Critics mocked the Obama Presidential Center's "land acknowledgement" as performative, while the center hosted Native American dance performances Saturday.
The Obama Presidential Center's structural engineer says boldness was the goal, calling the tower's design an unprecedented architectural statement.
The Obama Presidential Center features a permanent land acknowledgment display near the museum tower, sparking debate given the site's history.
The plaintiff in the case, Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, said by refusing to take steps to resume shows, the Kennedy Center is in violation of a previous court order.
Mary Trump has spent years telling anyone who will listen that her uncle cannot bear to be seen losing. This week she pointed to a tarp draped over the Kennedy Center as her latest exhibit.In the newest edition of her newsletter, the segment she calls "Trump Trolls Trump," the clinical psychologist and niece of the president argued that the covering left over the building's facade was not about construction logistics. It was about ego. Crews began stripping Donald Trump's name off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after a federal judge ruled the renaming illegal, and Mary Trump claimed the tarp stayed up for a revealing reason. Because he is "such an insecure, thin skinned baby," she wrote, "they left the tarp up so we cannot actually watch Donald's letters being removed."It is the kind of read that lands differently coming from her than from an ordinary commentator. As the president's niece and the author of a bestselling book diagnosing the psychology of her own family, Mary Trump has built her public profile on the argument that her uncle's behavior is driven by a fragile need to never appear weak. The tarp, in her telling, is that need made physical.The underlying events are not in dispute. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper determined that the president's name had been illegally added to the center, after a board stacked with Trump loyalists voted in December 2025 to rebrand it. The court ordered the name removed and blocked the administration's plan to close the venue for a lengthy renovation. After a last-minute scramble of appeals and a requested extension blamed on thunderstorms, workers began prying the lettering off the facade in the early hours of June 13, with scaffolding and tarp covering the wall.Mary Trump found the cover-up almost too fitting. The same tarp meant to spare her uncle the indignity of watching his own name come down, she noted, also blocks the public from seeing the name of the man the building was actually built to honor. "We cannot see the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy," she wrote, "the man for whom the Kennedy Center was actually named."She returned to the theme that animates her entire project: a man who treats every loss as something to be hidden, spun, or blamed on someone else. Throughout the newsletter she refers to him only as "Donald," a small but deliberate choice that keeps the family relationship in the frame and strips away the deference of his title.Her broader point was not subtle. The week, she argued, was a parade of self-inflicted embarrassments dressed up as strength, "corruption masquerading as governance" and "incompetence disguised as confidence." The Kennedy Center tarp simply gave her the cleanest image for it.The claim that the tarp was kept up to shield Trump's feelings is Mary Trump's interpretation, not a stated explanation from the administration, which has cited the appeals process and the building's condition.
Vice President JD Vance has departed for Switzerland to begin talks with Iran after signing the memorandum of understanding on Wednesday. Talks between the US and Iran are planned for Sunday at the Bürgenstock Resort in Switzerland, according to CBS. The post JUST IN: VP Vance En Route to Switzerland – Tells Reporters Iranians “Just Landed” (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
An ex-GOP lawmaker has heard enough about phantom left-wing saboteurs at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and he is pointing at the only suspects who fit the evidence: the people Trump hired to clean it.In a series of posts and a new video, former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger dismantled the administration's vandalism narrative by accepting one piece of it. Yes, he conceded, chemicals were used on the pool. The catch is who used them and why. "Just for those who are saying there was chemical sabotage to peel the paint in the reflective pool, you're right," Kinzinger wrote. "It's just, you guys did it to kill the algae."His central claim cuts straight through the conspiracy theory. "The Trump administration dumped hydrogen peroxide to kill the algae and it stripped the paint," he said in the video, adding bluntly in a follow-up that "it was literally the people who painted it. They poured peroxide in it." In other words, the corrosive chemicals Trump blamed on radical leftists were the cleanup crew's own attempt to rescue a basin that had turned green within days of its multimillion-dollar makeover.Kinzinger backed the point with a quick search result showing that highly concentrated, industrial-grade hydrogen peroxide acts as a strong oxidizer capable of breaking down the binder in paint and causing it to bubble and peel. That is the same outcome now floating across the surface of the pool, which the president has described instead as a deliberate "knife or blade" attack and a "250 foot long gash" carved into a national monument.The contrast with how some Trump allies want to treat the matter is stark. Kinzinger was responding in part to commentator Jeff Storobinsky, who suggested that anyone "causing damage at the reflecting pool should face the same consequences of those who stormed the Capitol on 1.6." Kinzinger's reply amounts to a warning that such a standard would land on the administration itself, since by his account the damage was self-inflicted maintenance, not an assault by outsiders.His broader frustration was with a movement he says cannot tolerate the idea that its leader made a mistake. They are "unable to see a flaw in their God king," Kinzinger wrote Saturday, choosing an elaborate sabotage story over the simpler truth that a rushed, overpriced renovation failed on its own. The peeling paint, in his telling, is not evidence of a crime. It is evidence of a cover story falling apart in real time.I have to do another video on the reflective pool debacle. They are trying to say it was sabotaged by the left. They are unable to see a flaw in their God king. The Trump administration dumped hydrogen peroxide to kill the algae and it stripped the paint. pic.twitter.com/jGCha2yGoX— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@AdamKinzinger) June 20, 2026
Donald Trump has sparred with most of his fellow Group of Seven leaders at some point. But Italy’s Giorgia Meloni this week did something none of them dared: She escalated.
