Kennedy Center Forced to Cancel Major Concert Due to Trump

The Kennedy Center has been forced to cancel their annual New Year’s Eve concert as more artists pull out to boycott President Donald Trump changing the historic venue’s name to the “Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” 

Jazz supergroup The Cookers announced Monday that they wouldn’t be performing on New Year’s Eve. 

“Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice. Some of us have been making this music for many decades, and that history still shapes us,” the band said in a statement, refusing to name Trump but alluding to their reasoning for pulling out. “We are not turning away from our audience, and do want to make sure that when we do return to the bandstand, the room is able to celebrate the full presence of the music and everyone in it.”

One member of the group, saxophonist Billy Harper, had already made his feelings more clear. 

“I would never even consider performing in a venue bearing a name (and being controlled by the kind of board) that represents overt racism and deliberate destruction of African American music and culture. The same music I devoted my life to creating and advancing,” he said in a previous interview. “After all the years I spent working with some of the greatest heroes of the anti-racism fight like Max Roach and Randy Weston and Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Stanley Cowell, I know they would be turning in their graves to see me stand on a stage under such circumstances and betray all we fought for, and sacrificed for, but also betraying all the listeners that believed (and still do) in our cause and our music.”

Trump-appointed Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell dismissed The Cookers as “far left political activists.” 

The Cookers’ withdrawal comes just days after the Kennedy Center was forced to cancel its annual Christmas Eve Jazz Jam due to what Grenell described as “dismal ticket sales.” The concert was free.

The Kennedy Center has been in disarray since Trump’s hostile, anti-woke takeover earlier this year, as high profile creatives and performers from Issa Rae to Rhiannon Giddens cancel their performances. And ticket sales have suffered, too—pointing to even darker days ahead for a once highly regarded cultural institution.  

The president has repeatedly elevated posts made by a parody account mocking White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, suggesting that he either enjoys the hyperbolic messaging or that he isn’t aware of the difference between Leavitt’s real account and the one making fun of her.

Donald Trump has already shared several screenshots from the account, @WHLeavitt, to his Truth Social page, despite the fact that it’s named “Fan Karoline Leavitt.” The account bio also reads “parody account,” a designation flagged by X.

One of the account’s posts that the president recirculated read: “BREAKING: Fulton County admits 315K 2020 votes lacked required poll worker signatures—a major rule violation.”

“Republicans demand restitution for Rudy Giuliani, hit with charges & $148M fine for contesting GA election,” it continued. “Do you support giving his money back?”

Another post by the parody page claimed that “Afghan ‘refugees’ in Texas want to ban Americans from eating pork and drinking beer because Allah has decided so.”

It then asked its followers whether they supported “deporting all Somalis, all Afghans, all Islamic refugees and all illegals,” providing two voting options: “Big yes” or “no.”

One post that Trump did not reshare, but maybe should have tipped him off about the account’s nature, asked followers to rate Leavitt’s butt.

Trump does spend an obscene amount of time on social media. His habits are practically akin to American teens, who spend hours online to the detriment of their mental health, according to a 2024 report by the American Psychological Association.

But his inability—or perhaps, callous disregard—to fact-check whether the posts were actually made by Leavitt raises several concerns. Firstly, it raises the question as to just how extreme Trump officials’ rhetoric can be before their leader raises an eyebrow or tries to reel them in.

But it also highlights Trump’s thoughtless approach to navigating his primary communication platform with the American public, and sparks doubt as to whether or not Trump is actually aware of what he’s consuming.

The 79-year-old has repeatedly claimed that he is in pristine condition, brushing off public alarm over his deteriorating body. But his health has been a topic of concern since he was on the campaign trail, when reports circulated that he couldn’t remember the contents of cognitive exams he claimed to ace.

The CIA carried out a drone strike bombing on Venezuelan soil last week, making it the first U.S. attack inside the country that we know of.

The strike, reported first on Monday night by CNN, hit a dock on the Venezuelan coast that the U.S. administration claims was being used by Tren de Aragua for narcotrafficking. The Trump administration also claimed that the dock was empty when the strike was carried out, resulting in zero casualties.

While Donald Trump vastly expanded the CIA’s ability to act independently, they still do not have the authority to carry out land strikes in Venezuela—although that means nothing when they’ve already extrajudicially murdered dozens of fishermen in Venezuelan waters and quite literally stolen an oil tanker.

While Trump alluded to hitting a “big facility where ships come from” last week, he refused to confirm or deny whether that attack was the one we now know was carried out by the CIA.

This is yet another alarming escalation of aggression against Venezuela. The Trump administration has gone back and forth in its justifications for their acts of war. They’ve claimed that the Venezuelan government is a malicious narcostate, that they want to make Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “cry uncle,” and that Venezuela was shipping their oil to “foreign terrorist organizations.” Either way, this reeks of classic U.S. intervention in Latin America that will likely further destabilize a country that we’ve been antagonizing for decades.

Americans across the country are facing enormous scam risks because of their president.

In a fundraising email circulated Monday, Donald Trump told his supporters that Democrats would steal their “tariff rebate checks” if they didn’t donate money to him within the hour.

“Troubles are BOILING OVER,” the email reads. “Dems want to send your check to illegals if you don’t respond in the next hour!”

Earlier this month, Trump floated the idea that the federal government would subsidize checks to American citizens to offset the cost of his “Liberation Day” tariff plan, seemingly similar to how he distributed funds during the Covid-19 pandemic. But within hours, scammers were already attempting to cash in on the national confusion. One scam flagged by the Better Business Bureau promised call recipients with unclaimed tariff rebate checks worth upwards of $5,000.

But Trump’s team has not taken heed of just how similar their fundraising language is to that of scam callers, seemingly more than happy to jump in on the hysteria.

“Only a massive and immediate response will do,” the president’s fundraising email continued. “I need YOU to help me hit my end-of-year fundraising goal by midnight tomorrow or EVERYTHING we’ve worked so hard to accomplish could go BYE BYE.”

A similar fundraising email issued by Trump’s team earlier this month urged recipients to “confirm” their names in order to receive the government checks. At the bottom, the message claimed to be “the only tariff rebate email authorized by President Trump.” That ad was paid for by “Never Surrender, Inc.,” a recently rebranded super PAC that mechanized Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and noted that it was not official communication with the U.S. government.

Regardless of the fact that Trump’s email has more in common with well-worn messages from a Nigerian prince than official White House communication, the entire concept of a tariff rebate program is nonsensical. Economists have repeatedly pointed out that tariffs are effectively taxes paid by importers and offset to consumers, rather than a legitimate revenue stream that pools money for future use.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Trump from claiming that his administration has made “millions”—or maybe “billions”—off of the unstable trade plan.

The National Guard presence in Washington hasn’t put a dent in violent crime in the nation’s capital.

At least, that’s the reality for the families of local murder victims, who claim that the Trump administration is ignoring their plight in order to push a narrative that crime has been practically eradicated from Washington, D.C.

There were at least 128 murders in the nation’s capital over the course of 2025, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

One of those murders involved 17-year-old Tristan Johnson, who was shot and killed in November over what his family believed was the attempted theft of his favorite jacket. Just two weeks later, Donald Trump completely bypassed Johnson’s death to tell the nation that the city hadn’t “had a murder in six months.”

The boy’s mother, Juanita Sampler, told The New York Times that bold-faced lies about crime in the city were “heartbreaking.”

“For the president to say there’s no murders? That’s heartbreaking, that’s devastating to me,” she told the newspaper. “That’s my son. He is someone. He is somebody. His name was Tristan Johnson.”

Washington was a critical component of Trump’s agenda when he returned to office in January. Alongside other Democrat-led cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle, Trump used Washington to push a baseless claim that America’s cities have been consumed by violence—violence that could only be settled by the federalization of the target areas’ law enforcement.

That resulted in the deployment of thousands of National Guard members to different cities across the country, whom the administration used to assist ICE agents and safeguard its immigration agenda. So far, that has involved tearing parents from their children and deporting people, without trial, to a Salvadoran prison well known for its systemic torture practices and inmate deaths.

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the Associated Press in November that Trump’s strategy had transformed Washington “from a crime-ridden mess into a beautiful, clean, safe city.” In a statement to the Times for Monday’s story, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that the president had “done more than any elected official in recent history to address violent crime in cities around the country.”

Homicides rates in Washington have gone down, but it doesn’t seem that the National Guard has had anything to do with it. Washington now experiences roughly seven killings per month, as opposed to 2024 when it had 12 murders per month on average. But those rates were already on the decline before Trump ordered troops to occupy the capital in September.

The material truth of Washington’s crime figures have not been flattering for Trump’s attempted rebrand. Instead, he’s claimed that crime has fallen to “virtually nothing” and that the city has “no crime”—unfounded assertions that have left real victims feeling utterly forgotten.

“I want the world to know about my son,” Carlena Durbin, the mother of shooting victim Jermaine Durbin, told the Times. “He had a family. He was loved. I want his story out so at least Trump can see that too.”

Carlitos Ricardo Parias—the TikTok streamer and immigration journalist who was shot by ICE in south Los Angeles this October—has had his indictment dropped by a federal judge.

U.S. District Judge Fernando M. Olgin on Saturday dismissed the indictment on the grounds that Parias was not given access to counsel while in ICE detention, and the government did not abide by the court deadline to release the body cam footage from the shooting.

ICE initially claimed that Parias, who goes by Richard LA online, was pulled over using standard operating procedures. According to the affidavit, Parias ignored commands to exit his vehicle, hitting two law enforcement vehicles before “accelerating aggressively” with his car. But U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli directly contradicted the government’s argument by revealing the agents “boxed him in,” which is not considered standard procedure for a traffic stop.

CNN reported that an ICE officer confronted Parias and used his weapon to smash Parias’s window, according to a law enforcement source who spoke to the outlet. Authorities believe the agent’s weapon fired while he was attempting to grab Parias, striking Parias and ricocheting to hit a deputy marshal. Parias was then charged with assault.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has spent her entire career profusely defending President Trump and his MAGA agenda. But their last conversation reportedly left her stunned, as he said he attacked both her and the survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Greene fought for the release of the Epstein files for months, eventually teaming up with Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, who were able to successfully force the administration to begin to release some heavily redacted files with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

When Greene implored Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office in a show of support in September, she told the New York Times Magazine, he berated her, telling her that they didn’t deserve the honor. That was the last in-person conversation they had.

“How did all of this end up to a point where it was about releasing files about women who were raped, and not the serious things that I think truly matter about helping to get our economy stabilized again?” she said. “Help reduce the cost of living, fix the housing market, fix health insurance—for the love of God, what the [expletive] is the matter with these people?”

Her last text exchange with Trump occurred two months later, in which she told the president about the fears she held for the safety of her family, given a death threat against her son she’d received that morning, following Trump publicly rebuking her as a traitor. He responded with a long message that completely ignored her fears and attacked her personally once again.

The administration responded with complete disdain.

“President Trump remains the undisputed leader of the greatest and fastest growing political movement in American history—the MAGA movement,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Times. “On the other hand, Congresswoman Greene is quitting on her constituents in the middle of her term and abandoning the consequential fight we’re in—we don’t have time for her petty bitterness.”

The race to replace Donald Trump is on, but no one seems particularly keen on his successor.

Despite his supporters openly encouraging him to ignore the Constitution, Trump has reportedly told his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles “a couple of times” that he knows a third term isn’t possible. And that leaves many in MAGA looking for what comes next.

Turning Point USA, the organization that energized young voters to turn out for Trump, has recently reoriented its focus on Vice President JD Vance ahead of the 2028 election. Vance, according to the Charlie Kirk-founded conservative nonprofit, has the chops to take Trump’s spot on the next Republican presidential ticket. There’s just one glaring flaw: No one seems to like him.

A CNN poll conducted earlier this month found that just 22 percent of Republicans support Vance’s bid for the presidency. They cited his “intelligence” as a key factor in his potential success with American voters, as well as the likelihood that he would continue Trump’s agenda.

The president’s suggestions as to who could top the Republican presidential ticket in 2028 have been so quiet that they’re practically murmurs. Without ever explicitly signaling his support for Vance to lead the party, Trump has lauded his number two, publicly describing Vance as “very capable” and the “most likely” choice to front the Republican ticket.

Vance has not yet announced a formal bid for the Oval Office, but that hasn’t stopped major Republicans from chiming in with their support. State Secretary Marco Rubio told Vanity Fair that he would back Vance rather than challenge him for the next GOP presidential nomination, while Representative Anna Paulina Luna has also shown her support for the 41-year-old Ohioan.

Turning Point’s new leader and Kirk’s partying, gold suit–wearing widow Erika Kirk made waves with her own support for the vice president after she intimately embraced him on stage in October, weeks after her husband’s assassination.

Erika Kirk and Turning Point formally endorsed Vance for president at the group’s conference earlier this month, pledging to help get him elected.

Somehow, Vance is the best that the party’s got—as of right now. No other GOP figure, including longtime presidential wannabes State Secretary Marco Rubio and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, eclipsed five percent in the CNN poll.

The largest group of respondents—some 64 percent of those polled—said they had “no one specific in mind” to top the 2028 ticket, suggesting an open playing field in which just about anyone could step in to win the Republican nomination.

Still, several of Trump’s most ardent supporters—including his first term chief strategist Steve Bannon—have advocated that the president should attempt to seek a third term. Vance, Bannon claimed in August, is simply “not tough enough” for the job.

Russia has apparently not agreed to a ceasefire, according to Donald Trump.

The U.S. president told reporters Sunday that Ukraine’s near-term peace prospects with Russia did not include an end to the violence.

“Did [Russian President Vladimir] Putin agree to a ceasefire to allow a referendum to take place?” a journalist asked Trump Sunday evening during a Palm Beach press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

“Not a ceasefire, and that’s one of the points that we’re working on right now,” Trump said. “He feels that look, you know, they’re fighting and to stop—and then if they have to start again, which is a possibility, he doesn’t want to be in that position. I understand that position. The president feels strongly about that, or something.”

“You know you have to understand the other side,” Trump insisted, speaking of the Russian dictator while just steps away from Zelenskiy. “I’m on the side of peace, I’m on the side of stopping the war.”

The detail adds to a growing pile of evidence that Russia isn’t negotiating in good faith to end its assault on Ukraine. The hostile foreign power has offered virtually nothing—not even temporary peace—to resolve the nearly four-year conflict. Yet it has been gifted unprecedented capitulations from the Trump administration, upending longstanding U.S. policy in the process.

Last month, the Trump administration unveiled a 28-point peace plan that catered to some of Russia’s most outrageous demands, such as requiring Ukraine to swear off NATO membership and to hand Moscow Crimea and the eastern Donbas region.

Still, Ukraine is pushing toward a resolution. In the weeks since Trump unveiled his plan, Zelenskiy and his team have drafted their own version of a peace plan, which he told reporters Sunday was “90 percent agreed to,” noting that the U.S.-Ukraine security guarantees were “100 percent agreed” to.

The sensitive issue of ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia, however, was still up in the air.

“I would not say agreed, but we’re getting closer to an agreement on that, and that’s a big issue. Certainly, that’s one of the big issues, and … it’s unresolved,” Trump said Sunday.

More than 13,300 civilians have been killed and 31,700 injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a United Nations report from June. Last week, Russia bombed Kyiv, devastating portions of Ukraine’s war-torn capital and killing at least one person while injuring 27.

Trump pledged on the campaign trail that he would end the war on his first day in office, but still the conflict has dragged on, in large part due to Moscow’s tireless and ever-shifting demands. On Sunday, Trump told reporters that he has “no deadline” to resolve the war.

By Monday morning, Russian officials suggested that Moscow’s position could change yet again as they accused Ukrainian forces of attempting to attack Putin’s residence in the Novgorod region.

President Trump is claiming to have successfully bombed a “big facility” in Venezuela in yet another act of aggression and sign of the administration’s interventionist goals in the region. 

“We just knocked out—I don’t know if you read or you saw—they have a big plant, or a big facility, where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard,” Trump told GOP donor John Catsimatidis on his Friday radio show.

A staffer close to the situation later described the target as a “drug facility.” And while details remain virtually nonexistent (how do we know this even happened?), the attack does align with the administration’s unsubstantiated narrative that the Venezuelan government is directly supporting drug traffickers. 

This is a major, violent escalation against Venezuela with absolutely zero explanation or justification to the American people. The so-called  “peace president” has bombed ships full of fishermen, stolen an oil tanker, threatened Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with regime change, and even given the CIA the greenlight to meddle there.

The Venezuelan government has yet to respond. 

Trump was later asked to shed more light on the apparent bombing while taking questions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. 

“Can you say anything more about the explosion in Venezuela that you mentioned in a radio interview?” a reporter asked. “Did the military do that?”

“Well it doesn’t matter, but there was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump replied. “They load the boats up with drugs. We hit all the boats, and now we hit the area.... It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement … and that is no longer around.” 

He also refused to confirm whether the attack was performed by the CIA, but said that he knew “exactly who it was” but didn’t “want to say who it was.”

This story has been updated.