DL Open Thread: Saturday, May 30, 2026
Everything Falls Apart–Trump Edition. It’s happening, folks:
Trump Excised From Kennedy Center. Turns out he couldn’t just unilaterally rename it:
In his ruling that President Trump’s name must be removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a federal judge turned his attention to the statute passed by Congress in honor of the slain president.
Signed into law in 1964, only two months after Kennedy was assassinated, the legislation renamed what was first known as the National Cultural Center after a leader who had championed the performing arts.
“The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, designated by this Act,” the law read in part, “shall be the sole national memorial to the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy within the city of Washington and its environs.”
In his ruling on Friday, Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington found that the president’s effort to rebrand the building after himself flew in the face of lawmakers’ original intent. He ordered that the 18 new letters added to the center’s white marble facade — which currently reads the “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” — be removed.
Trump’s reaction? Remember, kids, he’s the President:
As he complained about the decision in a lengthy post on social media, the president threatened to abandon his interest in restoring the center. (He never had any, save destroying it.)
Ticking through a number of maintenance problems he had pledged to fix, Mr. Trump wrote that he could not be “involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight.”
He added that he had directed the Commerce Department to “allow a full and complete transfer” of the institution to Congress, which he said would take responsibility for its “operation, maintenance, and management.”
The Kennedy Center is an independent organization with its own board of trustees, though Congress allots federal funds to maintain the building. Its governance structure was at issue in the lawsuit filed by Representative Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and an ex officio member of the board. She said she had been denied a role in decision-making by allies of the president.
“Based on the fact that the Radical Left Democrats care more about opposing your favorite President, ME, than saving a dying Performing Arts Center,” Mr. Trump wrote in the social media post, “almost all of which lose large amounts of money throughout the Country, we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.”
Trump’s Slush Fund Faces Legal Headwinds:
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, created as part of an unprecedented settlement with the president, his family and the Trump Organization.
The fund is being operated out of the Justice Department. Both Democrats and Republicans have criticized the fund. Opponents have labeled it a massive “slush fund” for President Donald Trump’s allies. Its existence has alarmed some legal experts, in part because there will be very little public oversight over how it is managed. Senate Republican leaders last week punted a vote on a GOP package to fund ICE and the Border Patrol until June in part because of concerns over the fund, NBC News reported.
The Trump administration cannot take any further action on the fund while legal motions are pending, “which includes the transferring of money to the fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the fund,” according to the order.
The judge said the order was necessary to “ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed from the Anti-Weaponization Fund” while there are motions pending to block the distribution of funds. She set a hearing for June 12.
There’s more:
The Trump administration moved to set up the fund just ahead of court deadlines over a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against the executive branch he controls in connection with a years-old leak of his IRS records.
A federal judge in Florida had questioned whether a court could even hear the case, given Trump’s control over the Justice Department attorneys who would be responding to the lawsuit. Trump’s private attorneys dismissed the case and announced a settlement of other claims against the government the day the fund was announced.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, the judge who oversaw that case, requested a further briefing Friday after 35 retired federal judges asked the court to re-open the case.
She wrote that a “party’s decision to file a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement may qualify” as the kind of impropriety that allows the court to investigate and determine “whether an attorney has abused the judicial process.”
Former US Attorney General Pam Bondi has defended her handling of the release of documents related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Bondi, who in April was removed from her post as America’s top law enforcement officer by US President Donald Trump, testified behind closed doors on Friday in Washington DC.
“We demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to transparency in the Department’s search for, collection, and review of the Epstein files, producing nearly 3 million pages of material,” she said in opening remarks to the US House Oversight Committee.
“I am proud of the Department’s record and commitment to transparency under my leadership,” she said. “This was an enormously complicated and labor-intensive process. To the best of my knowledge, the Department produced everything required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”
But three hours into the congressional interview, Democrats emerged accusing Bondi of being evasive in her answers, deferring responsibility to her former deputy (Blanche), and said government lawyers stepped in to prevent her from answering questions.
“She said she would not speak or respond to any questions that had anything to do with President Trump,” said Robert Garcia, the committee’s leading Democrat.
Congressman Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told the BBC the process was a cover-up and Republicans on the committee set the interview up with voluntary transcription and no video tape.
There is no plausible deniability remaining. Trump, along with his bodily fluids, are all over Epstein’s sordid adventures.
Can The Public Watch Court Of Chancery Proceedings? I ask because Vince McMahon is coming to town. In fact, the judge in the case has already ruled that McMahon illegally destroyed evidence:
The shareholders’ lawsuit against Vince McMahon and members of the WWE Board of Directors, scheduled to run from 6/8 to 6/12, has now listed who lawyers representing each side will be calling to testify and includes a 41-page filing sanctioning the behavior of Vince McMahon and Nick Khan.
The lawsuit is expected to include testimony from major names like Vince McMahon, Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro, Khan, Paul Levesque and Stephanie McMahon.
The key to the suit is that there are certainly suspicious things happened regarding Vince McMahon leaving and coming back and the back story that led to the merger, but proving shareholder damage is very difficult because the stock price exploded ever since the merger went through.
The case will be tried in Delaware Chancery Court and there will be no jury. Judge J. Travis Laster, who this past week ordered the sanctions against Vince McMahon and Khan, will make the final ruling, and that could take months.
The shareholders are trying to argue that McMahon made the deal with Emanuel because he had a deal in place that he couldn’t be removed from power, which, ironically, he was very quickly removed from power.
Although by contract he had to agree to do it and could not have actually been fired. He did resign when convinced of the possibility of a domino effect of sponsors after Slim Jim’s made it clear they were pulling out unless Vince McMahon was no longer involved with the company.
They claim other bidders, one of whom was Tony Khan, were not allowed to have a fair shot at buying and, therefore, WWE shareholders were shortchanged.
Laster ruled that Vince McMahon and Nick Khan destroyed evidence in this case and because of that the court will treat five damaging facts as presumptively true when the case goes to trial.
Laster’s briefing after a 5/13 hearing concluded that Vince McMahon, Khan, Levesque, Blum and Stephanie McMahon all used Signal’s auto-delete function, which wiped out messages they had a legal duty to preserve. Signal, which Khan encouraged Vince McMahon to use, allows users to set up that their messages would automatically disappear after a period of time of their choosing.
This clearly hurts the defendants in the upcoming trial. Laster noted that the defendants still have the opportunity to plead their case and overcome the presumptions. But he said the five facts that will be presumed true at trial are central to the plaintiffs’ theory that McMahon steered the WWE merger deal to Emanuel, not because it was the right move for business or the best deal for shareholders, but because Emanuel guaranteed McMahon the ability to continue running the company, something the other bidders would not do.
Laster stated the key things he now believes to be true going into the trial based on the destroying of evidence: 1) Emanuel’s promise to provide Vince with a continued role at any post-merger company after a transaction influenced Vince’s decision-making with respect to the merger. 2) Emanuel’s offer of indemnification and other legal support related to pending federal investigations of Vince’s alleged misconduct influenced Vince’s decision-making with respect to the merger. 3) Vince decided to pursue a transaction with Endeavor in 2022, before the Company initiated the strategic review process. 4) Khan communicated with Emanuel between August and December 2022 to facilitate a transaction between WWE and Endeavor. 5) Vince and Khan worked with Raine (the firm WWE hired to work with them on the sale) to steer the process toward a deal with Endeavor and away from other potential bidders.
For those of you wondering, Paul Levesque is ‘Triple H’. He is head of WWE Creative (aka ‘the booker’), and he is married to Stephanie McMahon.
For those of you still wondering, yes, I have a subscription to the Wrestling Observer.
Wanna make something of it, ya pencil-neck geeks??
What do you want to talk about?
