Trump claims Americans waiting ‘200 years’ for an arch
President Donald Trump says he is going to build the structure everyone has been waiting for.
“For 200 years they’ve wanted to build an (arch),” Trump said recently while traveling on Air Force One. “They have 57 cities throughout the world that have them. We’re the only major city — Washington, D.C. — that doesn’t.”
The president said there was, at one time, a plan to build an arch, but after constructing just four eagle statues, the project was derailed.
“It was interrupted by a thing called the Civil War, and so it never got built,” Trump said.
However, Trump’s history is a little off, according to The Associated Press. There are no records of Americans wanting to build an arch for nearly two centuries.
“Washington coming into the Civil War was still this unfinished city,” Georgetown University history professor Chandra Manning told the AP. “There’s no push for decorative memorialization in Antebellum Washington because it’s still such a place that doesn’t even have all the functional buildings it needs yet.”
Trump has said he would like the arch to “be the biggest one of all,” and it will be located near the Arlington Memorial Bridge which spans the Potomac River.
The White House sent the AP a photo of the four eagle statues at the corners of that bridge.
But that project wasn’t interrupted by the American Civil War, which ended in 1865. Plans for the Arlington Memorial Bridge were proposed in 1886, approved by Congress in 1925 and the bridge was built between 1926 and 1931.
Mamdani photos are AI
A social media post claims to show a photo of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a child, with his mother Mira Nair, and with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Mira Nair holding her baby Zohran Mamdani with Bill and Epstein. Yeah …. read that again….,” read the text on a Jan. 31 X post with a photo of a woman holding a baby, former President Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein, all posing in a tropical setting.
But this photo isn’t real. It was created using Artificial Intelligence, or AI, according to PolitiFact. It originated on a parody account and has since been shared.
Other fake photos from the same parody account, making the rounds on social media, include images supposedly of Mamdani as a child, attending events with Epstein, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
The photos all have a watermark, showing they were created using AI. The user from the account posting the fake images admitted the photos were not real or accurate.
“Damn you guys failed. I purposely made him a baby which would technically make this pic 34 years old. Yikes,” the user posted in a Jan. 31 X post.
Not fraud, temporary housing
A political commentator recently claimed, in a video from a Jan. 16 X post, that he had evidence of voter fraud in California.
“Twenty-six registered voters at this exact location, 100 Sunset Ave. in Venice,” Conservative commentator Benny Johnson said, while standing in a parking lot with portable toilets. “Straight-up voter fraud out in the open.”
Johnson said the evidence came from the registrar at the secretary of state.
But he’s not showing fraud, according to PolitiFact. He’s showing a parking lot where temporary housing once stood.
That lot, and the address cited by Johnson, was the location of a temporary housing facility called the Bridge Home. The home, which opened in 2020, provided shelter, hygiene services, food and case management to homeless people. The site closed Dec. 31, 2024.
“Under California law, eligible voters experiencing homelessness may register using a shelter as their physical location for voting,” Mike Sanchez, a Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder spokesperson, told PolitiFact. “This is not evidence of voter fraud.”
Sanchez said, there are currently 23 active voter records associated with that address.
Minneapolis Dylan mural is unchanged
A large mural of musician and Nobel Prize laureate Bob Dylan is displayed in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, honoring the Minnesota native.
But a recent social media post appeared to show much of the mural was painted over.
“In Minneapolis, a well-known graffiti mural was painted over overnight. The artwork showed an Iranian ayatollah alongside protesters’ message: ‘Iran please help us,’” read the text on the post.
Although one Dylan image was visible on the left side, and the words “The times they are a-changin’” on the right side, a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was added to the middle.
But this didn’t actually happen, according to Reuters. The original Dylan mural is still displayed on Hennepin Avenue.
The photo was altered to make it appear the artwork was defaced.
The colorful mural, highlighting different phases of Dylan’s career, was painted by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra in 2015.
• Bob Oswald is a veteran Chicago-area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News. Contact him at boboswald33@gmail.com.