As a follow up to the post below, just read this. The Washington Post got audio of the Kennedy Center Meeting Trump attended today:
Trump and board members floated names such as Paul Anka, Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Mathis and Andrea Bocelli for the award.
The president also suggested giving awards to Elvis Presley, Luciano Pavarotti and Babe Ruth, though the Kennedy Center Honors are not given posthumously. Pavarotti was honored in 2001. Trump floated expanding the event to include politicians, executives and athletes.
“Elvis sells better as a dead man,” Trump said.
During the board meeting, Trump railed against previous Kennedy Center Honors, saying, “In the past, I mean, these are radical left lunatics that have been chosen. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t watch it. And the host was always terrible.”
It is unclear how many members will be added to the committee. Their identities are also unknown. “We’re expanding the committee so that the search for the Kennedy Center Honors is more inclusive,” said one board member, who could not be identified by voice alone.
No you didn’t accidentally drop acid. They actually used the word “inclusive” a word which has been deleted from every government website.
This will be ratings gold for sure:
Trump seemed to say he would agree to be the ceremony’s host. “I don’t want to, but I want this thing to be successful,” he told the board.
Another bit of evidence of his decline into delusional megalomania.
Luckily, he’s got such great taste that the center will be incredibly successful:
He said he hopes to bring in Broadway shows. (The center routinely books tours of Broadway productions.)
Later, Trump and board members mentioned several shows they would be interested in bringing, including “Hello, Dolly!” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Camelot,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Cats.”..
At other points during the meeting, Trump shared personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw “Cats” and which members of the cast he found attractive. He also spoke about how dangerous the Potomac River can be. The center is adjacent to the river.
Oh my God.
You may have heard that Trump toadie Ric Grenell was mad at people for booing JD Vance at a performance the other night but you may not have heard what he wrote:
He cited the center’s diversity as a strength and urged tolerance for different political views. “As President, I take diversity and inclusion very seriously,” he wrote. “I have met with many of you, and I love that we are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, agnostic, gay, straight, black, white, Hispanic and absolutely different.”
As I said, you aren’t on drugs. He actually said that.
This is actually a good thing, though. The more time he spends destroying the Kennedy Center, the less he has to destroy the country. I think he should devote at least four days a week to it.
Trump has a lot on his plate and he’s very, very busy. Yes, he found time to squeeze in several hours of golf and partying at his beach club over the weekend even as he’s creating a constitutional crisis but he needs to have some downtime.
Now he’s back to work doing the important work of the American people that no one else can do.
President Trump is expected to tour the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts today, where he will also preside over a board meeting as the Center’s new chair.
Last month, Trump led an overhaul of the Kennedy Center’s leadership by dismissing the previously-appointed Board of Trustees, along with longtime Kennedy Center chair David Rubenstein. Deborah Rutter, who served as president of the cultural center for over a decade, was also ousted.
President Trump named an all-new board that, in an unprecedented move, elected him as the new Kennedy Center Board Chair.
The Kennedy Center has not shared a copy of today’s meeting agenda with NPR, but The New York Timesreports that Trump is aiming to exert more influence over the selection of the Kennedy Center Honorees and the board plans to discuss changes to the committee that makes nominations.
He’s going to choose the honorees from now on in his quest for the Golden Age of American Culture. I’d guess his first decrees will be for Kid Rock, Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and The VIllage People. Jason Aldeen, James Woods and Billy Ray Cyrus will have to wait for next year.
People didn’t vote for Project 2025 because Trump disowned it on the campaign trail saying he had nothing to do with it and that it was too extreme. We knew he was lying but his campaign was concerned enough about it to have him go out and lie. (Not that he doesn’t do that reflexively anyway.) He knew it was toxic to his chances.
Paul Dans was director of Project 2025 for the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right group which has produced such policy plans for more than 40 years.
Project 2025 alarmed progressives with its advocacy of slashing government staffing and budgets and attacking protections for LGBTQ+ Americans; efforts to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion throughout government; attempts to tackle the climate crisis; and more.
Democratic attacks proved effective enough for Trump to claim he had “nothing to do” with the project. In July, as the Trump campaign scrambled to limit damage, Dans was forced out of his Heritage role.
Now, with Trump back in power, the president and his chief donor and ally, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk, have mounted an assault on the federal government that has already led to thousands of firings, a bonfire of climate regulations, attacks on DEI initiatives real and imagined and much more.
“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Dans told Politico. “It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back here, but the way that they’ve been able to move and kind of upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.”
Dans told Politico that even though he was the sacrificial lamb the campaign tossed aside and he called their distancing from Project 2025 “malpractice.” But he’s so thrilled at how they are enacting it almost to the letter that he says now that he would be thrilled to be asked to join the administration. Why not? Nobody who matters (Republicans who are willingly making themselves human sacrifices for their Daddy) will care.
In reality, Trump is not only enacting Project 2025, he is going farther with his inane tariffs, destroying the world order, and allowing DOGE to run through the federal government with a chainsaw randomly cutting anything that gets in its way without even a review. It’s Project 2025 on steroids.
They handled the secure transport of nuclear materials — dangerous, demanding work that requires rigorous training. Four of them took the Trump administration’s offer of a buyout and left the National Nuclear Security Administration.
A half-dozen staff members left a unit in the agency that builds reactors for nuclear submarines. And a biochemist and engineer who had recently joined the agency as head of the team that enforces safety and environmental standards at a Texas plant that assembles nuclear warheads was fired.
In the past six weeks, the agency, just one relatively small outpost in a federal work force that President Trump and his top adviser Elon Musk aim to drastically pare down, has lost a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation.
The nuclear agency, chronically understaffed but critically important, is the busiest it has been since the Cold War. It not only manages the nation’s 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads, it is modernizing that arsenal — a $20-billion-a-year effort that will arm a new fleet of nuclear submarines, bomber jets and land-based missiles.
Since the last year of the first Trump administration, the agency has been desperately trying to build up its staff to handle the added workload. Though it was still hundreds of employees short of what it had said it needed, it had edged up to about 2,000 workers by January. Now, with the Trump administration’s buyouts and firings, the agency’s trajectory has gone from one of painstaking growth to retraction.
Don’t worry. Elon knows some college freshmen who can do the job, no problem. He’s a genius, you know.
I live in hope every day that nothing catastrophic happens but there are so many catastrophic decisions and actions being taken it’s hard to believe that something isn’t going to happen. Let’s hope it isn’t this.
I’m sorry to say that I think that may be literally true. These are not normal people. That account is the official Rapid Response account of the Trump 47 White House.
I wrote about the Salvadoran prison plan last month. and earlier today. This is actually happening. I am truly surprised they haven’t just re-opened the Bush era black site torture chambers. But that’s a lot more expensive. Better to send them to a country that will happily do the job for peanuts.
I must have written a hundred times that the torture regime of the Bush administration was only the first step to official authoritarian status. And here we are.
Elon Musk told Fox News’ Larry Kudlow this past week that Democrats support the safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid so they can lure undocumented immigrants to America and get their votes. It’s based upon the previously “fringe” Great Replacement Theory, which Musk apparently believes justifies taking a chainsaw to the federal government. It’s nonsense, of course. Undocumented immigrants cannot collect any of those benefits despite the fact that they routinely pay into them. Musk has it completely backwards. And, no they can’t vote either.
The question now is just how far into the Trump administration this Great Replacement ideology goes. It’s clear that top adviser Stephen Miller believes it and it’s quite likely a number of others do as well. Considering that this weekend Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, under the pretense that we are being “invaded” you have to wonder when they are going to find a way to declare full “wartime” powers. Who knows? Maybe they’ll find a way to use the Great Replacement Theory to round up their domestic political enemies as well . After all, they believe they’re providing “material support” for alien enemies with their support for “entitlements.” (I’m only half kidding…)
With the invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act of the Trump administration took another giant leap toward a Constitutional crisis. The Brennan Center defines the rarely used law this way:
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation. The law permits the president to target these immigrants without a hearing and based only on their country of birth or citizenship.
They point out that it is supposed to be used in cases of espionage or sabotage but in only three cases: the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, which I think we can at least agree were existential crises, even if the law was applied in appalling ways. It’s the law that President Franklin Roosevelt used to justify the Japanese Internment, the darkest moment of his otherwise illustrious presidency.
But it should be noted that the law is only intended to be used under a declaration of war or when a foreign government threatens or undertakes an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.” The first requires congressional action but latter justification is up to the president under his inherent authority. But as the Brennan Center points out, previous presidents and the Supreme Court have always considered this to have been enacted under the war power:
In the Constitution and other late-1700s statutes, the term invasion is used literally, typically to refer to large-scale attacks. The term predatory incursion is also used literally in writings of that period to refer to slightly smaller attacks like the 1781 Raid on Richmond led by American defector Benedict Arnold.
In other words, it was never intended to be nor has it ever been used as a power to deport people without due process for garden variety criminal activity — or no crime at all.
On Friday night Trump signed the Executive Order claiming:
“Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA,. he result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.”
Trump is nonsensically attempting to use the words “invasion” and “incursion” to describe criminal immigrants as if simply calling Venezuela a “hybrid criminal state” makes it true. Neither can the alleged members of the targeted Tren de Agua gang be accurately described as terrorists who have “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.” (Trump did declare the gang a terrorist organization last month but that doesn’t make it so.) It’s absurd. Assuming they are all members of the criminal gang he has cited, and there’s no way of knowing who they are since there is no due process, this is obviously a domestic criminal matter, akin to dealing with organized crime, not an act of war against the United States.
But then the alleged isolationist peacenik Donald Trump has been itching to use war powers since he became president the first time. And it didn’t completely come out of the blue. He talked about using the Alien Enemies Act on the campaign trail, often mentioning it as the only remedy for the lurid crimes he insisted were stalking everyone in America on a daily basis.
A federal judge has already issued a temporary restraining order to stop the deportations even ordering some planes filled with prisoners bound for a prison in El Salvador to turn around in the air. The administration did not obey the order later saying that the planes were already over international waters and the prisoners were transferred to the notorious El Salvadoran prison. The U.S. has agreed to pay millions for their keep.
Axios reported over the week-end that members of the White House were exuberant over the impending showdown between Trump and the judiciary over whether any judge has the power to stop a presidential order regardless of what it is, one senior official saying, “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win.”
According to Axios this whole drama was orchestrated by Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem who planned to keep the announcement of Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act under wraps until they could fly the prisoners to El Salvador, telling the reporters, “we wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out.” But the news leaked and the ACLU and Democracy Forward quickly filed a lawsuit.
Keep in mind that we have no idea who has been disappeared into that prison.
This is only part of the crackdown on non-citizens, regardless of their status. The case of legal green card holder Mahmoud Kahlil, detained for protesting, is the most famous at the moment. But there are others, like this Laotian mother of 5 who has been in the U.S. since she was 8 months old, snatched up without warning and put on a plane to a country she’d never been to. ICE has also deported legitimate visa holders without explanation, detained German and British tourists, European legal residents, and who knows how many Latinos, legal and otherwise, without probable cause. The sad fact is that no non-citizen can be considered safe from the threat of detention and expulsion with little or no due process in America today.
If you are not already chilled by the Trump administration’s defiance of a federal court order, Bill Kristol adds more fuel for your anxiety. He listened via computer to Saturday’s emergency hearing on the Trump 2.0 administration’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport two planeloads of detainees to El Salvador.
He reflects on Judge Boasberg’s ruling for the plaintiffs. This is how sober aplication of the law is supposed to work, Kristol thought. Orderly. Deliberate, and “with little in the way of emotion or soaring rhetoric.” That we live in a country with a centuries-old rule of law is something to cherish.
But this administration places that tradition, that culture at risk. Vice President J.D. Vance invoked the “great replacement” theory again over the weekend in an appearance with Laura Ingraham. He warned that Germany taking in millions of “culturally incompatible” immigrants puts it on the verge of “civilizational suicide.” Vance is a big believer in culture, just not the one Kristol values.
Of course, Germany did destroy itself almost a century ago. It almost destroyed civilization itself until America stepped in to help save it. That didn’t happen because Germany took in too many migrants. It happened because the German people fell for arguments uncomfortably close to Vance’s. Those were arguments that derided the very concept of the rule of law, a derision that was defended in part by warnings about immigrants and foreign blood.
In defying a federal court over the weekend and making outsized claims about the president’s Article II authorities, Trump 2.0 is not defending our U.S. culture of law but slashing its wrists. Drowning it in the bathtub feels less violent in the present context.
One trusts that the United States isn’t going to go the way of Germany in the last century. But the slope toward lawlessness is a slippery one, and we have an administration that is eagerly leading us down it. There are still footholds we can grab onto in order to arrest the precipitous decline that lies ahead. But we are already part way down the hill, and the pace of decline is accelerating.
Faced with a lawless White House, the question many of us are asking ourselves this morning is what are we prepared to do arrrest that decline. It’s the question Officer Jim Malone (Sean Connery) famously asks Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) in The Untouchables (1987).
It’s the question Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut posed on Sunday. If we continue to observe norms and act like the U.S. is business as usual — if we won’t step outside our comfort zones — our democracy could be gone in under a year. We are “at immediate risk.”
BREAKING: Chris Murphy just issued an urgent warning about the fragility of American democracy on NBC’s Meet the Press. More Democrats need to be talking like this. The American people need to know just how dire of a situation we are in. pic.twitter.com/sF5Q5mejSi
— Trump’s Lies (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) March 16, 2025
“And then what are you prepared to do?” I haven’t answered that question for myself yet. But the clock is ticking.
Is it mere coincidence that Malone and Murphy are Irish?
X-post from “Official Rapid Response account of the Trump 47 White House. Supporting @POTUS‘s America First agenda and holding the Fake News accountable. MAGA!”
The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn’t apply, two senior officials tell Axios.
Shortly before 7 p.m. ET on Saturday, the New York Times reports, “Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Trump administration to cease its use of an obscure wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as a pretext for the expulsion of migrants, and immediately return anyone it was expelling under the act to the United States.”
Earlier in the day, five Venezuelans held by DHS “filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that their expulsion on that basis would violate federal law and the Constitution’s guarantee to due process.”
Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against use of the Alien Enemies Act to affect their deportation. Besides, because none of the prisoners received a hearing, it is unclear how many of the 250 passengers on the planes were actual gang members, illegally in the country, on visas , on green cards, or innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time when detained. The Trump White House didn’t so much as say “trust us.”
This timeline will be scrutinized and argued in court (Axios):
The timeline: The president signed the executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday night, but intentionally did not advertise it. On Saturday morning, word of the order leaked, officials said, prompting a mad scramble to get planes in the air.
At 2:31 p.m. Saturday, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights, posted on X that “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL ICE flights” were departing from Texas to El Salvador, which had agreed to accept Venezuelan gang members deported from the U.S.
Hours later, during a court hearing filed by the ACLU., Boasberg ordered a halt to the deportations and said any flights should be turned around mid-air.
“This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he told the Justice Department, according to the Washington Post.
At that point, about 6:51 p.m., both flights were off the Yucatan Peninsula, according to flight paths posted on X.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller stage-managed the deportation, Axios reports, aided by Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem of dog-shooting fame.
“Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders,” an unnamed White House official told Axios. The judge’s ruling simply came too late to change course. “We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,” said the official.
“Court order defied. First of many as I’ve been warning and start of true constitutional crisis,” attorney Mark Zaid posted to Twitter/X. “Ultimately will lead to Trump #impeachment proceedings.”
Count me skeptical. Both on the impeachment and because the White House has a very slippery definition of defying.
The White House is doubling down on its strongman shtick (which looks less like a shtick). As I’ve written, their game is to find the legal line, step over it, and dare anyone to push back. Lather, rinse. repeat. Now with virtual immunity granted by the Roberts court, Trump feels he’s above the law and untouchable. He IS the law,
A defiant White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that’s a fight we are more than happy to take.”
Next up from the Trump WH, it’s the “They just needed killin'” defense. The Constitution and the rule of law are inconveniences.
* Doubly frightening, many in Trump’s base will cream their jeans over it. And they live in your neighborhood.
Update:
Something else I meant to add from ABC’s coverage: “top lawyers and officials in the administration made the determination that since the flights were over international waters, Boasberg’s order did not apply.”
I’m no lawyer, but I imagine complying with the judge’s order that the planes be instructed to turn around damn sure applied to Trump’s lawyers standing on U.S. soil who ignored it. What is Boasberg prepared to do about it and to them?
During the pandemic an empty Main St at Disney World
I actually think it’s going to be worse than what the analysts are predicting. Trump won’t shut his trap and now they’re detaining foreigners at airports who haven’t done anything wrong. It’s dangerous here.
International travelers concerned about President Donald Trump’s trade policies and bellicose rhetoric have been canceling trips to the United States, depriving the U.S. tourism industry of billions of dollars at a time when the economy has started to appear wobbly.
Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing U.S. national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead.
International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originallyforecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last monthto reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”
“There’s been a dramatic shift in our outlook,” said Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics. “You’re looking at a much weaker economic engine than what otherwise would’ve been, not just because of tariffs, but the rhetoric and condescending tone around it.”
It’s pretty clear that Trump and his cronies and henchmen are hostile to all foreigners and they are not welcome here unless they are Russian oligarchs or white South Africans (and no I’m not just talking about Elon Musk.). That’s it. I can’t blame anyone else for staying away. Why take the chance?
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