Donald Trump may be “bored” with the Iran war he started but it seems there is no wound to his vanity too trivial not to obsess over.
In this case, it’s a judge’s order that Trump’s name be removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. You may recall that after a judge ruled Trump’s name had been improperly added to the center, the infantile president threw a tantrum and rage-quit it.
But it seems the removal of his name proved too much for Big Baby Trump’s ego after all. In addition to covering the wall of the center with a tarp, thus hiding his missing name, Trump’s cronies created a legal document designed to threaten the center’s finances if Big Baby’s name isn’t there. There to help is Trump’s personal attorney cosplaying as acting attorney general, Todd “Slush Fund” Blanche.
The Atlantic has reported that DOJ lawyers representing the Kennedy Center are using our tax dollars seeking an emergency stay of the name removal to an appeals court. They argue that removing Trump’s name “jeopardizes ‘hundreds of millions’ of dollars in gifts and pledges tied to an entity, unheard-of until this month, called the Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation.”
That foundation is a renaming of the existing Kennedy Center Foundation, which had been established as an independent nonprofit in 2024, before Trump’s reelection, according to The Atlantic.
The renamed foundation’s presumably-new bylaws require that gifts be “’returned, refunded, or terminated’ if the president’s name is removed from the building, its branding, or other affiliated materials,” The Atlantic said. All this happened in mid-March, not long before the judge’s removal order at the end of May. It’s almost as though it was done just to undermine any such order.
“The Kennedy Center was reporting fundraising hauls totaling more than $100 million under Trump as recently as late last year,” as per The Atlantic. But since the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation did not exist until the spring, it’s not clear why any funds raised or pledged before that would have to be returned or canceled,” the publication noted. Nor is it clear how much was raised since.
So, it’s hard to know how much, if any, money is really at risk.
But one thing seems indisputable: Trump and his minions are threatening to hold Kennedy Center finances hostage to the Big Baby’s vanity.
One of those minions is the center’s general counsel, Elliot Berke. According to The Atlantic, he signed the official document designed to sabotage any effort to remove Trump’s name.
Berke is also the MAGA lawyer who tried – and failed - to book his band, The DePlorables, at the center’s jazz club, “even though it’s a rock cover band made up of amateur musicians,” Politico reported, in April.
The whole thing sounds pretty deplorable, eh?
