Kennedy Center Finances Collapsed Once Trump Added His Name

President Trump has  hailed his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as an economic boon for the storied venue, claiming the historic theater “would be in financial ruin” without Trump, and that not putting his name on the building would “cause donors to flee.” 

Instead, it’s been a complete bust.

New reporting from The Washington Post shows that the center is on track to fall $100 million short of its profit goal directly because of Trump changing the name to the Trump-Kennedy Center. It expects to miss its budget target by 70 percent and contributed revenue by 25 percent, a projected $23 million deficit. 

“The center took a huge hit when the takeover happened,” an anonymous source close to the situation told the Post. While ticket sales plummeted after Trump’s officials launched their anti-woke takeover at the beginning of his term, things got even worse after the name change last December. “It was just an absolute fiscal cliff. Donors disappeared, ticket sales disappeared, artists disappeared—like it was doomsday.”

This all comes as the center is multiple months late in delivering its independent audit during Trump’s first year of leadership. 

The Trump-appointed Kennedy Center board tried to close the center for two years beginning in July, but that decision was blocked by a U.S. district judge who argued that the board’s decision was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained.” Earlier this month, the board again voted to close the center for two years so that it can renovate the building in Trump’s image—and add Trump’s name back. 

Trump has put this once iconic venue through absolute hell. His initial takeover, fueled by a right-wing spite for “woke” culture, led many high-level acts to cancel and donors and patrons to flee. But the name change—which hasn’t even officially, legally happened—may have been the true coup de grâce.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are expanding their probe of Jared Kushner’s alleged foreign corruption to include his suspicious purchase of land in Albania from a suspected gangster.

In April, ranking member Jamie Raskin launched an investigation accusing Kushner of serving as “Special Envoy for Peace” in the Middle East, while soliciting millions of dollars from Gulf monarchies. Kushner never responded to the letter.

In a letter sent Tuesday, Democrats updated their probe to include his latest shady dealings in Albania.

Kushner purchased the land for more than $120 million from Arthur Shehu, a suspected criminal with a history of drug trafficking. For years, the Albanian government has claimed that Shehu used fraudulent documents and forged Ottoman-era land records to claim ownership of large swaths of coastal property. Despite warnings from local residents, Kushner proceeded with the purchase of disputed land, sparking massive protests and violence.

Since returning to aid the Trump administration in its negotiations with Iran, Lebanon, and Ukraine, Kushner has continued to operate his investment firm, Affinity Partners, and court foreign funding.

“This episode reflects both your essential frivolousness as an erstwhile representative of the United States and the Trump-Kushner family’s overriding and seemingly insatiable appetite for engaging in political and financial corruption,” Raskin wrote in the letter. “While acting as our nation’s chief negotiator to end several international conflicts created or exacerbated by your father-in-law’s administration, you have taken the time to start another fraud-related international incident all by yourself.”

Lawmakers demanded that Kushner provide them with all records on any real estate, business deals, or protests in Albania by September 7.

The Trump administration is proposing a new rule that would basically give data centers the ability to pollute as much as they want.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s rule change, The Guardian reports, would remove the Clean Air Act requirement that data centers publicly disclose their air pollution, making the disclosures voluntary at the discretion of state and some local officials. But since many state and local governments have business agreements with data center companies, this would likely end most pollution disclosures for data centers nationwide.

Now people with data centers in their community won’t know what substances they’re being exposed to, and won’t have evidence to cite in any legal challenges. In effect, the move seems to be aimed at squashing public criticism and oversight of data centers, according to the EPA’s former assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation Joe Goffman.

The existing rule is supposed to protect members of the public, giving them “an ironclad promise,” Goffman told The Guardian.

“The administration is basically saying: ‘You all may have thought this was an ironclad promise, but it no longer is,’” said Goffman, who has co-authored comments on the proposed rule. While the rule’s public comment period just ended, it could still face legal challenges if finalized.

Data centers have faced heavy public opposition across the country due to their power consumption, pollution, the lack of jobs many create, and the noise they generate, among other issues. The response from President Trump has been denial and an insistence that data centers benefit communities.

“Frankly, communities that don’t take a data center, they’re making a mistake because there’s plenty of communities that want them. Because it means jobs, and it means tremendous tax revenue coming into the towns and cities that take them. So you know, it’s like the smart ones are saying, ‘I want them so badly,’” Trump said in an interview just last week.

The Supreme Court buoyed one of Donald Trump’s more aggressive voter-suppression efforts Monday, permitting the White House to move forward with a March executive order that effectively transfers control of the mail-in voting process to the U.S. Postal Service’s postmaster general.

The preliminary Supreme Court decision—which came over the dissent of the three liberal justices—did not decide the legality of Trump’s scheme, and will likely not be the last time the court speaks on the matter. Nonetheless, it has steered attention toward the postal service which, thanks to the president’s machinations, is on the verge of being controlled by a cohort of Trumpian sycophants.

The postal service is led by a board of governors, similar to a corporation’s board of directors. Typically, the board hosts nine governors, the deputy postmaster general, and postmaster general, totalling 11 members. At the moment, only six people sit on the board.

Weeks before signing the executive order, Trump filed nominations to fill four of the vacancies. Rather than file nominees in bipartisan pairs—as is tradition—Trump opted to exclusively nominate Republicans. Three of the nominees have openly questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election, and have claimed that America’s voting processes are not secure.

Two of Trump’s nominees are on a fast track for approval, and could enter office as soon as the Senate returns from its August recess. Their appointment to the board would effectively transform it and confirm a majority of Trump loyalists at the highest echelons of the postal service.

“It is clear to me that the president is looking for people who will do exactly what he says and will carry out his order without respect for the U.S. Postal Service,” Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin, who oversees the agency as part of her duties on the Senate Homeland Committee, told The New York Times.

That fear is just as palpable inside the postal service. Jonathan Smith, the head of the American Workers Postal Union, told the Times that postal workers are already concerned they may be forced to implement legally or ethically dubious policies.

“They can direct the people I represent to follow procedures we perceive as possibly not constitutionally sound or legal or even ethical,” Smith told the newspaper. “Because the board of governors were put there for that purpose.”

The U.S. Postal Service is practically as old as the country. It was developed by the Second Continental Congress during the American Revolution, and Benjamin Franklin was appointed as its first postmaster general.

Since then, the Postal Service has reinvented itself again and again, keeping up with the myriad shipping demands of the American public and supporting trillions of dollars in commerce.

It also “generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations,” according to USPS’s website.

Still, that hasn’t prevented America’s public mail system from becoming a favorite target of the president. Since the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has repeatedly argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent voting by mail—a practice that he has repeatedly accused of fraud despite his own apparent preference for the absentee process.

Multiple people close to President Trump advised him to moderate his approach to the war on Iran. Six months later, with 18 U.S. service members and 3,000 Iranians dead and his approval rating at an all-time low, it appears he should’ve listened.

A new report from The Wall Street Journal reveals how Trump ignored the warnings of his own administration members in the lead-up to the February attack.

Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned Trump in February that assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would only bring a more hard-line government into power, which in turn would lead Iran to tighten their grip on the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing and crippling the global energy market.

There were other warnings too. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine told Trump that an all-out campaign would result in an overexerted fighting force and a depleted weapons stockpile. Even Vice President JD Vance warned against escalation at one point.

The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to make Americans believe that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, that its military really is decimated, and that this feckless war is in their best interest.

“He will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” a spokesperson for the White House said, also claiming that Iran’s military was virtually useless. “It would be wise for Iran to reach a deal. Otherwise, they know what could happen.”

Now, as the economy remains in free fall, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and as Trump turns to a flimsy “economic D-Day” solution, it is clear that the president should have heeded the advice he was given. The fact that he’s pivoting back to sanctions now signals what has been obvious for months—that his strongman military approach was a failure.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump was privately very upset and even confused as to why his all-out bombing assault on Iran didn’t yield a surrender, displaying an alarming lack of foreign policy tact, even for him.

“This was all predictable and predicted,” Nuclear Threat Initiative deputy vice president Eric Brewer told The Wall Street Journal. “You can draw a straight line from the fact that the war was launched without any clear political objective to the mishandled diplomacy in trying to end it.”