Trump’s Kennedy Center Plans Reek of His Same Lies About the Ballroom

If you believe the president’s word, then fear not: The White House is not planning to demolish the Kennedy Center during its summer renovation.

But if you tend to trust the evidence of history, you might have cause to be suspicious of whether the famed cultural institution will still be in one piece by the time Donald Trump is done with it.

A White House official told ABC News’s Hannah Demissie Monday that the administration has no intention of tearing down the Kennedy Center during its two-year remodeling project. Starting July 4, the performing arts space will close for two years in order to undergo “construction, revitalization, and complete rebuilding,” Trump announced Sunday evening.

The sudden decision to reinvent the world-class arts institution comes just a month after Trump potentially broke the law in renaming the center to include his name, and after more than a year of canceled performances by a litany of artists who opposed the Trump administration’s agenda.

Meanwhile, Trump’s other government renovation projects have been constructed out of a web of lies. Back when his White House ballroom was first announced in July, Trump pledged that the development would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing.

Months later, his construction teams completely razed the FDR-era extension, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress, both of which were conveniently unavailable at the time, due to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise; gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transforming it from Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite office into a marble-slathered eyesore; and swapped the historic Palm Room’s lush green tones and tall ferns for white paint and framed photos of plants.

Meanwhile, his administration is doing some demolition of its own, reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

Alex Pretti’s death was ruled a homicide Monday by the Hennepin County medical examiner.

In the medical examiner’s report, Pretti’s cause of death was listed as multiple gunshot wounds, and how the injury occurred was due to being “shot by law enforcement officer(s).” His manner of death was listed as “homicide.”

The 37-year-old ICU nurse was shot and killed by two Customs and Border Protection officers during a violent confrontation at a protest in Minneapolis last month.

Footage from the confrontation showed that Pretti was tackled to the ground by several federal agents, after he approached another protester who’d been sprayed with a chemical irritant. While beating Pretti, agents realized he was armed and took his firearm. Once they’d pinned Pretti to the ground, two federal officers shot him at least 10 times.

The medical examiner’s determination comes shortly after ProPublica uncovered the names of the officers who shot and killed Pretti: Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

CBP Commander Greg Bovino, who was recently removed from overseeing the Minnesota crackdown, refused to identify the officers. He told reporters they were still working the streets, just in another city. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security has since confirmed that the two had been placed on administrative leave, according to ProPublica.

Pretti’s senseless killing has sparked national outrage as Donald Trump’s federal immigration forces have killed a total of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in broad daylight. The Trump administration has blocked Minnesota officials from investigating residents’ killings by federal agents, hampering the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and opposed a federal judge’s order preventing them from tampering with evidence related to Pretti’s death.

This story has been updated.

The day after the FBI raided an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard arranged a call between the agents on the scene and President Trump.

The New York Times reports that Gabbard called the president on her cell phone after the search, which was based on Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia were rigged against him. Trump initially didn’t pick up, but called back minutes later to speak to the agents on speakerphone. He both thanked the agents and had questions for them.

The supervisor of the FBI squad conducting the search, which mainly handles public corruption and civil rights abuses, mostly handled the call, the Times reports. One official told the publication that the call was only a minute long and was like a pep talk.

Trump reportedly personally ordered Gabbard to travel to Atlanta for the search, coordinating her efforts with Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey. Gabbard’s presence has drawn questions about why she was there, considering her job is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence. For the past few months, Gabbard has been leading an investigation into Trump’s 2020 election grievances.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called out Gabbard’s presence at the raid, saying that if she believed that the raid in Georgia was connected to foreign intelligence, she was negligent in failing to notify Congress. If that wasn’t the case, Warner said, “she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”

The fact that Gabbard made a direct phone call to Trump seems to vindicate Warner’s concerns and indicate that Trump is attempting to preemptively interfere in future elections. It is highly unprecedented for a sitting president to be this directly connected to any active case by the FBI or Justice Department, and Trump is already threatening to directly take over elections.

Attorneys representing victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein are appealing to federal court to get the federal government to take down millions of documents related to Epstein, saying that the government failed to properly redact victims’ information.

In a letter to New York federal judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer, who are overseeing the cases of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, lawyers Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards requested an “immediate judicial intervention” over victims’ personal information being included in the newly released files.

“Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ’s latest release,” the letter states.

Henderson and Edwards, who represent over 200 alleged victims of Epstein, blasted the Justice Department for its failure, considering that protecting victims of Epstein is required by law.

“There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred—particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication,” Henderson and Edwards wrote.

“DOJ cannot plausibly characterize this as error, negligence, or bureaucratic failure. The task was straightforward: take the list of known victims and redact those names everywhere they appear,” the letter states. “When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim’s name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided.”

The lawyers mention multiple instances where victims’ names were left unredacted, including one minor’s name allegedly “revealed 20 times in a single document.” When those mistakes were flagged and told to the DOJ, the lawyers said, only three of the mentions were redacted, with the other 17 left untouched. In another instance, one email mentions 32 underage victims with only one of them redacted, while some FBI forms included in the file release left full names unredacted.

Some of the victims testified anonymously in the letter that they received death threats and harassment from the media since the files publicly identified them.

“The release of this information is not only profoundly distressing and retraumatizing, but it also places me and my child at potential physical risk,” one victim said.

The latest Epstein file release on Friday appears to be full of errors and negligent redacting. Nearly 40 nude photos of women, possibly underage, were mistakenly released unredacted, while an innocuous photo of President Trump speaking somehow was redacted. And the full batch of files has yet to be released, despite a legal deadline set six weeks ago. Is the DOJ taking the release of the Epstein files seriously?

The White House’s horrible, AI-doctored photograph of a Minnesota protester was used as evidence Monday that Donald Trump’s administration is acting in “nakedly obvious bad faith.”

In a four-page filing, attorney Jordan Kushner argued that the court should modify conditions for the release of his client, Nekima Levy-Armstrong, a civil rights attorney arrested at an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Kushner claimed that events that occurred after Levy-Armstrong’s arrest had “informed the Court of the government’s bad faith,” and had already influenced the court in declining to place restrictions on her co-defendants, who were released on January 30.

Among the list of incidents, Kushner included the White House’s X post featuring “an altered photo of Ms. Levy-Armstrong being arrested to make it falsely appear that she was crying and making her face darker.”

Kushner noted that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had posted the original photograph of his client being escorted in handcuffs by law enforcement. More recently, Attorney General Pam Bondi had posted names and mugshots of 16 other protesters, he added.

In considering all the reasons to lighten the release restrictions placed on Levy Armstrong, Kushner asked the court to consider “the government’s nakedly obvious bad faith.”

A Brazilian influencer who openly backed President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday.

Junior Pena, whose Instagram account boasts almost half a million followers, was detained in New Jersey after missing a court hearing related to his own immigration status, a friend told the Brazilian Times.

Pena immigrated to the United States in 2009, according to The Guardian. He openly identifies as an immigrant on social media, and frequently shares stories of others who have come to the U.S. in search of a better life.

But he has also been outspoken in his support for Donald Trump, explicitly defending the president during his immigration clampdown.

After reports that Brazilians were among the many immigrants being detained and deported in Trump’s first week in office, Pena urged his followers to stay calm.

“Don’t panic, thinking they’re deporting everyone,” he said in Portuguese. “There’s a news report showing ICE arresting [people], which even includes Brazilians, but they’re all criminals. All criminals. Don’t believe just any influencer.”

Pena’s friends have now launched a fundraising campaign to cover the influencer’s legal fees and court expenses. The campaign hopes to raise $50,000.

Donald Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, according to a New York Times review of the Justice Department’s Friday public release of some three million pages from the sprawling investigation into child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The references include documents pertaining to Trump, his wife Melania, and their residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

The president’s name appears in an FBI tip sheet several times in abuse allegations, including one in which an unknown source accuses Trump of forcing one of Epstein’s victims, presumed to be 13 or 14 years old, to perform oral sex on him, “approximately 35 years ago” in New Jersey.

Other mentions are bizarre, such as a censored image that is very clearly of the president, sparking concerns about how far the DOJ actually went to conceal Trump’s connection to Epstein. The photograph came up in an exchange between Epstein and Trump’s first term chief strategist, Steve Bannon, though the widely circulated image was not incriminating in and of itself.

Meanwhile, the agency neglected to redact nude images of young women in the files, some of whom may have been teenagers at the time.

All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache, according to the Times.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer but did not find credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation.

“There’s a lot of correspondence, there’s a lot of emails, there’s a lot of photographs—there’s a lot of horrible photographs that appear to be taken by Mr. Epstein or people around him, but that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody,” Blanche said, noting that the public now has the opportunity to “see if we got it wrong.”

The Trump administration revealed on Friday that it would only release half of the Epstein files, blatantly violating the recently passed law that required the documents’ full release some six weeks ago and sparking concerns about a governmental cover-up.

Donald Trump’s botched takeover of the Kennedy Center is drawing criticism from America’s most prominent political family.

After a board of Trump loyalists voted to add Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center in December, the president announced on Sunday that the prestigious theater will shut down for two years for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.”

The building will close on July 4 “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country,” Trump wrote.

That means that while the Kennedy Center served as America’s cultural center for over 50 years, the Trump–Kennedy Center will last a grand total of seven months before closing.

Many have speculated that the planned temporary closure is an attempt by Trump to save face after his decision to rename the building led to a sharp decline in ticket sales and multiple artists canceling shows.

After Trump’s announcement, Joe Kennedy III, a great-nephew of John F. Kennedy, wrote on social media: “While this trespass on the People’s will is painful, President Kennedy would remind us that it is not buildings that define the greatness of a nation. It is the actions of its people and its leaders. So, do not be distracted from what this Administration is actually trying to erase: our connection, our community, and our commitment to the rights of all.”

Maria Shriver, the daughter of JFK’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, mocked Trump in her own post, writing: “I’ve determined that due to this change in schedule, it’s best for me to close this center down and rebuild a new center that will bear my name, which will surely get everybody to stop talking about the fact that everybody’s canceling… right?”

JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg similarly ripped into Trump. “Trump can take the Kennedy Center for himself,” Schlossberg wrote. “He can change the name, shut the doors, and demolish the building. He can try to kill JFK. But JFK is kept alive by us now rising up to remove Donald Trump, bring him to justice, and restore the freedoms generations fought for.”

Unsurprisingly, one Kennedy has taken a different stance: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services.

RFK Jr. said he had “bigger fish to fry” when asked about Trump renaming the building in December. He has not commented on the president’s announcement that the building will be shut down for two years.

In its latest release of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein, the Department of Justice included several unredacted nude photos of young women, some of whom may have been underage when the photos were taken.

The government is required by law to redact sensitive information and images in the Epstein files before releasing them, especially regarding anything that could identify victims. When The New York Times reviewed the latest files, however, they found 40 nude photographs of at least seven different people, with their faces visible.

The women in the photos could have been minors, as the Times could not confirm their identities or ages. Some appeared to have been taken at Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands, while others simply showed bedrooms and other private spaces. The publication initially notified the DOJ on Saturday of the images, flagging more of them on Sunday.

The images flagged by the Times have since been removed or redacted. A DOJ spokesperson said that the department was “working around the clock to address any victim concerns, additional redactions of personally identifiable information, as well as any files that require further redactions under the act, to include images of a sexual nature.”

“Once proper redactions have been made, any responsive documents will repopulate online,” the spokesperson said.

The Trump administration remembered to redact a picture of Donald Trump that appeared in a text message conversation between Epstein and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. But somehow, it neglected a particularly sensitive set of photos and directly violated the law that mandated the release of the Epstein files, half of which still have yet to be made public.

One of Epstein’s abuse victims, Annie Farmer, called the news of the unredacted images “extremely disturbing.”

“It’s hard to imagine a more egregious way of not protecting victims than having full nude images of them available for the world to download,” Farmer told the Times on Sunday.

South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace used to make her staffers go on late-night booze runs, clean her house, and boost her on forums discussing the “hottest women in Congress”—and that was all before things got really bad.

In a sweeping profile published Monday in New York magazine, multiple former staffers detailed Mace’s yearlong nosedive from being a MAGA darling to being the mad captain of her own failing gubernatorial bid.

Almost a year ago on the House floor, Mace declared she was going “scorched earth” on her ex-fiancé Patrick Bryant, accusing him of assaulting her; filming her without her consent; and engaging in a conspiracy to drug, rape, and film other women. (In a shocking turn of events, Mace showcased what she described as her “naked silhouette” during the hearing.)

“She’s not okay,” one former staffer told New York magazine. “There’s nothing here I can point to and say, ‘Oh, this is normal.’”

“Looking at the floor speech and what went on there, it’s very clear that that was the breaking point to me,” the former staffer added. “Because you’ve now gone from standing up for people—whether rightfully, wrongfully, performative or not—you were on this mission, and now this is about you. The whole frame shifted, and she centered herself in it all. That’s when it became apparent to me that this is broken.”

A second staffer concluded that Mace had “deteriorated, and it sucks.”

Since that House speech, Mace launched a campaign to run for governor, mounted a humiliating temper tantrum at the airport, blew up her only chance at getting a crucial endorsement from Donald Trump by pushing to release the Epstein files, lost her campaign manager, and became the subject of a House Ethics Committee inquiry. A December poll found that support for Mace’s gubernatorial bid had taken a major hit, and she was floating somewhere around fourth place among other primary candidates.

As bad as things have gotten for Mace, things were never great for the people who work for her, and New York magazine was able to dig up plenty of new details.

Former staffers said Mace treated them like maids after she arrived in Congress in January 2021, ordering them to clean the multiple properties she was renting out on Airbnb, including her Washington townhouse. Ahead of election night in 2022, Mace instructed her staffers to spiff up her $3.9 million home in Isle of Palms, South Carolina, for a watch party, a former staffer with direct knowledge told New York magazine.

Mace also started dispatching staffers on late-night runs for alcohol to keep parties going at her home. “Look, when I worked for her, our poor scheduler was getting calls at two o’clock in the morning to come bring her bottles of tequila,” one former staffer told New York magazine.

Members of Congress are explicitly barred from instructing their staffers to run personal errands, and they are not permitted to purchase alcohol for their boss’s personal consumption.

One staffer alleged Mace’s excessive drinking and marijuana use became an issue. They recalled an incident in 2022 when Mace wanted to fire an aide for “doxxing” her because the aide told reporters she was out of the country, even though Mace had already announced her trip to a group of supporters just days before.

“She would definitely do it excessively,” the staffer said of the congresswoman’s drinking and marijuana usage. “And again, not to say that most members don’t or most staff don’t, but it got to the point where it was an issue.”

In response to questions, Cameron Morabito, Mace’s director of operations, hit back at suggestions of wrongdoing. “These allegations are so ridiculous they don’t even merit a response,” Morabito said. “I hope she sues you for every dime you got paid to write this defamatory bullshit.”

Mace also allegedly instructed a staffer to boost her standing on Reddit forums discussing the “hottest women in Congress.” She was “very adamant” about getting the staffer to upvote any posts about Mace and her attractiveness, one former staffer told New York magazine.

“We were scared of her,” one of the former aides told New York magazine. “She would make staffers cry. She would threaten to fire them, take their money away, not give them raises, not to give them days off, religious days.”

“The closer you get to her, the harder she messes up your brain,” said another former staffer. “It’s a classic story of ‘never meet your heroes.’”

One person close to Mace compared the congresswoman to how Bill Maher once described Trump: that she was not a crazy person but played one on TV. “We’ve moved past that now,” the person said. “Something’s broken. The motherboard’s fried. We’re short-circuiting somewhere.”