Philip Glass Cancels Kennedy Center World Premiere Amid MAGA Takeover

Prolific pianist and composer Phillip Glass is boycotting the Kennedy Center, adding his name to a growing list of performers who have pulled their performances in the wake of President Trump’s hostile takeover.

“After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” he announced in a statement Tuesday.

“Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.”

That “current leadership” would be none other than Board of Trustees Chair Donald Trump, whose overhaul of the once esteemed arts and culture venue has struggled mightily of late. Big names like Issa Rae and Rhiannon Giddens pulled out of shows, and as of last fall, ticket sales at the Kennedy Center were the worst they’ve been since the Covid-19 pandemic. In December, the Kennedy Center was forced to cancel its annual New Year’s Eve concert as artists pulled out to boycott Trump changing the center’s name to “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

President Donald Trump decided to abandon regulations protecting elderly residents, after nursing home executives poured millions into a pro-Trump super PAC, The New York Times reported Tuesday.  

In early December, the Department of Health and Human Services repealed a federal provision requiring nursing homes to increase staffing levels in order to reduce the rates of resident neglect. In a statement, HHS claimed that new staffing rules “disproportionately burdened facilities.”

That decision can be traced back to millions of dollars directed toward one of Trump’s favorite super PACs, a donation that won a group of nursing home executives a meeting with the president. 

After Trump’s gargantuan budget bill won nursing home companies a 10-year moratorium on the Biden-era staffing requirement, a group of industry executives wanted to try to get the rule permanently revoked—and knew exactly how to get the president’s attention. 

Beginning in August 2025, nursing home executives donated a total of roughly $4.8 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC run by the president’s allies, according to campaign finance disclosures. Later that month, a group of the largest donors joined industry lobbyists at Trump’s golf club outside of Washington, D.C., in order to plead their case to the president himself.  

The group of executives “urged the president to formally repeal the harmful minimum staffing mandate, which would have surely forced providers throughout the country to close their doors to new residents—or possibly close their doors altogether,” according to Bill Weisberg, the founder and chief executive of Saber Healthcare Group, who recounted the meeting in a message to the Times.

Less than a month later, federal prosecutors stopped defending the rule from legal challenges mounted by nursing home companies, and in December, they scrapped the rule entirely. A White House spokesperson dismissed the claims of corruption, saying that repealing the rule was a “commonsense, anti-red tape policy decision.”

Some of the biggest donors to MAGA Inc. in August 2025 included Pruitt Health Corporation, which operates more than 100 eldercare facilities across the southeast United States. Pruitt paid a whopping $750,000 to the super PAC.

Several other companies and executives donated $100,000, including Reliance Health Care Inc., which operates more than two dozen locations across Arkansas and Missouri; Northshore Health, which operates more than 70 facilities across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and North Dakota; and Teddy Price, the administrator of Central Management, which operates 21 nursing facilities across Louisiana.

There is perhaps reason to believe that even more corruption took place through MAGA Inc., which raked in an unprecedented $198.9 million between Trump’s election and June 2025—far too early to be tied to any upcoming election cycle. The super PAC was previously run by Taylor Budowich, who went on to join Trump’s White House communications team.

Even Republicans can see that there’s nothing normal about how the Trump administration has handled Alex Pretti’s killing.

Republican Senator Rand Paul took to social media Tuesday to highlight ICE and CBP’s long leash Tuesday, pointing out on X that no other law enforcement agency would permit offending officers to walk free after an extrajudicial killing.

“Local police routinely put officers involved in deadly shootings on administrative leave until an independent investigation is concluded,” Paul wrote. “That should happen immediately.”

He further scolded the Department of Homeland Security for its attempts to write off Pretti as a violent criminal, arguing that the agency had failed to accomplish the bare minimum to calm the tensions boiling among the American public.

“I can’t recall ever hearing a police chief immediately describing the victim as a ‘domestic terrorist’ or a ‘would-be assassin,’” Paul continued. “For calm to be restored, an independent investigation is the least that should be done.”

Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked in Veterans Affairs, was slain Saturday while he protested the death of another U.S. citizen, Renee Nicole Good, who was shot by agents weeks earlier.

Pretti was assisting a woman who had been shoved by a masked officer, when he was grappled by several agents and thrown to the ground. At least seven agents held him down or knelt on his back, and another agent drew his gun and shot Pretti. Widely circulated video of the incident that was filmed from multiple angles captured audio of 10 gunshots ringing out within five seconds.

In the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s death, top Homeland Security officials attempted to induce national amnesia, retroactively labeling him a domestic terrorist while insisting that he had “approached officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun,” forcing officers to fire “defensive shots.” They also blamed Pretti for lawfully owning a gun, suggesting that his death was justified since he had a weapon on him.

Pretti’s and Good’s needless deaths—and their dystopian handling by Trump officials—have made conservatives and their longtime donors recoil from Donald Trump’s immigration agenda for the first time since he returned to office. Wary of public backlash, Republicans are attempting to remap their routes toward midterm elections, steering clear of the polarizing subject. The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, made an unexpected strike against the administration when it tore into Customs and Border Protection commander Greg Bovino for suggesting that Second Amendment rights “don’t count” for protesters.

By Monday, it appeared that Trump was finally grasping the need to overhaul the administration’s messaging. He announced that border czar Tom Homan would seize control of ICE and CBP operations in Minneapolis, effectively ousting Bovino in the process.

But not everybody had caught wind of the makeover: DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin still wasn’t willing to backtrack on the department’s smear campaign against Pretti during an interview with Fox News Tuesday, sidestepping questions by the network as to whether DHS still deemed the nurse to be a “domestic terrorist.”

The Trump administration is being sued by the families of two people killed in U.S. military boat strikes.

Civil rights attorneys filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court on behalf of the families of Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, both of Las Cuevas, Trinidad. Both were killed in a U.S. military strike on October 14. The lawsuit was filed under admiralty law by Lenore Burnley, Joseph’s mother, and Sallycar Korasingh, Samaroo’s sister, and alleges that the U.S. bombing campaign in the southern hemisphere is illegal.

“These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification,” the lawsuit states. “Thus, they were simply murder, ordered at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”

The families are represented by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Seton Hall University in the first federal lawsuit filed over the strikes. Their lawyers echo concerns made by legal scholars and members of Congress that the bombings may constitute war crimes.

“This is uncharted water. Never before in the country’s history has the government asserted this type [of] power,” Seton Hall law school professor Jonathan Hafetz told The Guardian. “This is a clear example of unlawful killing by the United States. The U.S. is assuming the prerogative to kill victims in international waters.”

The October 14 bombing in the Caribbean was the fifth such strike by the U.S. Since then, the Trump administration has launched 31 more, including one on Friday in the eastern Pacific Ocean that killed two people. The government claims that they are targeting drug cartels and stopping drugs like fentanyl from making their way into the United States. The families of Joseph and Samaroo assert that the pair were fishermen who were arbitrarily targeted.

“This is killing for sport, it’s killing for theater and it’s utterly lawless,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We need a court of law to rein in this administration and provide some accountability to the families.”

Melania Trump’s new documentary, Melania, is looking like an opening-week box office flop—after Amazon’s MGM studios paid tens of millions of dollars for the rights to it.

The documentary detailing the first lady’s return to the White House is projected to make just $1 million in its first week. While documentaries generally do worse at the box office, the sheer amount of money Amazon spent—$40 million for the rights, $35 million for an aggressive marketing blitz—and the constant stream of Truth Social posts from President Trump make this a particularly pitiful showing.

Melania’s early failure comes as a new report from Rolling Stone details serious labor issues behind the scenes and a whopping two-thirds of the film’s staff requesting not to be credited at the end of the film. Director Brett Ratner, who made headlines after six women accused him of sexual assault and harassment during the #MeToo movement in 2017, was perhaps the most loathed person on set. (Actress Natasha Henstridge alleged that Ratner forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was 19, Olivia Munn claimed that Ratner masturbated in front of her, and more recently, he was pictured shirtless in the Epstein files.)

“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one crew member shared, “but Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.”

“He did actually chew a piece of gum and throw it in a coffee cup on my cart,” a staff member told Rolling Stone, [but] “didn’t acknowledge my existence for even one nanosecond.”

Another member recalled a day when Ratner feasted on his own meal in a set space where food was not allowed, on a day when no one else on the crew got a break to eat.

“Brett, unknowingly or maliciously, got his own food, went up there, was just eating it and just licking his fingers in grubbiest way possible, either being a dick or [having] no awareness whatsoever to the fact that everybody else is working and no one’s eating,” a staffer said.

“Unfortunately, if [the film] does flop … I would really feel great about it,” said another.

Melania herself is pocketing $28 million from the licensing sale. She and President Trump plan to attend a premiere of the documentary at the Kennedy Center on Thursday.