Trump’s Deranged Plan for Kennedy Center Revealed in Leaked Audio

Donald Trump apparently took over the Kennedy Center to make his own stylistic changes. 

The New York Times reports that during the first meeting of the center’s board of directors on Monday, its new chairman, President Trump, said that structurally, the center is in “tremendous disrepair,” adding that “the whole place needs work” and that he plans to seek funds from Congress to “bring it back.”  

Trump mused about covering up its signature columns with marble or granite, a signature part of Trump’s own buildings. 

“They never covered the I-beam,” Trump said during the meeting, according to a recording obtained by the Times. “I think the I-beams should be covered with some incredible stone—probably marble, but marble’s a bad outdoor stone, but looks better than granite. But it should be covered. And we’ll do that. We’ll add that in. But it’s not a small job.”

Trump, who last month fired the center’s board, installed his own loyalists, and had himself voted as chairman, waxed on about a number of topics during the meeting. He reminisced about his time attending various Broadway shows, including Cats, as an example of the kind of shows that the center should be hosting. 

“I walked in, I saw all these bodies, and then I noticed those bodies were gorgeous,” Trump said, regarding his impression of Cats when he supposedly attended its premiere. 

“They had silk tights on, and they were all ballerinas, and women from Broadway. And men,” Trump continued, adding, regarding the men, “I didn’t find those particular bodies as attractive to be honest.”

Trump floated hosting the annual Kennedy Center Honors, where attendees have criticized him in the past, resulting in him boycotting the ceremonies. 

“Believe me, I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it,” Trump said to the rest of the board. “I have enough publicity.” 

“They’ll say, ‘Trump wants to be the host.’ I don’t want to. But I want this thing to be successful,” the president continued, complaining that previous hosts were “always terrible” and calling himself “the king of ratings.” 

Trump also suggested honoring posthumous figures outside of the Kennedy Center’s usual domain of arts and culture, mentioning people from sports, politics, and business, such as Luciano Pavarotti, Elvis Presley, and Babe Ruth, instead of “radical left lunatics.” In a blatant nod to one of his backers, he suggested honoring Steve Wynn, a Republican donor and casino executive whose wife was named to the center’s board by Trump. 

“You could do entrepreneurs; you could do people that, you know, that were really in charge of show business,” Trump said. “I would say you could do politicians, you could do sports stars.”

In all, it seems that Trump took over the center to remake it in his own image: honoring the shows and people he likes, particularly from the era that he enjoyed the most: the 1980s. His decision to honor deceased figures probably stems from the fact that today’s stars dislike him and have often criticized him at various awards ceremonies, including at the center.

If Trump wasn’t president, wasn’t going to use taxpayer funds, and hadn’t unilaterally taken over a center that should belong to the American people, this would be fine. Instead, Trump appears to be transforming the Kennedy Center into his own personal cultural center, where he can honor and enjoy the entertainment he likes, set up the decor the way he wants it, and escape criticism while being feted and honored to boost his ego.

Even Bill O’Reilly thinks that a third term under Donald Trump would be little more than a pipe dream.

“That’s a fantasy, and I don’t really consider those kinds of things,” the longtime conservative commentator told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo Tuesday night. “It’s not gonna happen, never will happen. It’s not worth my time or your time.”

Trump has repeatedly pitched the idea that he could stay in office after 2028, but the likelihood of that actually happening is near zero.

As outlined in Article 5 of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a constitutional convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Beyond that, the MAGA leader would be 82 years old in 2028—the same age that President Joe Biden was when he left office—and that’s unlikely to play well with an American public that is increasingly tired of being led by the elderly.

Still, that hasn’t kept conservatives from trying to keep Trump in power. Republican lawmakers have already started to pave the way for the unconstitutional takeover. In January, Representative Andy Ogles filed a joint resolution to amend the Constitution’s Twenty-Second Amendment so that the executive branch leader could serve “for up to but no more than three terms.”

But O’Reilly had a different vision for the MAGA movement’s future.

“Donald Trump will serve out his second term, hopefully he’ll be successful, and then JD Vance will run for president in ’28 unless something happens. That’s what’s gonna happen,” O’Reilly said.

The idea that Trump could follow in Roosevelt’s footsteps came back to the forefront earlier in Cuomo’s show after Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon said he’s “working on it.”

“Chris, as you know, I’ve had greater long shots than this,” Bannon told Cuomo. “We’ve had greater long shots than Trump 2028, and we’ve got a lot of stuff we’re working on there. We’re not prepared to talk about it publicly, but in a couple months I think we will be.”

Bannon then proceeded to dodge a direct question on whether or not that meant a “revolution” or overthrowing the government. When pressed again, Bannon said that he “firmly” believes “in the revolution you’re seeing going on now: the revolution of common sense to deconstruct the administrative state.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore into Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over his backing of Republicans’ government spending bill last week.

In scathing remarks during a Tuesday news conference at a children’s hospital in San Francisco, Pelosi said she believed that Senate Democrats should have negotiated harder for Republicans to make concessions.

“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Pelosi said. “I think that’s what happened the other day.”

Pelosi said that Democrats could have offered “a third way” forward, one that avoided a government shutdown while also allowing Democrats to abstain from co-signing the bill, staving off a complete government closure while negotiations continued.

“They may not have agreed to it, but at least the public would have seen they’re not agreeing to it—and that then they would have been shutting [the] government down,” Pelosi said.

The spending bill approved by a total of nine Senate Democrats and one House Democrat may serve as a sort of blank check for the Trump administration, which has already announced its intention to withhold funds allocated to programs it doesn’t support. While the bill will keep the lights on until September, it will also slash funding for health care and boost spending on mass deportations.

Ultimately, Pelosi said she supported Schumer’s leadership of the party—but not everyone feels that way. Widespread outrage has led to many calling for Schumer to be removed and replaced with someone willing to fight Trump’s agenda, such as New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

But Senator Bernie Sanders said it wasn’t as simple as replacing Schumer. During an interview on CNN Tuesday night, the Vermont independent said that the issue demonstrated by Schumer’s surrender went beyond just him and was a structural problem within the Democratic Party.

“I know, everyone’s beating up on Chuck [Schumer], and I strongly disagree with him. Strongly. No one is in the caucus more critical of Schumer than I am. But it’s not Schumer, it’s the caucus, it’s not the caucus, it’s the Democratic Party,” Sanders said.

Sanders said that the Democratic Party had been taken over by billionaires and guided into the ground by consultants.

Schumer has continued to defend his choice, and his seat, saying that he is still the best person to lead the Senate and the best at winning Senate seats.

Trump is freezing $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania in an effort to further vilify transgender athletes.

“Promises made, promises kept,” the White House said in an X post on Wednesday, sharing a Fox Business report on the news.

“President Trump has promised to protect female athletes. He has threatened to rip federal funding away from any university that defies his executive order banning biological males from infiltrating women’s sports, and he is doing it,” a Fox Business contributor said. “We are the first to report that President Trump has paused $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania over its controversial policies.”

A senior Trump official told Fox Business that “this is just a taste of what could be coming down the pipe for Penn.”

Trump’s Education Department opened up a Title IX investigation into Penn earlier this month because Penn had a trans woman, Lia Thomas, on its swim team in 2021. The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced its trans ban shortly afterward. Three of Thomas’s former teammates also filed a separate lawsuit citing Title IX violations.

The Trump administration also recently cut $400 million in funding from Columbia University over allegations of antisemitism.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks that the bird flu should be allowed to spread unchecked to identify birds that could be immune.

Kennedy said in a recent Fox News interview that farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” an idea that experts say would be dangerous and hurt the poultry industry.

“That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told The New York Times.

Every new infection of the H5N1 virus is a chance that it will mutate and become more powerful and spread further, although it still hasn’t been proven to spread between people. But if it were allowed to spread through millions of birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen said.

While Kennedy’s department doesn’t have any regulatory powers over farms, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins agrees.

“There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Rollins said on Fox News in February.

If this plan actually goes into effect, the virus would spread among a larger number of birds, putting more people and other animals at risk of infection. Right now, if a poultry farm has a positive test for the virus, it is reimbursed for culling its flocks to prevent its spread.

If the virus were allowed to spread on purpose, bird flu “infections would cause very painful deaths in nearly 100 percent of the chickens and turkeys,” Dr. David Swayne, a poultry veterinarian and former USDA employee, told the Times, adding that it would be “inhumane, resulting in an unacceptable animal welfare crisis.”

Kennedy isn’t even operating on the right information: He claimed in one interview that the virus didn’t seem to affect wild birds, but there are many documented cases of wild birds dying from H5N1. Kennedy also theorizes that some chickens and turkeys may be immune, but scientists say that poultry lacks the genes needed to resist the virus.

It seems that Kennedy’s pseudoscience is spreading unchecked as well. He’s already been putting his anti-vaccine beliefs into practice at HHS by curtailing multiple vaccine research projects and directing resources toward researching the debunked conspiracy that vaccines cause autism. His latest idea on the bird flu is dangerous and could end up having disastrous consequences for public health and U.S. agriculture.