A federal judge on Friday rejected an eleventh-hour attempt by the Kennedy Center to pause the removal of President Trump’s name from the renowned performing arts center while an appeal plays out. The institution’s board had asked Judge Christopher Cooper to halt his previous order requiring that Trump’s name come off the façade of the…
Federal judge denies emergency request to block UFC Freedom 250 at the White House and Lincoln Memorial, ruling plaintiffs lacked legal standing.
After the Republican Party’s decision to terminate subsidies that had significantly reduced healthcare costs under the Affordable Care Act for 22 million people, the White House is considering a new way to—officials claim—“help” Americans who face massive medical bills, either due to high-deductible plans that don’t cover routine costs or because of emergency expenses.The proposal, though, could just shift “who [the patients] owe the debt to,” as one doctor and researcher told The New York Times, which reported Thursday on the Trump administration’s proposal to allow people to take out loans directly from their health insurance companies when they can’t afford to pay a hospital or doctor’s office out of pocket—and then pay the insurance company back, likely with interest.“Hard to top this level of dystopia,” said one writer in response to the Times report. “Have health insurance through the ACA? The Trump administration is going to turn your health insurer into a loan shark you borrow money from if you can’t afford to pay your portion of medical procedures.”As the newspaper was reported, the provision is buried in a 1,121-page final rule issued last month regarding how the ACA will be regulated next year.The Trump administration is planning to significantly expand the number of Americans who are eligible for high-deductible “catastrophic” health insurance plans that provide no coverage for day-to-day medical expenses.“We note that multiyear and 1-year catastrophic plans may be able to offer relief from the high deductible and maximum annual limitation on cost sharing through other mechanisms,” reads the final rule. “For example, issuers of catastrophic plans could consider financing the deductible by providing enrollees a loan.”Currently, the average annual deductible for people insured under the ACA is nearly $4,000, and about 40% of enrollees this year have “Bronze” plans, which have an out-of-pocket maximum that’s over $10,000 for an individual, likely leaving many people having to pay thousands of dollars in medical expenses despite having coverage.By 2028, as Common Dreams reported earlier this year, catastrophic plans with lower premiums could have deductibles as high as $31,000 for families.The plan to shift more people onto expensive plans that provide less coverage for day-to-day medical care—and to push patients to take out loans from their insurers—comes as about one-third of Americans, even those with insurance, report skipping meals or cutting back on other expenses to afford their medical bills.The Times reported that at least one major health insurer—UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest—is already equipped to start lending patients money to cover unexpected medical bills. The company operates a bank that administers loans to doctors and offers health savings accounts.Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) said the latest proposal from the White House shows that President Donald Trump “is destroying healthcare from all sides.”The advocacy group Protect Our Care said the “suggestion” buried in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ final rule “is not only out of touch, it is cruel—accruing medical debt only adds to families’ financial burdens.”“While working families drown in the high cost of living, the Trump administration’s answer to the healthcare affordability crisis they created is to throw people an anchor made of medical debt and call it relief,” said Leslie Dach, chair of Protect Our Care. “Trump and Republicans had a simple, popular fix sitting right in front of their faces—extending the ACA tax credits—but they killed it anyway, triggering premiums to double, triple, or even quadruple for millions of working families, all to make billionaires and big corporations even richer.”“Americans are being bankrupted by crushing medical debt, and this administration isn’t lifting a finger to help—it’s busy shoveling more people into that hole,” said Dach. “Voters will remember this foolishness at the ballot box in November, just you wait.”Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, which advocates for a universal, single-payer healthcare system for New York state, suggested the proposal makes the latest case for a federal, government-funded healthcare program similar to those in other wealthy countries, which would end the healthcare profit motive by expanding the existing Medicare system to the entire US population.“Letting Americans take out loans to afford healthcare forces Americans deeper into debt and drives up profits for the health insurance industry,” said D’Arrigo. “Abolish the health insurance industry. Demand Medicare for All.”
President Donald Trump is poised to celebrate his 80th birthday this Sunday with an unprecedented Ultimate Fighting Championship bout at the White House, but according to Zeteo, the president is still musing about expanding his birthday celebrations to a national scale.“As the birthday boy gears up for his party, we feel compelled to remind you of a remarkably sad fact: Yes, President Trump really does want to make his birthday a federal holiday,” Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng wrote in the outlet’s report published on Friday. “Whether he ever makes it happen, he’s got some Republican allies on Capitol Hill who would clearly like to help him pull it off.”Zeteo first reported back in March that on separate occasions throughout 2025, Trump had talked with “longtime advisers” about making his birthday a federal holiday. Those talks have apparently continued through 2026, expanded to include Republican lawmakers, and occurred with such frequency that some have coined a phrase to refer to the discussion topic.“The birthday thing,” one source familiar with the matter told Zeteo, speaking on the condition of anonymity, referring to Trump’s “casual” talks with GOP lawmakers about making his birthday a federal holiday.Suebsaeng argued the notion would have seemed "deeply weird" at the start of Trump's first term – but enacting it in 2026, he wrote, was outright "disturbing."“It would be deeply weird for a political party to fortify this kind of personality cult for a president whose approval rating hovered at the 60s, as President Barack Obama’s did when he left office and Trump took over the first time,” Suebsaeng wrote. “It is much, much more surreal and disturbing for a party to be doing this for a guy whose numbers are stuck in the low-to-mid 30s. It is more deranged than if Hollywood super-agents mounted a serious awards-season push to get ‘Freddy Got Fingered’ an Oscar. And yet here we are! Happy birthday, I guess?”
WASHINGTON — While President Donald Trump plans to make history this weekend when he hosts the UFC at the White House, Mixed Martial Arts history has already been made in Washington in recent years.At the start of this 119th Congress, there were two former MMA fighters in Congress before one, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), became Department of Homeland Security Secretary in March. Now, Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS) holds the title of MMA champion of Capitol Hill. Before coming to Congress, she boasted a 5–1 win–loss amateur record and a 1–1 professional fighting record. Still, Davids says she’s skipping the Octagon on the White House lawn. Asked if she planned to attend, Davids told Raw Story, “No, I’m not.”“We're hosting the World Cup in Kansas City. I’d rather be there,” she said.“Are you tempted to go to the White House?” Raw Story pressed. “No,” Davids said without hesitation.The congresswoman looked a tad perplexed, almost as if it were the first time she even thought about Sunday’s cage match on Trump’s 80th birthday. “I want to be in Kansas City!” Davids said through a dismissive laugh, which may be because the first KC World Cup match isn’t until Tuesday the 16th, when Argentina takes on Algeria. While the only elected MMA fighter in Washington is skipping Sunday’s prime-time affair, the UFC and the White House continue hyping the estimated $60 million event. “This is a very unique experience for everybody,” UFC President and CEO Dana White told TNT earlier this week. “We’re expecting Super Bowl-type numbers for this fight.” The UFC reports there could be as many as 125,000 spectators, which is why they’ve also got 494 port-a-potties at the ready on the National Mall. The UFC’s hype machine also got an assist from the FBI this week. “This is a great partnership with the UFC,” FBI Director Kash Patel said from a UFC training facility in a video posted this week. “We’ve seen about 300 agents come through and learn these amazing tactics so they can safeguard American lives.” MMA’s only grown in popularity recently in America, but boxing and politics have a storied history. While there have been bench-clearing brawls in the U.S. Capitol as recently as 1995, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was a middleweight amateur boxer before coming to Congress. Former Congressman John Morrissey (1831–1878) Wikipedia page, meanwhile, says: “Morrissey, also known as Old Smoke, was an Irish American politician, bare-knuckle boxing champion, and criminal.”
Workers began tearing Donald Trump's name off the Kennedy Center Friday, carrying out a federal court order his own lawyers had scrambled overnight to block.A federal judge ruled last month that the renaming was flatly illegal. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said Trump's hand-picked board never had the authority to put the president's name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — because Congress created it and only Congress gets to rename it. The lawsuit was filed by Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who sits on the center's board as an ex officio member."Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it," Cooper wrote in his ruling, giving the administration 14 days to strip Trump's name from the building.Trump's board had voted in December 2025 to rename the iconic performing arts venue, and workers bolted his name to the facade overnight — without a congressional vote and without public input.Friday was the deadline to take it back down. Trump's lawyers tried to run out the clock, arguing the removal would be "incredibly confusing for the public" and a waste of money if the name eventually goes back up. The Department of Justice filed a notice of appeal Thursday night. Trump's name had already been scrubbed from the center's website and social media pages earlier this week. After the original court ruling, Trump took to social media to vent. "Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into 'NEVER NEVER LAND,'" he wrote.
Elon Musk is now the first trillionaire, after the SpaceX IPO minted thousands of new millionaires on Nasdaq.
Workers were tearing President Donald Trump's name off the Kennedy Center on Friday as onlookers nearby chanted and cheered.Thousands tuned in on livestreams from ABC 7, WUSA9, Reuters, Fox 10, the Associated Press, Forbes, and MS NOW to watch it happen in real time. A crowd assembled outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as workers erected scaffolding on the façade. A judge had killed the Trump board's last-ditch legal attempt to stop the removal just hours earlier, leaving a midnight deadline intact.Then the chanting started."Take it down!" — 15 times in a row. The crowd exploded into applause and cheers.About a minute passed."Take it down!" — 11 more times. More cheering. Someone hollered "Woo!" The energy didn't drop.After another minute, there were nine more chants, more applause, more whoops, more noise — the whole thing playing out over roughly 2-1/2 minutes of pure crowd electricity.The backstory: Trump's handpicked board illegally slapped his name onto the center's marble façade in December 2025, a federal judge ruled, because only Congress gets to change the name of a building named by Congress. When that ruling first came down in May, Kerry Kennedy — a niece of President John F. Kennedy — declared she might not need the pickaxe she'd famously vowed to grab once Trump left office.As of publication, the scaffolding is up, and workers were on site — but the letters haven't fully come down yet. The clock runs out at midnight.
A court filing Friday documented the wreckage of President Donald Trump's Kennedy Center vanity project — highlighting fleeing artists, cratering ticket sales, and an Honors broadcast nobody watched.The midnight deadline to scrub Trump's name from the Kennedy Center was still ticking Friday. Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex officio board member — meaning she holds her seat by virtue of her congressional position, not a Trump appointment — had just fired back at Trump's lawyers, who'd asked the judge to freeze his own order.The numbers in Beatty's filing claimed after the renaming, "many artists canceled upcoming performances," and ticket sales "experienced a precipitous drop as compared to prior years, as did viewership of the Kennedy Center Honors broadcast." CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane posted on X that the filing "dunks on the name change itself and 'crowd size.'"The 94-page ruling that led to the deadline cited a Wall Street Journal analysis that found ticket sales plunged 70% in a single week after the renaming, compared with the prior three years.For days, it looked like Trump's team was waving the white flag. Workers slapped new stickers with the original Kennedy Center name onto buses parked outside. The website dropped Trump's name. Staff got a memo telling them to scrub it from email signatures immediately — CNN reported the website was already clean by June 8.Then Trump himself joined a virtual board meeting Thursday night, and the board voted to fight back, according to the New York Times. Their lawyers raced a last-minute motion to court — essentially asking the judge to hit pause on his own order — arguing that removing the name would be "wasteful" and "incredibly confusing for the public."Beatty's filing shot back. "'It should go without saying that the Court can, and should, reject out of hand Defendants' rather silly suggestion that enforcing the law would be 'incredibly confusing for the public."Beatty's lawyers also argued in the filing that the Trump administration "waited two weeks and within hours of the deadline" before asking for emergency relief — proof, they say, that no real harm is at stake. The whole move, they wrote, is a "frivolous" eleventh-hour gambit.If the judge says no, Trump's lawyers could take the fight to a federal appeals court.