Trump Appoints Weirdest Board Ever to the Kennedy Center

Donald Trump announced more than a dozen new additions to the John F. Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees Thursday, shortly after making himself the president of the prestigious performing arts organization.

Trump claimed he had been “unanimously” picked to serve as chairman of the Kennedy Center in a Truth Social post Wednesday, but a source familiar with the vote told CNN that some abstained or voted against his ascension. He had already declared his intention to become the chair last week, as well as his plan to immediately terminate several members of the board.

In a press release from the White House Thursday, Trump announced the list of new additions to the board of trustees, which included White House insiders such as second lady Usha Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Wiles’s mother, Cheri Summerall, and deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino.

Allison Lutnick, the wife of Howard Lutnick, Trump’s soon-to-be confirmed secretary of commerce, and Trump’s presidential personnel office director, Sergio Gor, also earned a spot on the board, according to CNN. Gor had been the one who emailed the ousted Democratic appointees alerting them that their positions had been terminated, The New York Times reported.

Trump also named his ally and former acting director of national intelligence Ric Grenell to serve as the organization’s interim executive director, which is a position that did not exist prior to his appointment.

Trump appointed John Falconetti, Lynda Lomangino, former White House adviser to the first lady Pamela Gross, and megadonors Patricia Duggan and Emilia May Fanjul, as well. Also among the newcomers are Mindy Levine, the wife of New York Yankees president Randy Levine, and Dana Blumberg, the wife of Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

The incoming trustees will replace several Democratic members. The White House announced those include Joe Biden’s former press secretary Karine Jean Pierre, the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee Chris Korge, musician Jonathan Batiste, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Democratic donor Cari Sacks.

There are now 31 members on the board of trustees.

Trump’s takeover has also led to the immediate departure of several high-ranking Kennedy Center appointments. Shonda Rhimes, who served as the board’s treasurer, resigned Wednesday, and artistic advisers Renee Fleming and Ben Folds announced they’d be vacating their roles at the Kennedy Center and National Symphony Orchestra, respectively.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had no clear answer Thursday when asked outright what concessions Russia would be making in peace negotiations with Ukraine.

“You have focused on what Ukraine is giving up. What concessions will [Vladimir] Putin be asked to make?” a reporter asked Hegseth at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

“Um, well that’s—I would start by saying the arguments that have been made that somehow coming to the table right now is making concessions to Vladimir Putin outright, that we otherwise—or that the president or the United States shouldn’t otherwise make—I just reject that at its face,” Hegseth said. “There’s a reason why negotiations are happening right now, just a few weeks after President Trump was sworn in as the president of the United States.

“President Putin responds to strength,” Hegseth added.

But that interpretation of events flies in the face of what the president’s former allies see in his negotiations with Putin. Speaking with CNN on Wednesday, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton claimed that Putin’s insistence on negotiating through Trump—rather than going through previous administrations or through Ukraine’s leaders directly—was simply because Putin believes “he’ll get more out of it.”

“And he’s absolutely right,” Bolton said.

NATO allies were left reeling Wednesday after Hegseth pitched that America would effectively end its role as the steward of European security, revealing that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several chips “off the table,” including Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine.

Hegseth also said Wednesday that Ukraine returning to its prewar borders—before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014—would be “unrealistic,” effectively forcing Ukraine to cede territory to Russia in another striking reversal of the U.S. and NATO’s previous position regarding the former Soviet territory.

The new deal, per Bolton, amounted to Russian propaganda and was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

It was a stunning show of inexperience for the former Fox News host, who apparently needed to walk back some of those brazen settlement terms while speaking before NATO on Thursday. Hegseth insisted that, despite the U.S. having already shown its hand, “everything is on the table” when it comes to arranging peace between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

“What he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world, of President Trump,” Hegseth said Thursday. “I’m not going to stand at this podium and declare what President Trump will do or won’t do.”

During an Oval Office press conference Thursday unveiling his new “reciprocal tariff” plan, Trump denied telling Hegseth to walk back his comments, describing them as “pretty accurate.”

But the futile backtrack earned him the ire of several national security and defense experts, who argued online that Hegseth had already ceded too much to Russia.

“Hegseth’s lack of experience is already showing,” posted The Economist’s defense editor, Shashank Joshi, on X. “Publicly makes a series of pre-emptive concessions prior to the most important negotiations in many years, and then has to publicly explain that he had no authority to say any of those things.”

Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for President Barack Obama and the United States National Security Council, also torched Hegseth for the critical negotiating error.

“This was a huge fuckup by Hegseth,” Vietor wrote. “There’s no walking back his initial comments that Ukraine won’t join NATO or gain back all the territory lost since 2014. He wrote Putin a big check that has already been cashed. Maybe don’t make an unqualified Fox News host @SecDef?”

This piece has been updated.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will soon be headed to an agency very close to his personal interests: NASA.

On Wednesday, the agency’s acting administrator Janet Petro told Bloomberg that NASA was expecting a visit from Musk’s DOGE cronies, saying that “they are going to look—similarly to what they’ve done at other agencies—at our payments.”

Musk’s company SpaceX is a major contractor with NASA, to the tune of about $14.5 billion, and has taken over transporting astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. It is also under contract to build a vehicle to take humans back to the moon under NASA’s Artemis initiative.

Despite those contracts, Musk has repeatedly criticized the agency, calling the Artemis program “extremely inefficient” and missions to the moon “a distraction” from his own personal goal of colonizing Mars. SpaceX is already launching multiple missions to the red planet in the next decade, and the tech mogul–fascism enthusiast might want to shift the agency’s mission in that direction.

Musk might also take aim at NASA’s other contracts to serve his interests. Last year, for example, he attacked Boeing over its Starliner program. Some of the many young programmers in DOGE, such as Luke Farritor and Marko Elez, already have connections to SpaceX.

Petro said that NASA’s conflict-of-interest policies would apply to DOGE operatives, saying that “any employee or any person that’s coming in, we will check out their conflict of interest, make sure they don’t have any conflicts of interest with any of the companies that we work with.” But Petro herself may soon be replaced by Jared Isaacman, an astronaut who has flown multiple missions for SpaceX, if he is confirmed by the Senate.

It’s highly doubtful that any conflict-of-interest policies anywhere in the federal government will be enforced against Musk. For example, a massive $400 million State Department contract for armored vehicles awarded to Tesla drew criticism, but the department only responded by removing the word “Tesla” from the contract. NASA could be where Musk’s most blatant self-serving actions take place.

Trump’s nominee for education secretary refused to say whether classes like African American history would be allowed in public schools under his administration.

Former WWE executive Linda McMahon faced questioning from Senator Chris Murphy during her Senate confirmation hearing Thursday regarding the specifics of her anti-DEI enforcement plans.

“West Point has closed down all ethnic clubs. So the Society of Black Engineers can no longer meet because they believe that to be in compliance with this order they cannot have groups structured around ethnic or racial affiliations,” the Connecticut senator began, referring to how the military academy responded to Trump’s executive order striking all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from the federal government. “Would public schools be in violation of this order, would they risk funding if they had clubs that students could belong to based on their racial or ethnic identity?”

‘Well I certainly today don’t want to address … hypothetical situations,” McMahon said, sidestepping the question. “I would like, once I’m confirmed, to get in and assess these programs—”

“Isn’t that a pretty easy one?” Murphy interrupted. “You’re saying that it’s a possibility that if a school has a club for Vietnamese American students, or Black students, where they meet after school, that they could be potentially in jeopardy of receiving federal funding?”

“Again, I would like to fully understand what that order is and what those clubs are doing.”

“That’s pretty chilling,” Murphy said, in response to McMahon’s spineless attempt to avoid admitting that the Trump administration would regulate cultural clubs and activities. “I think schools all around the country are gonna hear that. What about educational programming centered around specific ethnic and racial experiences? My son is in a public school; he takes a class called African American history. If you’re running an African American history class, could you perhaps be in violation of this executive order?”

“I’m not quite certain,” McMahon said. “I’d like to look into it further and get back to you on that.”

“So there’s a possibility … that public schools that run African American history classes … a class that has been taught in school for decades, could lose federal funding if they continue to teach African American history?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that I would like to take a look at these programs and fully understand the breadth of the executive order and get back to you on that” McMahon desperately tried to backtrack.

She did not expound on exactly what “looking into” African American history programs entailed.

“I think you’re gonna have a lot of educators, and a lot of principals and administrators scrambling right now,” Murphy warned. “My time is expired.”

It looks like Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government could put people’s lives at risk across the world.

USAID provided, among other things, funding for groups advocating for human rights and democratic reforms in states mired by autocratic regimes, as a form of U.S. soft power in places such as Russia. When Musk gutted the agency earlier this month, he baselessly claimed that USAID was “laundering” taxpayer funds into far-left sources.

Now Russia wants to know exactly where the money was going. Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian State Duma, asked the U.S. Tuesday for a list of individuals and opposition groups in Russia who received money from USAID.

“If they recognized the organization as an enemy, let them give us the lists,” Volodin said, according to The Times of London.

“Congress will send us the lists—we will give them to the FSB,” he continued, referring to the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Volodin bragged that exiled opposition figures would be left “hungry and cold” without funding from USAID. “Those who received money from abroad, now let them publicly confess and repent on Red Square,” he said.

It’s unclear whether Congress, or the U.S. government, will comply with Volodin’s request, but Donald Trump has made it more than clear that he’s not opposed to giving in to every one of Russia’s demands.

The president bragged Wednesday about a friendly phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin to start negotiations to end its invasion of Ukraine. This week, his secretary of defense ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine, and said that it was “unrealistic” to expect Russia to forfeit all of its illegally claimed territory. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has since sort of walked back the NATO claim.)

If Musk or Trump genuinely believes that the U.S. was wrongly funding these groups, there is no reason why they wouldn’t readily supply this information to the Russian government, which is not only historically hostile to the U.S., but takes extreme measures to stamp out dissent within its borders.

But this U.S. administration is so far notably less hostile to autocrats, and practically uninterested in democracy.

Should Musk comply, there are many others who might be at risk abroad. As Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency sinks its teeth into the far corners of the federal government, it’s clear that there are significant national security risks involved, particularly where its intelligence agencies are involved.