This is an adapted excerpt from the March 30 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
On Monday morning, a 10-foot-tall golden toilet appeared at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., along with a plaque that reads “A throne fit for a king.”
“In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what really mattered: Remodeling the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House,” the plaque continued, adding that the giant toilet “stands as a tribute to an unwavering visionary who looked down, saw a problem, and painted it gold.”
A golden toilet sculpture sits on the National Mall on March 31, 2026. Heather Diehl / Getty Images
This weekend, that gold-toilet president was also the target of one of the largest single-day nationwide demonstrations in American history. Organizers estimate that more than 8 million Americans joined the third day of No Kings protests against Donald Trump in 10 months.
One of the places where the local press reported a steep increase in participation compared with previous anti-Trump and No Kings protests was in Hagerstown, Maryland, where an estimated 3,000 people took part in a demonstration at the public square.
In Hagerstown, the banner for the protest wasn’t just “No Kings,” it was “No Kings, No Camps.” Just outside that city, the administration has been trying to build one of its Trump prison camps, which would hold thousands of people without trial.
The grassroots group Maryland Coalition to Stop the Camps asked people to come from all over the state to Hagerstown to show opposition to the prison camp that Trump is trying to put there.
This piece of this story is worth watching right now, especially after Kristi Noem was ousted as homeland security secretary and a new guy, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, is taking over.
One of the things that has emerged about the warehouse purchases the administration has been making for its prison camps is that for some reason the government appears to have been eager to wildly overpay.
In Salt Lake City, the administration paid almost 50% more than the property appeared to be worth. It was assessed at $97 million, and the government paid more than $145 million. In Roxbury, New Jersey, one warehouse was assessed at $62 million, but the Trump administration came in and offered $129 million for it — more than double the cost. In Georgia, one of the properties valued last year at $26 million was purchased for $129 million.
On Friday, The Washington Post reported on an internal department memo that circulated last week, the day after Mullin was sworn in as the new head of Homeland Security. The memo reportedly said that the process of turning these warehouses into Trump prison camps was going to be slowed down and that the proposals for these facilities are going to be revised to start incorporating feedback from stakeholders — whatever that means — before they move ahead.