the first Black president and his wife as apes, thereby mainlining into the body politic one of the most toxic tropes against Black Americans. Asked about it in a podcast interview, Obama was, as usual, too cool. He called Trump’s behavior “deeply troubling” and said “there doesn’t seem to be any shame about this among people who used to feel like you had to have some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office.”

But, like Bush, he never named Trump. And it’s not even clear that Obama was referring to him. Certainly Trump never was one of those who, as Obama put it, “used to feel … some sort of decorum and a sense of propriety and respect for the office.”

Then there was the third trigger for my musings about America’s M.I.A. statesmen.

On Friday — ahead of the holiday honoring Washington, who as the first president and military commander established the indispensable tradition of a nonpartisan military — Trump yet again violated Washington’s precedent. At Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, he essentially pushed uniformed young troops to violate the military codes enshrining Washington’s legacy of nonpartisanship. Trump treated them like props at a MAGA rally, lauding Republican candidates and officeholders on hand, mocking past presidents and urging the troops to vote Republican in November.

“You have to vote for us,” the commander in chief ordered them.

This is unprecedented, except by Trump himself. In October, he prodded sailors at Norfolk, Va., to boo “Barack Hussein Obama.” In September, he told commanders summoned from around the world that the fight is here at home, a “war from within” American cities. In June, also at Ft. Bragg, Trump damned Democrats and sold MAGA merch, over Army objections.

There’s a darn good reason for the wall that Washington built between the military and civilian government. As the Army Field Manual instructs troops: “Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively.” Not just Republicans, and not just Trump.

But as multiple officers told the website Military.com, “holding troops to account when goaded by the president, who is ultimately the boss, would be impossible.” Commanders themselves are mute because, after all, Trump is the commander in chief. They’ve watched as one Pentagon purge has followed another, starting with Trump firing the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer. He chose instead an officer who, he often claims, once donned a MAGA cap and said, “I love you, sir. … I’ll kill for you, sir.”

It’s understandable that active-duty officers don’t make a stand. But what about America’s roughly 7,500 retired generals and admirals? As veteran ML Cavanaugh wrote in the Los Angeles Times after Trump’s Ft. Bragg performance last year, “The military profession’s nonpartisan ethic is at a breaking point.” Sure, individuals have spoken out. But as the military knows better than anyone, there’s strength in numbers.

It’s past time for a large, united front of veteran commanders to challenge Trump. Why wait for him to make good on his talk of invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops at the polls in this midterm election year, based on trumped-up conspiracies about Democrats’ fraud?

You know who could give the veteran and active commanders some political cover? The former commanders in chief.

Even more conspicuous than the brass by their silence and virtual invisibility in the face of Trump’s assaults — on the rule of law, civil rights, elections, foreign alliances and America’s global reputation — are the nation’s four living former presidents: Democrats Joe Biden, Obama and Bill Clinton, and Republican Bush.

It’s past time for the not-so-fab four to come together to publicly demand that Trump honor the oath of office that each man took, and to school the electorate on the many ways in which he’s dishonoring it — including by continuing to justify his refusal to peacefully transfer power in 2021. But each man is so observant of the norm that former presidents should not publicly criticize the incumbent one — again, a precedent from George Washington — that they self-muzzle.

This is Americans’ quandary in these Trump times: Presidents and high-ranking veterans who could speak truth to power are so constrained by their devotion to norms and traditions that they won’t confront a president who’s daily shattering the norms, traditions and laws that form the foundation of this democratic nation.

“This is the master alarm flashing for our democracy,” Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and veteran, said last week of Trump’s targeting of him and other critics.

That takes us back to my original question: Where are the statesmen to answer that alarm?

Answer: They’re following ordinary rules despite these extraordinary times. And they must stop.

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Feb. 10 (UPI) — A grand jury rejected the Justice Department’s effort to indict congressional Democrats for their recent online video telling military members they don’t have to obey illegal orders.

The grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday evening declined to indict the lawmakers, all of whom either are veterans or served in the national intelligence community, The New York Times reported.

The lawmakers are Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, along with Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, and Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, organized the video, which did not cite any specific orders or provide context. The video was published online after the Trump administration began carrying out deadly aerial strikes on alleged drug-running vessels in the Caribbean Sea in September.

It’s unclear if all or only some of the lawmakers were subject to the grand jury proceedings, according to NBC News.

The news outlet said the effort by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro is an example of the Justice Department targeting the president’s political enemies.

Slotkin described the grand jury that declined to indict her and her Democratic colleagues as “anonymous American citizens who upheld the rule of law.”

“Today wasn’t just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country,” she said in a social media statement Tuesday night.

“Because whether or not Pirro succeeded is not the point. It’s that President [Donald] Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies. It’s the kind of thing you see in a foreign country, not the United States we know and love.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the effort to indict them was “a despicable, vindictive abuse of power” targeting lawmakers and veterans “because the administration didn’t like the content of their speech.”

In the video published online in mid-November, the six lawmakers all said military members can refuse to carry out illegal orders, and some said that “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but right here at home.”

Trump called the video “seditious behavior” and suggested George Washington would have had all six hanged for treason.

The six lawmakers later said the FBI had contacted the respective House and Senate sergeants-at-arms to arrange interviews as part of a criminal investigation.

The four House members issued a joint statement in which they accused Trump of using the FBI to “intimidate and harass members of Congress.”

They said that “no amount of intimidation or harassment will ever stop us from doing our jobs and honoring our Constitution.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also tried to censure Kelly and seek to demote, the senator said in a lawsuit.

Feb. 7 (UPI) — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would end its academic partnership with Harvard University over what he called a “woke” institution that is not welcoming to the U.S. military.

In a video posted on Friday to X, Hegseth said the Department of Defense would end its partnership and work with the private university — which dates to before the American Revolution — over its alleged “wokeness.”

The move, according to a statement from the Pentagon, is “because attendance at the school no longer meets the needs of the [Department of Defense] or the military services.”

Calling the decision “long overdue,” Hegseth said that all professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs at Harvard will be formally ended starting with the 2026-2027 school year.

Members of the military who are already attending classes there, however, will be permitted to finish their courses of study, the Pentagon said.

Noting that the U.S. military has had “an important and often positive relationship” with the university for more than 250 years, Hegseth said that “Harvard is no longer a welcoming institution to military personnel or the right place to develop them.”

“Too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard — heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks,” he said, adding that “the school has become a factory for woke ideology and a breeding ground for anti-American radicals.”

Hegseth alleged that Harvard research programs work with the Chinese Communist Party, university leadership has encouraged celebrations of Hamas and allowed attacks on Jewish students, and that the university “promotes discrimination based on race.”

Harvard University has been involved in some way with the U.S. military in an official capacity since 1775 when George Washington used the university as a military base, according to The Harvard Gazette.

Washington basing about 1,000 soldiers in Harvard Yard followed Harvard students and faculty who had “given their lives for the burgeoning nation” in war efforts for 150 years preceding the Revolutionary War, the university said.

Since President Donald Trump was inaugurated back into office in January 2025, Harvard has been one of several universities to draw his administration’s ire.

This has included everything from protests against the war between Israel and Hamas, academic programs and federal investments it deemed waste and their introduction of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs to improve student and faculty life.

Hegseth noted in the statement about Harvard that DOD plans to evaluate all existing graduate education programs for active-duty members of the military at all Ivy League and other universities.

“The goal is to determine whether or not they actually deliver cost-effective strategic education for future senior leaders when compared to, say, public universities or our military graduate programs,” he said.