RIP Trump Kennedy Center: 2025–2026

The “Trump Kennedy Center” appears to be no more.

Scaffolding has gone up around the storied performance venue to remove the “Trump” part of the “Trump Kennedy Center” name, which President Trump changed without congressional approval late last year. A judge ruled the decision illegal last month and rejected the administration’s bid to reverse the division on Friday.

“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote.

Trump has been particularly hostile toward the lauded cultural center, from firing all of its board members and replacing them with sycophants to slapping his own name on the building. His takeover led to dozens of artists dropping out of planned performances, which in turn led ticket sales to plummet.

Massive crude oil tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma—the main hub of America’s energy market—are reportedly growing dangerously depleted as President Donald Trump’s war in Iran stretches into its 105th day.

The oil tanks in Cushing held an inventory of just 21.6 million barrels Friday, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s a little more than half of the 40 million barrels they usually store. When they hold less than 20 million barrels of oil, Cushing’s tanks are effectively empty, with only largely unusable sludge remaining.

The extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed the reserves in Cushing toward operational stress levels, where they will be unable to fulfill the demand for oil.

Cushing isn’t the only place in the United States where oil reserves have been affected. Gas inventories have fallen 5 percent below where they were a year ago, and U.S. diesel stockpiles have hit their lowest level since 2003.

The full shock of the present energy crisis has been dampened by the world’s oversupply of oil—but that could be about to change, as stockpiles drain around the world. If the oil markets get dry enough, the volume of oil won’t be great enough to produce the pressure needed for pipelines. Within a month, the world’s oil market could enter the danger zone, CNN reported Friday.

Earlier this week, industry officials warned the White House that gas prices could spike yet again due to rapidly diminishing inventories, which could be wiped out in a matter of weeks.

Maybe Trump could fill some of these tankers with the 100 million barrels of oil he claims to have miraculously moved through the strait without Iran noticing.

Bari Weiss has ripped 60 Minutes to shreds—and earned a venomous reputation among the show’s various contributors and producers as a result.

Change at the investigative weekly program has been rapid and corrosive. Late last month, Weiss simultaneously fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on the notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. That same day, she appointed Nick Bilton—a former Vanity Fair columnist with no television broadcast experience—to lead the venerated newsmagazine.

The following week, Scott Pelley—the de facto face of CBS News—was canned after he openly questioned Bilton’s appointment during a contentious staff meeting.

Former staffers of the investigative news program have since sounded off on Weiss’s chaotic takeover and her heavy hand in restructuring the show.

“We have to acknowledge that 60 Minutes needed a bit of a facelift, and there were potentially positive ways to improve the program, but it’s the way they have gone about it,” one former staffer told Variety. “You don’t give a facelift with a fucking machete.”

Rome Hartman, who worked as a producer on the show for 25 years, lamented the figurative arson of his “professional home,” and speculated that the show would only continue to decay under Weiss’s and Bilton’s direction.

“Scott wasn’t shouting at him or physically intimidating the guy—he was doing exactly what he should’ve done in the best tradition of the best 60 Minutes correspondents,” Hartman told Variety. “And if Nick Bilton is such a snowflake that he can’t possibly tolerate a voice of challenge—and if Bari Weiss has to hide behind his skirts—that does not speak well of how he’s going to run the place or how she’s going to run the place.”

But she may not be running the place for much longer at all. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery—a monumental industry shift that could see Weiss’s brief tenure atop the network come to an end, according to 30-year 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft.

“I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing 60 Minutes for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” Kroft told Variety. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”

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 a judge denied a last-minute appeal 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 capital.

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.”