The ageing protesters trying to topple Washington’s “ego arch” Donald Trump has energised his fellow boomers in opposition June 11th 2026 WHO SAYS 70 is too old to raise hell? Not Susan Douglas. Boomers like her are the backbone of the resistance to Donald Trump—the median age of No Kings protest organisers around the country is 67. His schemes to remodel the capital keep them busy. Recently her group held a three-day vigil near the site of his planned triumphal arch. They did a “resistance dance” and sang along with a “rapid-response choir”. Then they descended on a meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), a zoning board tasked with reviewing the project, to avail themselves of the opportunity for public comment—and give Mr Trump’s lackeys on the committee an earful.
At 250 feet (76m) high, the arch is ostensibly meant to commemorate America’s semiquincentennial. The president revealed its true intent when, asked last year what it would memorialise, he replied “Me”. That the form recalls a passé imperial aesthetic was not lost on anyone at the NCPC meeting: a near-competitor, height-wise, sits in the North Korean capital. Commentators called Mr Trump’s iteration an “ego arch” and “silly silliness”. Ms Douglas declared herself “horrified!” Perhaps even more than its campy style, it is the arch’s proposed site that is unsettling its opponents. Mr Trump wants to put it in Memorial Circle, a roundabout on the axis that connects the Lincoln memorial to Arlington cemetery, where 400,000 veterans and their spouses are buried. Above that cemetery lies the mansion where Robert E. Lee lived before he defected to lead the Confederate army. The direct view between his old stomping ground and the memorial to the man who freed the slaves was a deliberate choice by city planners in the 20th century: a symbol of reunification after the civil war. Mr Trump’s monument-to-me would be a 25-storey obstruction of that sight-line. Moreover, the approach to Arlington is meant to be sombre and reflective, not triumphal, as Holly Berkley Fletcher, a historian, noted at the NCPC meeting. A victory arch rather misses the point of memorialising veterans. The reason to honour them is not because they “won” anything but rather because they sacrificed themselves, says Bryan Green, an architectural historian. By law Congress is supposed to approve memorials near the Mall. Mr Trump’s excuse to bypass lawmakers is to cite an authorisation granted in 1925 to build two slender columns, each 166 feet high, in roughly the same spot. Herbert Hoover scrapped that plan. David Scott Parker, a preservationist, likens the unbuilt columns to candlesticks framing your view across a dinner table—whereas Mr Trump’s arch is a giant wedding-cake centrepiece “which is quite something else”. Mr Trump’s builders intend to make the arch out of cast concrete and clad it in granite. A structure so heavy will require months just to prepare the foundation. Courts will probably block the project before then—a judge is weighing whether to do just that, in a lawsuit brought by veterans. Mr
Trump’s other building projects, from the White House ballroom to the renovation of the Kennedy Centre, have been held up in court too. Commentators at the NCPC acknowledged as much. “The question before you commissioners today, then, is not the future of the arch,” implored one. “It’s your personal legacy.” Unpersuaded, the commissioners advanced the proposal by a vote of 9-1. Then Mr Trump thanked them on social media; they reposted his post; and Ms Douglas and her crew went to plot their next move.■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/08/the-ageing-protesters-trying- to-topple-washingtons-ego-arch
Should priests have to report child abuse disclosed in confession? American states take different approaches June 11th 2026 TRAVEL THROUGH central Europe and you will eventually come across one of thousands of statues of a man on a bridge with his finger pointing to his tongue. According to lore, John of Nepomuk, a 14th-century clergyman, heard the queen of Bohemia’s confession, only for the jealous king to ask him to divulge his wife’s secrets. When he refused, the king had him drowned. Poor John was martyred for one of Catholicism’s most sacred tenets: the absolute seal of confession. Six centuries later, tight-lipped priests are once again being tested—this time by state legislatures. State laws govern which adults are required to report child abuse that they learn about on the job. In most places teachers, doctors,
therapists and camp counsellors have to tell the police and can face fines or even jail time if they don’t. As part of a reckoning with the church’s recent history, more states have added clergy to the list. But this spring twin bills in Missouri and Vermont took it further. They aimed to scrap an exemption that allows priests to withhold information disclosed during confession. Policy on the matter is already a patchwork. Clergy everywhere in America enjoy some form of “penitent privilege”, which broadly shields conversations that take place in a spiritual context from the courts. But states differ on whether the protection applies when it comes to child abuse. At least six states—New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and West Virginia—don’t recognise it in these cases or override it, as the new bills aim to. Others, such as California and South Carolina, preserve it narrowly by exempting a priest who learns about a crime during confession but not while teaching a class, for example, or when a perpetrator confesses rather than a victim. That inconsistency of rules has ignited a battle between child-safety advocates and religious-liberty lawyers. Under Catholic doctrine, “breaking the seal” of confession is one of the worst offences a priest can commit. Because a spiller of secrets is automatically excommunicated and referred to Rome for discipline, mandated reporting puts American clergy in a bind. “Practically, you have all these priests who will have to make a choice between violating canon law and violating civil law,” says Kurt Martens of the Catholic University of America. A band of right-wing lawyers saw a constitutional problem in that. When Washington state passed a similar bill last year, they argued that it violated the First Amendment’s protection of exercising religion. Their case hinged on a contradiction: if uncovering child abuse was important enough to justify burdening religious practice, how could the state exempt lawyers from the same reporting mandate? (What clients confess to their lawyers can remain secret.) “If you provide any exceptions to your rule, then by definition under Supreme Court precedent you don’t have a compelling interest,” says Hiram Sasser, who argued for the First Liberty Institute. The Department of Justice joined the lawsuit last June and a judge temporarily ruled against Washington state. Its lawyers chose not to appeal.
Marci Hamilton, who founded the CHILD USA think-tank, finds their argument legally indefensible. She believes that the state has an overriding interest in protecting children—and that the church’s defence of the confessional privilege is hypocritical, given that it has received thousands of abuse reports over the past 25 years and mishandled them. (To make matters worse, many cases of priests abusing children happened in the confession box.) “If they are permitted to continue to keep the secrets, then we’re conceding that a certain amount of child sex abuse simply will not be prevented,” she says. Victims of clerical abuse say the confessional can be a place for uncovering crimes that would otherwise go undetected. A seven-year-old boy entering the box may well have internalised sexual abuse as his own sin and confess it as such, says Peter Isely, who was raped by his “spiritual director” while at boarding school. “I felt—and he told me this—that I was making him do these things.” As the weather warmed and state legislative sessions ended, both the Missouri and Vermont bills died in committee, never reaching the chamber floor. Esme Cole, the Vermont lawmaker behind the bill, is not giving up. Child-safety advocates argue the defeats could mark a moment of peak influence for the religious right on the issue, and that the pendulum will swing back. Others are not so sure. “The church always wins,” says Mr Martens. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/06/05/should-priests-have-to-report- child-abuse-disclosed-in-confession
Social media is behind both “teen takeovers” and the outrage they fuel Cities struggle to respond to big gatherings of young folk June 11th 2026 On the evening of June 5th, a Friday, visitors to Foster Beach on the north side of Chicago may have assumed something big was happening. A dozen or more police squad cars parked up and cops milled around. The beach itself, however, was quiet, with only a handful of bathers. Many of Chicago’s beaches have been patrolled by large numbers of police over the past few weekends. The reason why is a fear of “teen takeovers”. That is when hundreds of young people, typically from poorer neighbourhoods, descend on one spot for a party. On the Memorial Day holiday weekend, two weeks earlier, a beach at Hyde Park in the South Side of the city was overrun. By the end of it three teenagers had been shot and