It is time for the Trump-appointed members of the Board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to be fired by Congress or to resign.
They have failed in their most fundamental duty, the duty to protect the function and reputation of the institution they serve.
Being a board member is not a perk. It’s a responsibility.
Above all, board members are responsible to safeguard the institution.
Before Trump, the Center had a bipartisan board and a nonpartisan reputation. It was dedicated to celebrating the best of American art and culture.
One doesn’t become a board member to destroy the reputation of an institution.
One doesn’t become a board member to destroy the finances of an institution.
The Kennedy Center was built as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. He had a singular interest in the arts. He frequently invited artists and poets to speak and perform in the White House.
The board of the Kennedy Center appointed by Trump has been slavishly devoted to turning the memorial into a center honoring both Trump and Kennedy.
They violated their oath and their fiduciary duty from the beginning.
Their rank politicization of the Center drove artists and performers away. It drove away the Washington National Opera. It drove the National Symphony Orchestra to financial ruin.
It drove away the audiences who loved the Center and never thought of it as a partisan performance space. Ticket sales plummeted.
The board fought in the courts to keep Trump’s name on memorial, where it did not belong.
The Trump board repeatedly lost in court; a federal judge concluded that Congress named the Center and only Congress could change its name.
So the board has now decided to close the Center, and Trump has said he will block funding for the Center’s renovation unless his name is put on the facade. He wants to share the Kennedy memorial.
It is not his to share, anymore than the Lincoln Memorial or the Jefferson Memorial.
The board has joined Trump in desecrating the Kennedy Center.
The members of the board appointed by Trump are responsible for this mess.
Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.
I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX
There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.
Shocked. Absolutely shocked.
The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis
Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.
For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.
The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.
Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.
The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.
Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.
The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories
Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:
Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.
Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told
Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion
Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated
The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.
That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.
$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh
And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.
Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.
Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.
To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.
The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?
The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure
Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.
The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:
Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data
They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.
None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.
The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:
Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.
The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.
The Bottom Line
The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.
Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.
The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.
Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.
All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.
Heather Cox Richardson sums up the sickening feeling that many of us have about the Trump-Musk alliance and their efforts to torpedo the November midterm elections. Musk has corrupted our politics with the vast amounts of money he spends to elect far-right politicians. Most of his wealth comes from government contracts, and he wants to maintain his friends in office. You have to wonder how a man who celebrated the killing of US AID, leading to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, can sleep at night. Did he enter the U.S. legally?
She writes:
On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk.
When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks, posting: “If we take on responsibility here, I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation. Germany would then once again be a place worth investing in. Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt!”
Jon Henley of the Guardian noted that right-wing leaders across Europe celebrated the outcome, including ousted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who called the election results “a huge night for Germany and Europe,” adding: “Buckle up. This is just the beginning.”
Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 U.S. elections, putting around $290 million into the 2024 election to help elect President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. On August 28, Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he considered investing at least $100 million to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.
Since that meeting, Musk has plowed money into the Texas Senate race to support Texas attorney general Ken Paxton against Democratic nominee James Talarico. According to Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times, Musk’s investments—many through political action committees—target Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as House races in at least California, Wisconsin, and Washington.
Musk’s open attempt to buy elections for the Republicans should be bigger news, not only because of the political power his money has given to one man, but also because of what his behavior says about the MAGA administration’s ideology and its goals.
After supporting Trump in 2024, Musk appeared to become the head of the Department of Government Efficiency—the administration was coy about who actually held that title—where he worked to slash government spending. On February 3, he posted on his social media: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk called USAID—the United States Agency for International Development—“a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America.”
In July 2026, Ari Daniel, David Augustine, Kazeem Olawale Nasiru, and Lameck Nyagudi of NPR reported on a study by Boston University infectious disease modeler Brooke Nichols that estimated more than 700,000 people had died from the sudden stop in USAID funding, including more than half a million children in developing countries.
And yet, for all his talk about slashing government expenditures, Musk’s DOGE did not appear to save much. Emilio Perez Ibarguen of Politico reported in August, when DOGE officially ended, that a report by the Government Accountability Office found that the savings it claimed were in large part exaggerated or couldn’t be corroborated.
Meanwhile, government contracts continued to flow to Musk’s businesses. As Desmond Butler, Trisha Thadani, Emmanuel Martinez, Aaron Gregg, Luis Melgar, Jonathan O’Connell, and Dan Keating reported in the Washington Post in February 2025, Musk himself has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in history, taking in at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the course of more than 20 years. Once he was in power in Trump 2.0, government investigations into those businesses ended.
The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires. In July, economist Paul Krugman noted a growing backlash against those billionaires. A poll by UMass Amherst found that 58% of Americans think billionaires are a threat to democracy, and 45% of them say the U.S. is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” As Krugman noted, only 28% of those polled disagreed.
Krugman pointed out that wealth has been concentrating at the top of the U.S. economy for decades, so the growing wave against that concentration of wealth appears to be driven by those like Musk and Trump himself, who has flaunted his use of taxpayer money for his own interests while dismissing the pain of regular Americans.
This flow of taxpayer dollars to favored businesses rather than to programs that serve the needs of the people seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the Trump administration and reflects its rejection of democracy in favor of the right-wing axis of authoritarianism.
Last night, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal published a deep investigation into the machinations of Corey Lewandowski when his colleague Kristi Noem was secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They report that Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager for part of 2016, appeared to offer aid to foreign countries navigating U.S. bureaucracy in the department for a fee, selling government services for his own gain.
The journalists also report that Lewandowski may have been involved in awarding government contracts improperly, an accusation covered in a November 14, 2025, article by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security an additional $75 billion to spend during Trump’s term on deportations, detention facilities, and technology, providing deep pockets for corruption.
While the administration appears to have sidelined Noem and Lewandowski since Noem resigned under pressure in March, the journalists say Lewandowski “has told people close to him he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case.”
Lewandowski responded on social media that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again. We’ve lived through the Russia collusion hoax the fake Birthday card and countless other sensational allegations that ultimately failed to withstand scrutiny. I’m tremendously proud of my work as a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda and remain confident that the facts and not anonymous accusations will ultimately speak for themselves.”
But, of course, every official investigation into the 2016 election, including the one conducted by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee and unanimously adopted, agreed that Russia did work to get Trump elected in 2016. And while Trump claims he did not create the birthday card to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently bearing Trump’s signature on a drawing of a nude girl that was produced by the Epstein estate, the story was convincing enough that it helped to push Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the first case he brought against the Wall Street Journal for publishing the story was dismissed. A second case is pending.
There is, in fact, increasing pushback against the world Musk and Trump are trying to put into place instead of liberal democracy. In the U.S., the growing opposition to data centers, which seems to represent anger at the very wealthy tech bros who want to call the shots, is perhaps a sign of the direction the wind in the U.S. is blowing.
Whether that popular pressure can withstand the extraordinary amounts of money Musk and other right-wing billionaires are pouring into the midterms is unclear. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that Musk is funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government.
Instead, Musk’s campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status, among other information.
Legum reports that the privacy policy of the website “allows [Musk’s super PAC] America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.” America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”
A new documentary about Musk by filmmaker Alex Gibney argues, as Steven Zeitchik of the Hollywood Reporter put it, that Musk is “a dangerous huckster [who] is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data.” The documentary, called Musk, notes that, under Musk, DOGE had access to federal IT systems and, as Zeitchik recalls, a whistleblower warned that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive data from the Social Security Administration.
Zeitchik reports on the onscreen comments of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” who said: “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
In Europe, in the wake of the rise of the AfD, German defense minister Boris Pistorius said today that Germany will send missiles to Ukraine to help it fight off a winter incursion from Russia.
In Florida, a couple were arrested and charged for keeping their four grandchildren confined in a truck for six years and allowing them to be sexually abused during their long confinement.
The good news (sarcasm) is that they homeschooled the children by enrolling them in Khan Academy online classes.
Did the couple know they were eligible for $32,000 in voucher payments to pay for all their educational expenses from the state of Florida? Maybe they did and were collecting. Why pay for the Khan Academy classes when the state will pick up the bill?
A grandmother and her fiancé are accused of trapping four children for six years inside a semi truck’s cab, where the children endured sexual abuse, malnutrition and neglect, prosecutors in Florida said on Tuesday.
Starting in 2019, the victims, two girls and two boys who now range in age from 11 to 15, slept on a top bunk without all fitting on the mattress, the authorities said in an arrest warrant. They urinated in a plastic cup and defecated in a grocery bag, the warrant said.
One child scarred her hand permanently when hot noodles burned her, and she was not taken to the hospital, the warrant said. One girl contracted a sexually transmitted infection, the warrant said.
“This is just straight evil, and a scourge on our society,” Mark Glass, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said during a news conference held on Tuesday.
The ordeal began when Ms. Epps and her fiancé, Tamra Marshon Stewart, 37, of Jacksonville, Fla., traveled with the children from Atlanta to Miami, James Uthmeier, the state’s attorney general, said during the news conference. Ms. Epps was a licensed semi truck driver, Mr. Williams said.
The couple served as primary caregivers for the children, and they all lived inside the truck’s cab.
The cab included two seats for a driver and a passenger, a bunk bed, a refrigerator, a microwave and a space for storage all packed into tight quarters, the authorities said in the arrest warrant.
“This was a prison, a rolling prison,” Mr. Uthmeier said.
One of the girls, who is now 12, said Mr. Stewart had touched her inappropriately every day for two years, the authorities said. She said her grandmother knew what was happening to her, and in one instance pretended to be asleep, according to the arrest warrant.
Mr. Stewart furnished the other girl, now 11, with candy and money after sexual encounters in an effort to keep her quiet, according to the arrest warrant. The victim “said it didn’t work,” the warrant said.
A 15-year-old boy confronted Mr. Stewart, calling him a pedophile and a child molester, according to the arrest warrant from the state’s attorney general office. Mr. Stewart punched the victims after the dispute, according to an arrest warrant filed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
The children did not attend school while with Ms. Epps and Mr. Stewart and instead used Khan Academy, a website with educational videos that is not accredited, the authorities said.
Trump is clearly bitter that his name is not on the Kennedy Center facade. The tarp that covers the original name still hangs, hiding the humiliation of Trump’s name removal.
Last week he cut down 40 weeping willow trees on the Center grounds, which symbolized a grieving nation, grieving for the assassinated President Kennedy.
This week, the Kennedy Center is removing a piece of outdoor art called “Blue,” which was installed in 2019. The artist, Joel Shapiro, thought it was a permanent installation.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts began removing a major outdoor sculpture from the center’s grounds on Wednesday. The work, installed in 2019, was targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.
The Kennedy Center made no advance announcement of its plans to remove the towering, vivid blue metal sculpture of a stick-like human figure, called “Blue.”
On Wednesday morning, the limbs and torso of the figure were wrapped in protective material; an arm was the first to be removed.
The Kennedy Center confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that the sculpture was being deinstalled and that a foundation dedicated to the artist would determine its next location. It did not say the reason for the removal but noted that the deinstallation of artworks that had been donated or lent was common practice for conservation or preservation purposes.
A news release from around the debut of “Blue” describes it as a permanent sculpture for the grounds.
“We are deeply grateful to Joel Shapiro for the years ‘Blue’ has spent animating our campus and connecting visitors to his vision,” the statement said. “We are honored to have been stewards of his vibrant work and a part of his enduring legacy.”
Mr. Shapiro died in 2025. His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, who is president of his foundation, said in an interview that she thought her father would have been “alarmed” that the sculpture was being taken down from its intended location.
“In Joel’s mind, it was one of his greatest site-specific commissions, which celebrated joy, freedom and creativity,” she said.
Ms. Shapiro declined to discuss what she was told about the Kennedy Center’s reasoning for removing the sculpture. Her father had given it to the center as a gift, but she said that it was now owned by the foundation, and that she would like to see it installed at another public site.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Josef Palermo, who was laid off in March as the curator of visual arts and special programming at the Kennedy Center, wrote in an essay for The Atlantic that he had been instructed to remove works from the center’s permanent art collection, and told that Mr. Trump’s renovations would include new art.
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Palermo recalled that “Blue” had been “targeted early on” and said he took issue with the lack of an announcement.
“The Kennedy Center,” he said, “is in effect holding these pieces in trust for the American people, and there should be a lot more transparency.”
The sculpture is on the grounds of the Reach, an addition to the Kennedy Center that opened in 2019. The sculpture was completed that same year by Mr. Shapiro, whose public art is found in cities around the world. One of his most prominent works is a tree-like bronze sculpture, called “Loss and Regeneration,” that is situated outside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
“Blue,” which is visible from the Potomac and roads traversing the Kennedy Center, has become a local landmark. In a video about the work that was posted by the Kennedy Center around the time of its debut, Mr. Shapiro said he designed it so the figure would appear in different positions depending on the vantage point of the viewer.
“It’s about action and risk and performance and energy,” he said of the work. “It’s a celebration of possibility.”
Of course, Trump had to remove a sculpture that celebrated “Joy, freedom, and creativity.” These are qualities that Trump has never experienced and does not appreciate.
Will it be replaced by a statue of Trump? Gold, of course.
The New York Times published a deeply disturbing article about the e billionaires who are pumping huge sums into the 2026 midterm elections and about dark money vehicles some use to hide their influence.
I am giving you free access to the articles: no pay walls.
This one shows who they are: “Meet the Megadonors.” Most are Republicans, tech entrepreneurs, and crypto kings.
In 2002, Senator John McCain of Arizona (R) and Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin (D) sponsored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly called the McCain–Feingold Act.
Its central purpose was to reduce the influence of large, unregulated political contributions.
It banned national political parties from raising or spending unlimited “soft money.” It restricted corporations and labor unions from financing certain broadcast political advertisements immediately before elections.it I ncreased disclosure requirements, and it raised some limits on direct contributions to candidates.
McCain-Feingold passed the Senate 60-40 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush.
The Supreme Court initially upheld most of it.
In 2003, McConnell v. FEC, the Supreme Court upheld the central provisions—including the restrictions on soft money and electioneering communications.
Then the Court gradually dismantled important parts.
In 2007, in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, the Supreme Court restricted the government’s ability to regulate certain issue advertisements.
In 2008, the Supreme Court (in Davis v. FEC) struck down the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment,” which raised the limits of campaign funding for individuals running against a wealthy, self-financing candidate. That attempt to level the financial playing field was eliminated by the Court.
And then came the big decision that ripped the teeth out of campaign finance reform: Citizens United.
In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that corporations and unions have First Amendment protection to spend unlimited amounts independently to influence elections. This invalidated a major part of McCain–Feingold.
Citizens United, together with subsequent cases, helped produce the modern system of unlimited independent expenditures and Super PACs.
We are now in the era of Citizens United, the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that negated most limits on political spending.
Why did the U.S. Supreme Court swerve sharply against campaign finance reform?
John Roberts was appointed to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 2005 by President George W. Bush. He formed a 5-4 majority with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito,
Trump’s lawyers yesterday threatened to demolish the Kennedy Center if he is not allowed to close it for two years and renovate it. His “expertise” as a builder makes him uniquely qualified to rebuild the Kennedy Center, his lawyers said.
He forgets that his full-time job is President. He has no time to manage construction, although he is very good at destruction. In New York City, he was never known as a “master builder.” He cut corners. He hired undocumented workers to save money. He stiffed subcontractors.
When he built Trump Tower, he saved money by not installing fire detectors. An apartment owner died a few years ago because he didn’t get out in time no fire detector or smoke alarm). He promised to donate the elegant friezes at the front of Bonwit Teller to the Metropolitan Museum, but he demolished these priceless items because it would cost too much to preserve them.
After he became President in January 2025, Trump has been determined to remake the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into one of his possessions.
He fired the bipartisan board and replaced it with his trusted associates. His board immediately named him chairman of the board and voted to put his name on the building, which was named in 1964 to honor the memory of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
In response to the addition of Trump’s name, performers and major productions began canceling, the Washington National Opera moved out, and ticket sales sharply declined. The Center’s revenues plummeted.
The board’s response to the wreckage they created was to propose to close the Center for two years for renovations.
Joyce Beatty, a board member and a member of Congress from Ohio, sued to restore the building’s original name and to prevent the board from closing it for two years. She prevailed in court, and a federal judge ordered the board to remove Trump’s name from the building, the website and all other places and to stop plans to close the Center without providing a reasonable explanation.
In court yesterday, the Trump administration’s lawyer said that the President would demolish the building if he was not allowed to close it and renovate it.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will eventually have to be demolished unless President Donald Trump is allowed to save it, Justice Department lawyers representing the center argued in a court filing posted late Monday.
The center, which the lawyers described as “structurally unsound, fundamentally unsafe, and embarrassing to the Nation’s Capital,” faces “terminal decline” without Trump’s experience as a real estate developer and fundraising prowess, assistant attorney general Brett Shumate and two other department lawyers wrote.
“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” Shumate wrote. It could be replaced by a structure “such as a large outdoor amphitheater,” he added.
Trump is a big baby. If he can’t put his name on the Kennedy memorial, he will tear down the Center altogether, as he tore down the East Wing of the White House without seeking permission to do so. He is determined to put his name on the Kennedy Center, and the board recently voted to try again.
He is a model of stolen honor. The world knows that he is obsessed with Obama and Biden, but neither of them has a monument that Trump can deface. Next best: Put his name on Kennedy’s memorial center. He was admired, revered, and idolized as Trump has never been and never will be. So, of course, Trump has to slap his name on the Kennedy Center.
What else will Trump rename to honor himself? The Lincoln-Trump Memorial? The Washington-Trump Monument?
Julie K. Brown is the reporter at the Miami Herald who broke the Jeffrey Epstein case wide open. She wrote a series in the newspaper revealing the cover-up of Epstein’s criminal activities called “Perversion of Justice.”
The newspaper says this about her series:
In her year-long investigation of Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown tracked down more than 60 women who said they were victims of abuse and revealed the full story behind the sweetheart deal cut by Epstein’s powerhouse legal team. Since the Herald published ‘Perversion of Justice’ in November 2018, a federal judge ruled the non-prosecution agreement brokered by then Florida U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta was illegal, and on July 6 Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in New York state. On July 12, Acosta resigned as U.S. Secretary of Labor. And on Aug. 10, Epstein died by suicide in his Manhattan jail cell. Investigative journalism makes a difference.
Last week, a federal court in Manhattan ordered the release of the voluminous case files from Virginia’s Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell.
The release of these files was in part the result of eight years of litigation by the Miami Herald and its parent company, McClatchy, which have been fighting for the material since I published my series “Perversion of Justice,” in 2018.
Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Judge Loretta Preska rejected Maxwell’s final arguments
to keep the files sealed, noting that the passage last year of the Epstein Files Transparency Act superseded any earlier grand jury arguments that Maxwell was using to keep the records from the public.
What does this mean, and what new information will we learn?
First some history. Virginia brought this defamation lawsuit against Maxwell back in 2015, after Maxwell publicly proclaimed that Virginia was a liar who had made up her allegations of being sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, Maxwell and other powerful men (including Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the former Prince Andrew.)
Giuffre, represented by the Boies-Schiller firm, sued Maxwell for defamation, asserting that she faced “public ridicule, contempt, and disgrace” when Maxwell went public with her statements. As part of the lawsuit, the lawyers gathered tens of thousands of pages of discovery, including depositions by Giuffre, Maxwell and dozens of other people. Part of the effort also involved Dershowitz, who together with social media influencer Michael Chernovich, tried unsuccessfully to unseal portions of the Giuffre-Maxwell case while it was still being litigated.
The lawsuit was settled in early 2017. I had been told the discovery contained damning evidence against Epstein, Maxwell and other men, and that it was worth trying to get the courts to unseal the documents on the grounds that they were never properly sealed in the first place.
Judicial records by law are supposed to be open to the public. In this case, the former judge (Robert Sweet, now deceased) issued a blanket sealing on all the documents because they contained “sensitive” and “private” information. Sweet placed a protective order on massive amounts of material, including hearings and judicial decisions made in the case — and voluminous evidence that Virginia presented to show that Epstein and Maxwell were operating an underage sex trafficking operation.
This is not the way sealing is supposed to happen, however. Each document that the lawyers want sealed has to be examined, and those requesting it be sealed must provide legal justification to the judge for doing so. This wasn’t done in this case.
Nearly all the evidence that Virginia’s lawyers uncovered about Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking that came out during this civil case was kept secret.
Maxwell settled the case before it could go to trial, however — and paid Virginia somewhere in the neighborhood of $3-5 million. By settling it, she thought that all the evidence about her involvement would remain under seal.
But I convinced my editors to ask our lawyers to file a motion to intervene in the case in order to unseal the files.
An appeals court eventually ruled in our favor, and on August 9, 2019, thousands of pages were made public, including sworn statements by Virginia in which she alleged she was trafficked to Dershowitz, who represented Epstein; former Prince Andrew; former Maine Sen. George Mitchell; former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin; hotel magnate Tom Pritzker; the late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky. All of the men denied that they were involved with Giuffre.
Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell the following morning. …
This is only the opening of her post. The rest is behind a paywall. But the bottom line is that the release of the Maxwell files will add lots of fuel to the Epstein fire.
Heather Cox Richardson is masterful at analyzing the important events of recent days and putting them into perspective. Trump now has firm control of the Justice Department, since his personal defense attorney has been confirmed as Attorney General of the United States. The department will brazenly reflect the President’s agenda and diligently persecute and prosecute his political enemies. Expect that the Justice Department will have a task force devoted to proving that Trump won the election of 2020 and another one seeking ways to exonerate and compensate the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
After his confirmation, Blanche said that there were people who were absolutely harmed by a “weaponized” Department of Justice, and both he and Trump want to “make them whole” to compensate for their sufferings.
I responded on Twitter:
“Is it now legal to break into the U.S. Capitol, beat up police, and disrupt Congressional proceedings?”
On Monday, August 10, Todd Blanche took the oath of office as attorney general, administered by federal appeals court judge Emil Bove, another of Trump’s defense lawyers before moving to the Department of Justice, where he was Blanche’s top deputy. In that capacity, CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz recalled, he fired career prosecutors and pushed Trump’s takeover of the department.
Using Bove to swear in Blanche looked like a victory lap for the Trump team. Although the press was excluded, two other Trump loyalists, FBI director Kash Patel and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, attended Blanche’s swearing-in.
Retired conservative judge J. Michael Luttig told MS NOW: “Todd Blanche now becomes the symbol of Donald Trump’s corruption of the rule of law in America and the actual ruin of the Department of Justice of the United States. This is another shameful act of acquiescence, if not obeisance, by the Senate Republicans; they will bear this badge of shame the rest of their lives.
Never before in American history has an attorney general been confirmed who was as corrupt as Todd Blanche. The Department of Justice is already in shambles.”
“And,” Luttig added, “he will further ruin the Department of Justice.”
As soon as he took office, Blanche issued a memo dramatically expanding executive privilege, which he described as the authority of the president to “withhold certain sensitive information for the public good.” Executive privilege has enabled the president to shield conversations with key advisors from public scrutiny with the logic that a president must be able to get a wide range of advice, given freely, by those in the executive branch.
Now, though, the Department of Justice under Blanche says the president can shield “presidential communications with private advisers so long as the communications relate to official presidential decisionmaking.” The memo defines as a “private adviser” “anyone the President consults outside the Executive Branch.” As John Light of Talking Points Memo notes, this definition would enable the White House to defy congressional subpoenas for anyone to whom the president talks.
As Avery Lotz of Axios reports, Democrats had been planning to begin investigations of Trump’s corruption if they retake control of the House and/or the Senate. Recognizing that the White House would stonewall them, they intended to subpoena companies, college officials, and private citizens to testify. The memo, which is not legally binding but which indicates the administration’s position, would hamper that effort.
Lotz notes that the administration is already fighting a subpoena in a lawsuit filed by the American Bar Association that orders Trump’s senior personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, to testify about the deals the Trump administration struck with major law firms early in his second term.
Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) wrote: “This latest opinion should be seen as a partisan measure to insulate the president and his corrupt activities from Congressional subpoenas when the majority flips.”
Thursday was the day that Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held a status conference in the case of Phang v. Blanche. This is a lawsuit brought by independent journalist Katie Phang to force the Department of Justice to produce unredacted versions of documents from the Epstein files that she says were redacted against the explicit instructions in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. With that law, Congress ordered the Department of Justice to release all the files gathered by the FBI investigation into sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, with redactions only to protect victims, no later than December 19, 2025.
Almost eight months later, the Department of Justice has refused to do so, probably producing about half the files, with many of the documents heavily redacted at the same time that it released some of the victim’s names, photographs, and identifying information.
As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in her Civil Discourse, Phang sued in April for access to an unredacted version of a handful of files, including emails about a “torture video” and sexual activity with girls, as well as notes from FBI interviews with a victim who claims Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13 and materials in foreign languages, which the Department of Justice has not produced at all. She also asked the Department of Justice to explain why they made the redactions they did, something the law requires but the Justice Department has not done.
In late June, Sullivan granted Phang’s request.
But the Department of Justice under then–acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who interviewed Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell shortly before she was transferred to a far less restrictive prison that should have been inaccessible to a sex offender, did not turn over those documents.
So, in July, Sullivan ordered the government to turn over the unredacted documents to him so he could review them himself to see if the decision by the Department of Justice not to release them was correct. Once again, the Department of Justice refused. As for an explanation for why the department hadn’t explained the decisions to redact, the Justice Department lawyer told the judge the process was “underway” but couldn’t say when it would be done or why translating documents in foreign languages wasn’t practical. He claimed the materials the department is withholding are simply duplicates of things that have been released, but offered no proof of that assertion.
Ultimately, as Vance explains, Sullivan asked: ““So you’re saying I’ve learned everything I’m going to learn from the government?” The lawyer for the Department of Justice, Andrew Block, answered: “That’s right.”
Sullivan wasn’t satisfied. “The public has a right to know what the hell is going on in this case. The victims have a right to know. The court has a right to know. The law is still in full force and effect. The court is just ensuring compliance.”
To make it clear he was being reasonable, in expectation of a review from a higher court, Sullivan repeatedly told Block he was willing to work with the department, but warned that he had held prosecutors in contempt of court in the past. Sullivan gave Phang’s lawyers 10 days to propose an order to deal with the failure of the Department of Justice to comply with his orders to produce the files Phang requested.
The administration is also undermining another popular law. This week, under Trump, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the Treasury Department not only ended the registry Congress set up in 2021 over Trump’s veto to make shell companies identify their owners, but also destroyed all the data it has already collected.
FinCEN combats money laundering. Congress set up the Corporate Transparency Act after documents leaked to BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2020 found that between 1999 and 2017, banks had flagged more than $2 trillion in potentially laundered money, moved by criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria through shell companies. These are legal entities that don’t have physical plants or operations, but can be used for holding and moving money.
Shell companies also meant that the political system in the U.S. was awash in secrecy. “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” one Democrat reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.” One of the documents flagged how much Russian money was flowing into the U.S. in 2016 through Deutsche Bank.
The U.S. was the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company enabling them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes—Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from taking the story of her sexual encounter with Trump public before the 2016 election. So Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act to undercut the shell companies that enabled money laundering in America.
The act required the owners of any company that was not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, would go to FinCEN. The measure also increased penalties for money laundering and streamlined cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.
The plan was to pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. The measure passed on a bipartisan basis; then-senator Marco Rubio of Florida, now secretary of state, co-sponsored it, calling it the “most significant anti-corruption and money laundering law in decades.”
Now the Treasury Department says it will not collect the information the law requires, raising the question of whether the Trump administration is openly refusing to implement a law.
One of Donald Trump’s first acts when he returned to the Presidency was to take full control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. During his first term in office, Trump never attended any event at the Kennedy Center.
In 2025, Trump fired its board of directors, all except members of Congress, whom he can’t fire. He replaced the bipartisan board with his cronies, who promptly named Trump the chairman of the board. The board proceeded to fire the professionals who ran the Center and to adopt a resolution renaming the Center. Henceforward, the board decreed, the Center would be known as the John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts.
That decision led the Center into a spiral of decline. Many performers and shows cancelled. The Washington National Opera moved out. Ticket sales dropped.
The Kennedy Center suffered incalculable reputation damage after he politicized it. Why did he do it?
Despite his wealth and notoriety, Trump was never accepted into the world of high culture in New York City. He was never invited to serve on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, or any of the city’s other prestigious institutions of high culture. Nor was he known as a donor to those institutions.
He built his brand as a brash businessman who hung out in night clubs with mobsters and beautiful women and sought recognition in the gossip columns of the city’s tabloid press. He was rich, and he was a celebrity, but he was never admitted into elite circles.
His vendetta against the Kennedy Center should be seen in that perspective.
His puppet board at the Kennedy Center did his bidding. In addition to adding his name to the facade of the building, the board decided to close the Center for two years for repairs and renovations. The closure would halt the embarrassment of canceled performances and empty seats. Some critics worried that Trump would tear down the Center as he tore down the East Wing of the White House. Act fast and don’t apologize.
One board member, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio, sued to stop the board’s decision to rename the Center and also to close it for two years for Trump-directed “renovations.”
U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled on May 29, 2026, that the Kennedy Center board did not have the legal authority to rename the institution. He said that Congress had established the name by statute and only Congress could change it. He ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the building and from all official Kennedy Center materials. Judge Cooper gave the board a deadline of 14 days.
The Kennedy Center board considered an appeal to delay or reverse the order but ultimately complied. Workers began on June 12 to erect scaffolding in front of the building, moving at a snail’s pace, and began removing Trump’s name at 1:20 a.m. on June 13.
Since then, the facade of the building that shows its name has been covered by white tarps.
At first, Trump petulantly said that Congress should run the Kennedy Center, but he soon reverted to control mode.
On August 13, 2026, the Kennedy Center board voted to put Trump’s name back on the building. It wants to add an inscription saying the center was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” despite Judge Cooper’s earlier ruling. And it voted to name the large plaza in front of the Center for Trump. It also voted to close the Center for two years, which Judge Cooper said it could not do without more detailed plans and reasons.
Congresswoman Joyce Beatty is suing to reverse the board’s defiance of Judge Cooper’s May 29 decision.
At the same time, the Trump administration is appealing Judge Cooper’s original order.
Judge Cooper could hold the board in contempt of court. Or he could order them not to change the name, as he did in May. Or he could accept the new wording for the facade, which seems unlikely. Or the board could challenge Judge Cooper’s decision to higher courts. Or Congress could step in and rewrite the statute so that Trump could add his name.
Why is the board so insistent on honoring Trump? His hand-picked President Richard Grennell praised Trump for “his visionary leadership.” Board members appointed by him have lavished praise on him.
Trump needs this sycophantic behavior. At his Cabinet meetings, Cabinet secretaries mouth the same obsequious language, stoking his ego, which is insatiable.
Why does this squabble over the Kennedy Center even matter? The U.S. is stuck in a war with Iran that has caused loss of life, depleted our supply of weapons, and harmed the global economy by limiting the flow of oil.
But Trump is deeply engaged in his vanity projects, of which this is one. He is obsessed with his ballroom, which has been stopped by the courts temporarily but is under construction. He assumes it will be known as “the Donald J. Trump Ballroom” forever. He intends to build a 250′ triumphal Arch, despite overwhelming public opposition. He ripped out Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden and paved it over.
He’s doing something to the portico of the White House, but it is hidden by huge shrouds. He is installing a permanent helipad on the White House grounds. He is renovating the Lincoln Bedroom into who-knows-what. He wants to paint the historic grey granite Eisenhower Office Building white, although preservationists have warned him against it (the paint won’t last and it is likely to damage the granite).
All of this is about leaving a permanent mark on D.C. He was not engaged in vanity projects during his first term. Now, at the age of 80, aware of his mortality, he is obsessed by his passion to create a permanent legacy.
Of the many monuments in Washington, D.C., that honor presidents–the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center–all were created after the honoree was dead.
Perhaps Trump, who is deeply insecure despite his braggadocio, is afraid he won’t be honored after his death. He remains angry that he never was accepted into the top ranks of New York City’s elite. They treated him like scum. That may be why he is so intent on building Trump monuments while he can.
Act first, get permission later from commissions packed with your flunkies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 