Trump to Give Kennedy Center Honor to Guy Who Hates His Guts

When Trump on Wednesday announced KISS as a Kennedy Center Honoree, the president called the rock band’s founding members, including bassist and vocalist Gene Simmons, “incredible people.”

The feeling doesn’t seem entirely mutual, as the KISS frontman (whom Trump fired on his reality show The Apprentice in 2008), is a vocal critic of Trump’s influence on U.S. politics.

While Simmons recalls being “happy” Trump announced his candidacy in 2015—and, in April 2016, then-candidate Trump thanked the rock star for his favorable comments—KISS turned down an invitation to play at Trump’s first inauguration. “In this polarizing era, it’s not a good idea,” Simmons said.

The musician apparently began to sour on the president some time during his first term, specifically due to his election lies, culminating in the January 6 Capitol riot.

Simmons’s mentions of Trump on Twitter largely consist of links to news stories about the Big Lie and his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout January 2021, Simmons frequently engaged with users propagating Trump’s claims about election fraud—debunking them, calling them “misinformed,” and urging them to do more research on the matter.

In August 2021, he spoke to Yahoo! Entertainment, and the conversation drifted toward Trump: “Look, we all lie to some extent,” he said, “but what happened in the last four years was just beyond anything I ever thought imaginable for people who have lots of power—not just him, but the administration, everybody … all these QAnon people.”

Regarding the importance of speaking one’s mind, Simmons added, “In a political dialogue, if somebody spews complete fiction and QAnon stuff, you want to be able to have somebody who says, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? What, do you just shit in your diapers and forget to wipe it?’”

In May 2022, Simmons told Spin that Trump made America more polarized and “got all the cockroaches to rise to the top. Once upon a time, you were embarrassed to be publicly racist and out there with conspiracy theories. Now it’s all out in the open because he allowed it.

“I don’t think he’s a Republican or a Democrat,” Simmons, who endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012, continued. “He’s out for himself, any way you can get there. And in the last election, over 70 million people bought it hook, line and sinker.”

In a November 2022 interview with Bill Maher, Simmons agreed with Maher that Trump “doesn’t understand how government works and doesn’t care to learn.” These past criticisms aside, Simmons was grateful for Wednesday’s recognition: “We are deeply honored to receive the Kennedy Center Honor,” he told TMZ.

The Trump administration and the aviation companies working for it have been purposely hiding the tail numbers on immigration flights to avoid public scrutiny and accountability, CNN reports. This move comes as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown ratchets up in frequency and aggression, as deportation flights are up 15 percent from last year.

A plane removing a tail number is the equivalent of a car removing a license plate. With the tail number, civilians, journalists, and immigration organizations alike can keep an eye on which deportation flights are leaving, and to where. It also helps loved ones track their deported family members.

The flights are run by multiple private charter companies and at least one commercial airline, each of which have lucrative contracts with ICE.

Flightradar24, one of the websites that covers immigration, noticed in March that those subcontractors requested that their tail numbers be hidden from public flight-tracking sites and records, making them extremely difficult to follow. The bulk of these flights are domestic, moving detainees from facility to facility.

“Flights operated on behalf of the United States government are often unidentified at the government’s request. As subcontractors to the United States government, we ask that you direct your questions to them,” said a spokesperson from Avelo Airlines, a company that has dedicated three of its planes to ICE deportations.

“This is vital information to be able to understand how ICE is conducting its enforcement and deportation activities,” ACLU National Prison Project senior counsel Eunice Cho told CNN. “Sometimes this is the only information that the public has with respect to where ICE is placing people because of a general lack of transparency around detention and deportation under this particular administration.”

The Department of Homeland Security has yet to comment.

Trump administration officials are offering blunt warnings for sanctuary cities: The democratically elected immigrant protection status does not matter.

Speaking with Fox News Wednesday, border czar Tom Homan spilled that Washington’s sanctuary city status was irrelevant now that the president had federalized the capital’s law enforcement.

“Does the fact that there’s National Guard now there—it’s a sanctuary city, like sanctuary cities across the country—but it’s unique in that it has federal control, and now you have the National Guard on the ground side by side with ICE. Does that combination basically negate the sanctuary city status in Washington, D.C.? At least for these 30 days, in terms of what you can do there, Tom?” asked host Martha MacCallum.

“Yes,” Homan said, plainly. “I think D.C. under federal control is not going to be a sanctuary city.

“We’re working with the police hand in hand, and when we encounter a criminal illegal alien, they will be turned over to ICE,” the former acting director of ICE continued. “And that’s the way it should be.

“I’m not saying every illegal alien in D.C. is a criminal. But many are,” Homan said. “There is no sanctuary for these people in the city of D.C.”

Washington’s City Council unanimously approved the Sanctuary Values Amendment Act in 2019, and Mayor Muriel Bowser signed the act into law that same year. But Bowser has worked to undo that legacy since Trump returned to the White House, attempting to repeal Washington’s sanctuary status law in a 300-page budget bill. In June, the D.C. City Council erased the language in the budget that would have killed the sanctuary law in the board’s effort to retain the designation.

But Washington isn’t the only sanctuary city in the hot seat. In late May, the Department of Homeland Security released a list of some 35 regions, including 13 states, that it considered to be “deliberately obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws and endangering American citizens.” The states included California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, in addition to the nation’s capital.

During a press conference Monday announcing the imminent takeover, Trump warned that several of America’s liberal bastions could experience the same fate, specifically calling out New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Oakland.

President Trump’s federal takeover of D.C. “doesn’t make a lot of sense” to D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, he told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing on Wednesday. The interview highlights how the ongoing militarization of the nation’s capital is not only an authoritarian power grab but also a theatrical farce.

Hodges—who was attacked while defending the Capitol building on January 6, 2021—noted that the troops Trump has stationed in D.C. are not exactly cut out for the job.

The National Guardsmen patrolling the city’s streets are not “in their lane,” said Hodges, citing his six-year stint as a member of the Virginia National Guard. “I can tell you that this is not what they’re trained to do,” Hodges said. “Soldiers are trained to fight and win wars. We’re not in a war out here in D.C. There’s crime out here, but it’s not a war-torn hellscape like Trump has said. The troops are not trained to do law enforcement.”

As for the officers from various federal agencies now policing Washington, he said, “I don’t think this is really their specialization either. So many of these federal officers are investigators. They’re supposed to be behind a desk, you know, working that way.” Rather than helping local police in the harsher areas of the city, Hodges said, “you’re going to see [the federal agents] standing around in Chinatown or on the [National] Mall or walking around Georgetown.” (Social media footage from the first few days of Trump’s takeover shows them doing just that.)

In the event that President Trump actually wants to help local law enforcement, Hodges offered some advice. For one, he said, the president could “actually allow D.C. to spend its own money.” D.C., after all, is currently still “in the hole” by about $1 billion due to Republican cuts to the city’s budget. Further, Hodges suggested, the Federal Emergency Management Agency could undo its recent 44 percent cut in assistance to the city’s security funding.

“So there are things that they can do to help us out that they’re not doing, and I would love to know why,” he said.

There’s apparently much more of the nonsense Hodges describes to come. Trump on Wednesday announced plans to extend the D.C. occupation beyond 30 days, at which point—though he will require congressional approval under the Home Rule Act—he’s vowed to do so even without Congress’s green light. And the capital is apparently just a testing ground, as the president suggests he’ll bring similar crackdowns to cities across the country.

President Trump was accidentally caught in one of his favorite lies: that he finished the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, one of the marquee promises of his first term.

“The Biden administration was auctioning off border wall materials, but we’re hearing now that … the auctioneer’s selling those materials back,” a reporter asked Trump while he took questions Wednesday at the Kennedy Center. “Are you finishing building the wall?”

“Well, I’ve built hundreds of miles of wall, and I was getting very close. I actually finished the wall, but then I added another 200 miles because when you do the original wall that I said I was gonna build—which I got built—and I got it to the specifications of the Border Patrol and ICE,” the president answered meanderingly. “They wanted steel, they wanted concrete inside, they wanted rebar inside that, they wanted it to have wires, the walls are wired for, you know, all of the internet stuff and security things.”

The president’s answer doesn’t make much sense. He said verbatim that he finished building the wall, but added on an extra 200 miles for the hell of it. How do you add 200 miles to a finished border wall without altering the border itself, which Trump never achieved?

He’s lying to avoid admitting that he failed at something. In reality, Trump only added 500 miles of border wall to a 2,000-mile border, and most of those wall pieces were for repair or reinforcement. And it wasn’t even a wall—it was a 30-foot fence.

For all his talk about Hillary Clinton and the Russia investigation, Donald Trump doesn’t seem to care that Russians hacked into sensitive government databases this year.

Answering questions outside the Kennedy Center Wednesday, the U.S. president appeared remarkably blasé about the foreign attack.

“There’s new reporting that the Russians have hacked into computer systems that manage U.S. federal court documents. I wonder if you’ve seen this report, and do you plan to bring it up with Putin when you see him later in the week?” asked one reporter.

“I guess I could. Are you surprised? Are you surprised? They hack in, that’s what they do,” Trump said. “They’re good at it, we’re good at it, we’re actually better at it.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that a Russian entity had accessed the court case document system, as well as “recently compromised sealed records,” as part of a yearslong effort.

“Some of the searches included mid-level criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions, with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern European surnames,” the Times reported.

But the president’s shocking reaction to the attack also undercuts Republican efforts to reframe the 2016 Trump-Russia scandal against Clinton and former President Barack Obama: If he doesn’t care about Russian meddling under the nose of his administration, why would he care so deeply about reframing the narrative around the foreign power’s intervention nine years ago?

Trump is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin Friday in Alaska to discuss a potential resolution to the war in Ukraine. It will be the first time that the Russian leader has stepped foot on U.S. soil in over a decade.

Laura Loomer’s deposition against HBO late-night host Bill Maher has offered absurd new insights into the woman unofficially tasked with federal staffing decisions.

The self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” has had enormous success influencing the Trump administration from the safety of her X account: An analysis by The Daily Beast found that at least 16 individuals were fired from the federal government after Loomer singled them out as covert Democratic agents.

But more than 200 pages of Loomer’s transcribed deposition in her defamation lawsuit against Maher shed light on the influencer’s beliefs and prerogatives—and illustrate her as a raving conspiracist rather than a fine-tuned firing machine.

In sprawling answers to completely unrelated questions, Loomer rants about George Stephanopolous, her lack of boyfriends, and her inability to get a White House press credential, in an interview that quickly flies off the handle.

In one particularly wild exchange, Loomer practically roasted Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene as someone who puts “roast beef in her pants.”

“What is your basis for saying she put Arby’s in her pants?” Maher’s legal counsel asked.

“She carries roast beef in her pockets,” Loomer responded.

“What is your basis for saying she puts roast beef in her pockets and in her pants?” the counsel pressed.

“Because I know she likes to eat at Arby’s,” Loomer said, further clarifying that she believes Greene puts the meat sandwiches in her pants and that she believed Greene would agree with that statement.

“Are you making a derogatory comment about her sex life by talking about Arby’s in her pants?” the counsel asked.

“No. I’m talking about Arby’s, the sandwiches. I’m talking about Arby’s. I would—I’m a very direct person,” Loomer said. “If I was making a derogatory comment, I would have said it.”

Immediately after the Arby’s exchange, Loomer offered another gem without provocation: She believed Senator Lindsey Graham is gay.

“Several of President Trump’s staff have told me in confidence that Lindsey Graham is gay,” Loomer said.

“Hold on, Ms. Loomer, there’s no question,” responded Maher’s attorney.

Loomer sued Maher and HBO in October after the late-night show host suggested that Loomer “might” be “fucking” Donald Trump. The far-right activist has since claimed that Maher’s joke tanked her odds at landing a White House gig.

Three days into his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Trump said he plans to extend the crackdown beyond its month-long limit—with or without congressional approval.

The president on Wednesday was asked if he considers the 30-day timeframe during which he’s allowed, under the Home Rule Act, to control D.C.’s police before needing Congress’s OK as sufficient to address his imagined crime spike.

Before today, his administration’s answer to this question was seemingly yes; a White House official has said the operation is “expected to last 30 days.”

Now Trump is looking to extend it.

The president indicated Wednesday that his plan A is to put a “crime bill” before Congress “very quickly.” The bill, he said, will “pertain, initially, to D.C.” and ask “for extensions on that—long-term extensions, because you can’t have 30 days.” Trump noted that he expects unanimous Republican support for this (though, as Semafor reports, Senate Democrats seem able and committed to block an extension).

But Trump also expressed his willingness to bypass Congress to draw out the takeover. “Well, if it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress,” he said, adding that while he expects all Republicans to fall in line, “if I have to [call a national emergency], I will.”

Trump has flogged national emergency power more than any other recent president, exhibiting, per libertarian legal scholar Ilya Somin, “a dangerous pattern of invoking spurious emergencies to undermine the Constitution, threatening liberty and circumventing Congress.” So far during his second term, he’s declared a dozen such national emergencies—and is apparently ready to add to that list in order to impose his will, unchecked, on the American people.

The man at the head of President Trump’s cruel, indiscriminate immigration crackdown also has perplexingly bad taste in condiments, according to his wife.

Katie Miller, herself a former Trump aide, hosted Vice President JD Vance on her new self-titled podcast aimed toward right-wing women. The conversation turned to a classic icebreaker question.

“If you could only eat one condiment for the rest of your life what would it be?” Miller asked Vance.

“One condiment?” Vance asked.

“Yeah.”

“Does barbecue sauce count?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok. Barbecue sauce.”

“Not mayonnaise?” Miller asked, entirely unprompted.

“No,” Vance said, with a look of slight repulsion. “Mayonnaise is like … in low doses it’s good, but it’s kind of … like I had a buddy who used to eat french fries with mayonnaise. I thought that was disgusting.”

“It’s the only thing my husband eats,” Miller said plainly.

“With french fries, or like period?”

“Period.”

“OK, wow. Didn’t realize.”

“Yeah he’s only a mayonnaise guy.”

“Ok, I learned something new about Stephen I didn’t know.”

“Yeah it’s … whatever,” Miller replied, while Vance offered up a canned chuckle.

If this is the administration’s attempt to humanize Miller, Vance, and the various other Trump cronies who are carrying out this brutal, culturally based anti-immigration campaign, it isn’t working. And it should come as no surprise that someone who looks and acts as cartoonishly evil as Miller has his fries with a side of mayonnaise. That is disgusting.

Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise went on Fox Business to display his wild, willful ignorance regarding “public broadcasting.”

Scalise, who represents Louisiana, helped lead GOP efforts to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which will put hundreds of free, local stations and shows in jeopardy. His response? His constituents should just pay for it.

“Getting rid of the USAID, public broadcasting—look, if you wanna go watch public broadcasting you can pay for it,” Scalise told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “You know, people that wanna watch your show, and a lotta people do, they can pay good advertising dollars because it’s a popular show. If nobody’s watching your program—they’re too many options today in cable programming to have taxpayers funding to the tunes of tens of billions of dollars. We got rid of that wasteful spending, and it’s just the beginning.”

This is not how public broadcasting works, or any publicly funded service for that matter. American citizens already are paying for public broadcasting, and they were receiving worthwhile content in return, from emergency weather alerts to educational content like Ken Burns documentaries and Sesame Street. And even if they weren’t, Scalise’s argument would likely leave mostly poor Americans in rural areas he wants to take public broadcasting from paying even more.

This isn’t about waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s about Republicans and their yearslong war against Corporation for Public Broadcasting–funded institutions like PBS and NPR. For years, the networks have been targeted by conservatives, who frame them as deeply ideological propaganda rather than basic media. Only time will tell how their own constituents will be impacted.