The National Opera Company Just Sued the Trump Administration

When President Trump took over the Kennedy Center, his people allegedly ignored a long-term agreement and seized millions of dollars from the Washington National Opera.

That’s what the WNO alleges in a lawsuit against the center, filed Thursday in federal court. According to court documents, the WNO and the Kennedy Center had a contractual relationship for nearly 15 years in which operas were held at the venue in exchange for the center providing support services for the WNO, including managing donations.

With the Trump administration’s takeover of the center, however, many of those services—including marketing, fundraising, and administrative tasks—ended in late 2025. When the WNO complained to the center, instead of fixing the issues, the center’s governance proposed ending the relationship in January 2026.

The WNO then asked the center to return its $17 million in funds, which the agreement states belong to the WNO. But despite being contractually obligated to return the funds, the center still hasn’t returned them to the opera, and now the WNO is suing to get that money back.

All of this comes as judge denied a last minute appeal from to keep Trump’s name on the center Friday. Now, Trump may follow through on his stated desire last month to hand over control of the center to Congress. Will he follow through, or try to defy the ruling?

Like a tongue on a sore tooth, Donald Trump keeps coming back to his renovation projects.

The intrusive topic has won his mind in all sorts of inappropriate settings: he has deflected from the Iran war and inflation concerns by fixating on the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, pivoted to renderings of his construction projects during an Oval Office meeting with Mark Rutte that was intended to focus on global alliances and security issues, and interrupted a January meeting with oil executives about Venezuela’s future to mention his $400 million ballroom, an idea so inspiring that he stopped the conversation and walked to a window to muse about its construction.

A prominent clinical psychologist has signaled that the tireless obsession could be a warning sign of cognitive decline.

Dr. John Gartner, a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, told The Daily Beast Thursday that the president’s repetitive verbal ramblings are symptomatic of something much graver.

“Tangential speech is one of the diagnostic criteria for dementia,” Gartner told the Beast.

“What he’s obsessed with is a function of malignant narcissism. He’s obsessed with things that reflect glory on him,” Gartner continued. “He’s changing Washington, D.C., to Trump D.C.”

That could include any number of projects: Trump has also (impermanently) plastered his name on the Kennedy Center and proposed a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” in the nation’s capitol.

An analysis by The Washington Post in April found that, by that time, Trump had invoked his ballroom in roughly a third of his public remarks, far outpacing any mentions of his supposed policy priorities.

But Gartner mentioned that Trump’s rants would only “go downhill from here.”

The White House, in response, insisted that Trump is in immaculate condition.

“If it quacks like a duck, it may actually just be a Democrat hack doctor,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Beast in response to Gartner’s assessment.

Yet something must be unusual about the president’s condition. Last month, Trump’s examination at Walter Reed Medical Center involved 22 specialists, breaking the previous record held by George W. Bush, who once saw 10 specialists in one go.

The White House has not elaborated on exactly why Trump needed so many doctors. Trump officials told the Post that the unconventionally large medical team allowed for a “complete and preventive evaluation” of the president. White House physician Sean Barbabella commented that the assessment found Trump in “excellent health.”

Two working-class, three-time Trump voters shared feelings of betrayal and disappointment in their president’s second tenure on Friday’s Morning Joe.

One of the Trump voters, Annette Dombrowski—is about to lose her job at an Ohio manufacturing plant because its billionaire, Trump-supporting owner, John Paulson, is outsourcing domestic jobs to China, something Trump has promised time and time again to prevent. 

“I actually have panic attacks. I’ve had a couple this past week, and I get very emotional over it. I don’t want to work anymore, but I can’t afford to retire,” Dombrowski said. 

“Obviously, President Trump is immensely wealthy. He has been wealthy since he was born,” MSNOW’s Alex Tabet posited.

“Yep.”

“Do you think he understands?”

“No. He hasn’t lived it to understand it. He sees it, he has not lived it. He needs to live it. Wear the clothes, wear the shoes, wear your Walmart clothes, wear your Walmart shoes, do your thrift thrift store shopping. Don’t eat steaks.  I don’t get to go out to dinner,” Dombrowski continued, growing emotional. “It’s not an overnight thing, but it’s been two years now. You said you’d bring down the grocery prices … I must be the most angry person in my grocery shop, because I buy the same things every week, and I see it jump every week. It is not every couple months, it’s literally every week.” 

Morning Joe also featured another three-time Trump voter, truck driver Chris Tackett. 

“When President Trump said he wasn’t going to start foreign wars, when he said he was going to bring down prices, did you believe him?” Talbot asked Tackett. 

“Yeah. I mean, his first term … I think he held true to everything that he said he was gonna do. I think he fought for everything he said he was gonna fight for. This time around, I haven’t seen it,” Tackett said. “He’s backtracked on every single pitch point he had during his election.… All we heard was ‘drill drill drill’ during the election, now all we’re getting is drilled into the dirt with these prices. I voted for Trump all three terms, [but] to be honest with you, I’m not a big supporter of him at this point.”

“If you could talk directly to President Trump, what would you tell him right now?”

“Get it together, man. The average American is struggling to make ends meet right now, and nobody wants to hear the war [in Iran] is almost over. Nobody wants to hear it’s going to get better. You’ve had a year to make it better at this point. Make it better.”

The most recent consumer price index has inflation at its highest rate in three years, due to President Trump’s widely unpopular, very expensive war on Iran. Even still, Trump claims that the numbers are great, and that he loves inflation—even as Dombrowski and other people who voted for him struggle to afford things he can have any moment he wants, like steak.

Outbound Senator John Cornyn has predicted a midterm “disaster” for Donald Trump.

The Texas Republican has become a vocal critic of the president since he lost his primary runoff last month to the Trump-backed favorite in the race, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In an interview with The New York Times published Friday, Cornyn flamed Trump’s influence in the race, lamenting that Trump apparently “couldn’t resist” the temptation.

“If he would do that to me, he would do that to anybody,” Cornyn told the Times. “There’s never going to be good enough for him, other than 100 percent, you know, slavish adherence to whatever he wants. But obviously that’s not what the senator’s role is supposed to be, especially in terms of checks and balances.

“If that’s the way friends treat you, you wonder about his enemies,” Cornyn continued, referring to a post-race social media note in which Trump wrote that the Lone Star conservative would “remain my friend for a long time.”

Cornyn’s race was a gamble and a loss for the GOP: one of the most prolific fundraisers, Cornyn had done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his 24-year legislative career, bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races.

The lost cash flow, paired with Trump’s waning popularity and dismal economic offerings, could bode poorly for the Republican Party come November, according to Cornyn.

“It’s going to make things harder, certainly more expensive in Texas, and make it harder around the country,” Cornyn said, adding that Trump would regret his actions. “I don’t say that with any sort of desire for vengeance; I just think that’s the way it’s going to be. He’s going to have the most miserable two years of his life in the last two years of his term, I think, because I think November is going to be a disaster.”

The FBI raided the offices of an Ohio pro-democracy organization in Cleveland Thursday and questioned employees across the state, asking about voter fraud.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which promotes voter registration and voting rights, was targeted by over 100 agents who showed up at the homes of the organization’s leadership and employees, seeking electronic devices and in some cases carrying subpoenas. The bureau also had a search warrant for the organization’s Cleveland office.

“They had agents all across the state going to civil rights leaders’ and community leaders’ doors intimidating them, coming and demanding that they talk about literally anything they would ask,” Prentiss Haney, an OOC board member, told MS NOW. The agents “asked them if they’re committing voter fraud, just on their doors, in front of their houses with their children, and just following them to work and school.”

Haney told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that the agents who approached the organization’s staff at their homes in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Youngstown didn’t have warrants, calling their approach “just straight-up intimidation tactics.” He said the OOC is not involved in voter fraud in any way.

“It was terrifying,” Haney said. “I’ve never seen this sort of force from a federal agency against regular people, regular Ohioans, who are helping people participate in elections.”

The FBI and the Department of Justice have not commented publicly about the raid or any investigation into the OOC, but Democratic Representative Shontel Brown, who represents Cleveland and much of northeastern Ohio, said in a statement that she was “alarmed and outraged by reports that Trump and Kash Patel’s FBI has raided the Ohio Organizing Collective in Cleveland.”

“This appears to be a blatant effort to suppress and deny the vote of people in Northeast Ohio. These raids must end immediately,” Brown said on X.

The FBI’s raids bring to mind the right-wing smear campaign in 2009 to bring down ACORN, a national organization that also advocated for voting rights, among other efforts aimed at low-income Americans. Even though investigations found that ACORN staff broke no laws, the organization lost almost all of its funding, depriving many communities of a valuable organization and hurting voter registration. Thursday’s raids seem aimed at depressing voter registration and creating panic about nonexistent voter fraud in a state where Democrats stand to make gains in November.