Kennedy Center Leaders Warn It’ll Collapse Without Trump’s Name

President Trump’s allies claim the Kennedy Center for the Performing Center will collapse unless he gets to take it over and put his name on the building.

The Washington Post reports that Trump’s handpicked officials leading the center are claiming that “within a matter of weeks,” they won’t be able to pay employees or fulfill regular maintenance contracts, and that giving Trump the recognition he wants could secure the funds that would keep the center alive.

The center is in structural danger as well. A severe storm caused a four-by-five-foot section of ceiling plaster to fall in the building’s Grand Foyer, sending debris near the Concert Hall entrance, Trump’s handpicked executive director Matt Floca told trustees. Water damage is reportedly widespread throughout the building.

The officials recommend that the center close immediately, saying that keeping it open would put lives at risk. If the board approves the recommendations, which were laid out in a 57-page document distributed to the center’s board of trustees, the center could close on Tuesday, when the board meets next.

The document all but says that Trump’s support is contingent on receiving public credit. The financial resolution proposed to the board states that Trump has offered to “raise the necessary funds to keep the center from bankruptcy” while the building gets a major renovation, but he is unlikely to provide “fundamental oversight” to rescue the building without “appropriate recognition.”

Trustees are being given 10 different text options to put on the building’s exterior underneath its name. One of them is “Renovation Restoration and Endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” That’s very similar to another plan the board approved less than a month ago to inscribe “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” on the building’s facade, which is being challenged in federal court.

One of the trustees is Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, who sued to remove Trump’s name from the building, and her lawyers blasted the proposal in a statement to the Post.

“This constant effort to add Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center facade is the definition of insanity,” attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky said. “This is now the third attempt to deface this sacred memorial and turn it into a vanity project for one man’s ego.

“Worse still, now Trump is taking the Center hostage and threatening to in effect kill it unless he gets his way,” Zelinsky and Eisen added. “This has to stop.”

Trump has threatened to demolish the Kennedy Center if he can’t have his name on it, and his attempted takeover has led to performers canceling their engagements at the center and ticket sales plummeting with fundraising drying up. He proposed closing the building earlier this year, but that was blocked by a court challenge. One wonders how much of this latest news is an attempt to force through his takeover.

President Donald Trump and his three sons are poised to receive a massive payout from their shady crypto scheme, The Washington Sun (formerly NOTUS) reported Monday.  

In May, four digital wallets moved more than 20 billion in $WLFI tokens—launched by the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm—into a vesting contract, which would allow the owners to sell their shares after a two-year waiting period. The wallets precisely matched the initial amounts of crypto awarded to Trump and his sons Donald Jr., Eric, and Barron, all listed as founders of World Liberty Financial. 

Eric Hagerman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, told the Sun that new governance rules required the owners to shed 10 percent of their holdings, and the only way to do so was to place them in a vesting account. But three experts that reviewed the company’s governance documents found that doing so was strictly optional.

Zach Everson, the research director at Public Citizen, warned that the president’s family was headed for a massive payout. “It has never been clear what World Liberty Financial was supposed to do other than enrich the Trumps, and here we have them taking the first avenue they can to offload their coins,” he told the Sun. 

Trump’s total holding of 14.175 billion in $WFLI tokens is currently worth about $1 billion, while his sons each hold roughly 2.75 billion in tokens, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The value of these tokens would likely plummet if the president or his sons sold off their shares.

Trump has used his family’s business to rake in cash while in office. In 2025, he took in $526 million in token sales from World Liberty Financial and $635 million from a license agreement with a company connected with his $TRUMP meme coin. The president’s crypto scheme has long been a source of corruption concerns; shady players who bought large amounts of coins have received favors from the White House. 

Meanwhile, investors are already losing money. Nearly one million people who bought the president’s meme coin lost a total of $3.81 billion through the end of June.

The Environmental Protection Agency no longer intends to protect any environment from the interests of America’s power plants.

Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator and Donald Trump’s former impeachment defense attorney, will announce plans Monday to walk back several critical national regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from plants that burn coal and gas, reported The New York Times.

By the EPA’s own analysis, the power sector is the second-largest contributor of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the U.S., accounting for a quarter of all emissions in the country.

Zeldin is expected to announce the change while meeting with international energy ministers from the G20 countries. He intends to make the case that greenhouse gases from power plants do not endanger human health or the rest of the world, delegitimizing the legal grounds used to develop the 1963 Clean Air Act.

If U.S. courts agree with the EPA’s new parameters, it could restrict future administrations from enacting similar regulations.

Environmentalists and climate scientists that spoke with the Times argued that, if the U.S. power sector were its own nation, it would be the fifth-largest global polluter behind China, the U.S.’s various other industries, India, and Russia.

“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Times. Bapna added that Zeldin is ending the EPA’s “legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”

It’s the latest of many efforts by Trump and his allies to diminish or completely rewrite the destructive realities of climate change and global warming. Yet evidence abounds proving the catastrophic forecast: Summer 2026 was the hottest season in U.S. history (surpassing the national average temperature during the infamous 1936 Dust Bowl heatwave), the California coast—from Malibu to the San Francisco bay area—is falling into the sea due to land erosion caused by rising sea levels, and intense, sudden rainfalls in the Grand Canyon caused by a spike in temperature killed two people last month.

The changes have been even more harrowing on a global scale. Last month, a glacier several times the size of the Empire State Building melted away from its perch atop the Himalayas, which have experienced climate change at a disproportionately higher pace than the rest of the world—sometimes warming as much as twice the global rate.

The glacial chunk crashed into a valley along the Nepal-Tibet border nearly 7,000 feet below, carving into the land and reshaping the earth before landing in the Lhende Khola River, where the enormous quantity of rock and ice displaced enough water to trigger a nine-meter flash flood. The entire event killed at least 1,300 people, and more than 5,300 are still missing in the region.

President Trump doesn’t want us to know what he’s using artificial intelligence for.

The question was raised Sunday night in the Air Force One press gaggle while Trump spoke about trying to beat China in the AI arms race—something he and many others in government seem to think is of highest priority.

“Whoever wins AI—and we’re leading by a lot—whoever wins AI wins,” Trump said.

“Have you ever used it yourself?” a reporter asked.

“I use AI, yeah I do.”

“How do you use AI?”

“But uh, I would say for the most part you can use AI for a lotta things,” he continued, ignoring the question.

“What do you use it for?” the reporter pressed.

“I don’t wanna tell you that.”

The Trump administration is certainly AI-obsessed. Trump has used it to make disparaging, racist posts of his political adversaries, portray himself as Jesus Christ, depict the Gaza Strip as a post-genocide beach resort, and even literally speak for him in a campaign ad. His administration has also been extremely friendly to the AI industry, with everything from DOGE to the Department of Defense implementing it into their protocols and wars—all while the technology goes largely unregulated. And yet even with all that in mind, it’s troubling to imagine what else Trump may be using it for as president. Maybe lately he’s asking ChatGPT what “Ansar Allah” means.

Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish destination wedding was bankrolled by a member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, ProPublica reported Monday.

Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch, dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on Don Jr.’s big day, according to records reviewed by ProPublica, as well as three people familiar with the event who spoke with the outlet.

Kremlev rented out a private island where the reception was held, and guests were housed for $100,000 per night. He paid an estimated $70,000 for a massive fireworks display, and his team even helped to plan the festivities.

Kremlev is president of the International Boxing Association, which is financed by Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy company. The wedding payments were sourced from an entity in Dubai that IBA uses for financial transactions.

The event was small—just 18 people attended the ceremony, and around 50 attended the reception—which made it all the more conspicuous that there was a large delegation of Russians wandering around. None of the family’s pictures showed Kremlev, but the top of his bald head could be spotted in a group picture posted by a friend of the bride.

Kremlev has extensive ties to Putin: The Russian president has positioned Kremlev as a central figure in the sports-betting industry and chosen one of his companies to run the national lottery. In 2023, Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company—and Kremlev promptly became its owner. Kremlev is also involved in a sports education organization called Healthy Fatherland, which has been sanctioned by Ukraine for allegedly abducting and relocating Ukrainian children.

“Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.”

The previously unreported relationship between Don Jr. and a Russian oligarch should raise serious concerns about the level of access Putin’s inner circle has to President Donald Trump and his family. Also in attendance at the wedding was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who has held a central role in negotiating a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

It’s not clear why Kremlev would bankroll Don Jr.’s wedding, considering that the president’s son already has a net worth of $300 million. Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles, told ProPublica that the arrangement reeked of quid pro quo. “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” he said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

A spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute that his wedding was paid for by a Russian oligarch, insisting that Kremlev was a “personal friend” and “not someone he has a business relationship with.” Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr. have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”

This story has been updated.