Trump Uses Nuclear Option to Hide Kennedy Center Docs From Judge

President Trump is fighting attempts to make him testify and produce documents related to his takeover of the Kennedy Center.

In a court filing Wednesday, Trump asserted executive privilege, claiming that in her lawsuit, Kennedy Center board member and Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty initiated “overbroad discovery requests that expressly implicated the President’s involvement in the Kennedy Center’s management and operations, and called for information, documents, and communications concerning that involvement.”

“Those requests are improper, and this Court should deny Plaintiff’s motion to compel. Plaintiff’s arguments to the contrary fail to convince,” the president’s deputy assistant and deputy counsel, Joshua Hoyt, wrote in the document.

Beatty sued Trump late last year over his attempts to take over the center, add his name, and shut it down for repairs. Since then, the president has pressed on with his handpicked board of trustees, rebranding the center with his name and closing it so it can be renovated to his liking, defying multiple court orders along the way.

Now Trump is refusing to testify or provide documentation about his involvement, asserting executive privilege over a pet project that shouldn’t be anywhere near his top priorities as president. His takeover has not so coincidentally coincided with the center’s financial collapse, with most of its cash reserves gone. Donations and pledges are drying up, and ticket sales have plummeted.

“The burst happened up the pipe,” said Andrew Taylor, director of the arts management program at American University, to The Washington Post last month. “The water stopped flowing into the organization because of the choices the administration was making.”

Trump claims that only his name and takeover can save the center from physical and financial ruin. But it seems that things have only gotten worse since he got involved, much like everything else in the U.S.

President Trump would let his friend who “looks like shit” die at his rally.

“I travel with more doctors than any human being. If people get sick in the audience, they leave ’em alone. You know what they call them? Collateral damage,” Trump said at his Wednesday rally in Arizona, receiving some chuckles from the crowd. “If that person right over there, a friend of mine—he looks like shit, actually. He looks like he’s ready to have a heart attack. If he actually had a heart attack, you know what my doctors would do? … They would leave him alone!”

“I say, ‘Please help him!’ They’d say, ‘No sir, we can’t leave your side.’ But he’s dying of a heart attack! ‘Sir, he’s collateral damage,’” he continued. “Can you believe it? They got like six ambulances, and they won’t use one for anybody else.”

It’s unclear who exactly Trump was saying “looks like shit.” But the crowd full of his most loyal supporters just laughed along with him—as if they weren’t collateral damage to him too.

Some commentators pointed to Trump’s lack of filter as a sign of dementia, and indeed shortly before his remarks, Trump was bragging about acing a dementia test.

CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner challenged Trump’s notion that doctors would ignore sick people or refer to them as collateral damage.

“This is completely untrue, and an actual insult to the fabulous doctors, nurses, and PAs of the White House Medical Unit,” he wrote online. “Over the years I’ve been honored to get to know many members of the WHMU and I know that they would never call a spectator ‘collateral damage’. They would save their life.”

President Donald Trump wants to build a case to strip Representative Ilhan Omar of her citizenship and deport her.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the federal government is investigating how Omar got her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia as a child, focusing on how her late father filled out her forms. Her Washington, D.C., home was searched on Monday, just three weeks before the midterm elections in November.

Homeland Security agents took her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport. Several subpoenas have been issued to her relatives and others close to her. It’s obvious that the Trump administration wants to make an example out of her as part of its effort to begin denaturalizing American citizens.

The investigation ostensibly centers on whether Omar’s father put her age as 17 rather than 18 on her citizenship application to allow her to qualify immediately for citizenship alongside his own application. Omar became a citizen in 2000.

“They cheat on everything,” Trump said to an Ohio audience at a rally Monday about Somali Americans. “We’re not going to stand for it.”

In order to strip an American of their citizenship, the Department of Justice has to sue in federal court and prove that the person materially lied to get their status. For years, conservatives have pushed the unfounded rumor that Omar married her brother to bring him to the U.S. Investigations by media outlets and the government have yielded nothing incriminating about her.

Trump’s effort is a racist attempt to single out a Black, hijab-wearing Muslim of Somali descent to satisfy his and the Republican Party’s bigotry. The case is an uphill battle and will result in a drawn-out court fight, but they want to be as cruel and inflict as much damage on Omar and her reputation as possible.

Elon Musk is wiping his hands of the Trump administration’s latest intel scandal.

The SpaceX founder did not deny that his company’s satellite-supplied internet service was suspended in Ukraine earlier this week as Russian missiles barraged Kyiv. Instead, he blamed the lapse on the U.S. military and Donald Trump.

In a statement on X, Musk wrote that “Starshield systems are owned and controlled” by Washington and “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

“Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX,” Musk continued. “Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.”

But Ukraine’s actions on Tuesday were not offensive. Russian ballistic missiles slammed two plants supplying heat and electricity to Kyiv and damaged a residential building in the capital. At least nine people died in the attacks, reported Al Jazeera.

Ukrainian officials suggested that the strikes could have been prevented if they received the proper intelligence—but there was only radio silence. Multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News that U.S. officials had claimed their defense systems had failed to detect the missiles because of “bad weather,” but Kyiv did not buy the excuse.

Around the same time, SpaceX restricted Starlink access within the region, upending Ukraine’s primary internet connection.

On Friday, Trump brokered an eyebrow-raising deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Moscow, effectively offering the country an economic lifeline that would allow Russia to continue the war.

Zelenskiy torched the deal, arguing to American officials that the arrangement exhibited “weakness.” Trump, apparently, did not appreciate the language choice.

A multiday harassment campaign ensued, in which the Trump administration called European capitals and Kyiv, threatening to cut off military intelligence sharing and weapons deliveries unless Ukraine stopped attacking Russian oil refineries.

On Wednesday, Zelenskiy told Piers Morgan that he felt “betrayed” by Trump and the U.S.

“This is our country, our body, our home, our children.… That’s why it’s painful when Trump chooses one side,” the Ukrainian president said in a clip of the interview shared on X.

“If you’re in the middle, you have to stay in the middle. Not on the wrong side,” continued Zelenskiy. “This is not the right side of history.”

A federal judge is considering forcing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to testify in court about his anti-transgender statements for a lawsuit challenging the U.S. military’s ban on transgender people.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said in court in Washington, D.C., Wednesday that she might compel Hegseth to sit for a one-hour deposition and answer questions about the anti-trans views he has expressed.

“I’m very aware that he is the secretary of defense and he has a lot of constraints on his time. But he has time to tweet and put out videos and speak to generals, and I think it’s fair game,” Reyes said, according to The Washington Sun’s Jose Pagliery.

First, though, Reyes said she’d give Hegseth the chance to respond to 10 written questions, and if he isn’t forthcoming enough and is too “lawyerly,” then he’d have to sit for the deposition.

The Department of Justice’s lawyers, meanwhile, don’t want Reyes to take Hegseth’s past statements or social media posts into consideration.

“The Supreme Court has held that courts should not look outside the operative terms of a policy—as this Court did with respect to certain social media posts—in assessing the basis on which a policy classifies,” the DOJ wrote in a four-page court filing Tuesday seeking summary judgment in favor of the government from Reyes.

Hegseth has a long history of making anti-trans comments—both in public and on social media.

On February 27, 2025, Hegseth shared an official Department of War post stating, “Transgender service members are disqualified from service without an exemption.” On April 20 the same year, he posted, “Your agenda is illegals, trans & DEI—all of which are no longer allowed @ DoD.” On April 24, he called Reyes “a rogue judge” and claimed there were “Zero readiness reasons for trans troops.”

In a speech on May 6, Hegseth declared, “No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit.” And after the Supreme Court later allowed the ban to remain in place while the legal battle continued, Hegseth posted on May 8, “After a SCOTUS victory for @POTUS, TRANS is out at the DOD.”

In Reyes’s March 2025 ruling temporarily halting the military’s ban, well before these posts, she said the military’s policy was “soaked in animus and dripping with pretext.” That proved prescient, as in June this year, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the ban in a 2–1 decision.

The Pentagon is trying to delay enforcement of that decision, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court, while the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, service members who are already being pushed out, want the appeals court to mandate compliance immediately.