|
Yesterday U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia refused to permit the Kennedy Center board, stacked by Trump with his own loyalists, to return Trump’s name to the facade of the building. Cooper reiterated that Congress had prohibited such an addition and would have to change that law in order to make the addition of Trump’s name legal.
The board of the Kennedy Center promptly appealed and voted to close the venue for two years for renovations. Then Trump posted on social media that those renovations couldn’t take place unless the court approved the addition of his name to the building. Without that, he posted, “unfortunately, the Building is destined to doom. Isn’t that too bad?”
Although the Kennedy Center board insisted that only Trump’s name on the building would restore donations, in fact, the Washington Post reports that ticket sales and fundraising plunged when Trump added his name to the building in the first place.
Nonetheless, Trump posted that he is the only one who can save it, “because I have the ability to raise the money, and the ability to construct—that few others have. I also have the strength and power of the Presidency, which will be needed [to] do what must be done, and give it a strong shot at Greatness again!”
As George Conway of the Bulwark noted, “To destroy things he can’t possess or control is his essential nature.”
It is also as if Trump is self-soothing by celebrating his core identity even as his incompetence and greed have driven the United States, and the world, into crisis.
But even that is not providing him comfort these days. Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board and the member who sued over his takeover of the center, explained to Symone Sanders-Townsend of MS NOW that Trump called into the board meeting after the court decision and “went into a tantrum.”
While most people appear to have refused to confront Trump to his face—Maine governor Janet Mills’s “We’ll see you in court” was so rare it made headlines—Beatty took him on. She recounted: “It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of it.” But after he called her “an obstructionist” and “dumb” and said he thought she was “incompetent,” she retorted: “I know you’re incompetent.” Beatty appealed to the chair to stop Trump’s unprofessional behavior, but when he continued to berate her, claiming it would be her fault if someone were killed at the center, she responded: “You’re already killing people, we’re at war.” And when he talked about what a great developer he was, she “reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room.”
“I mean, it really went there,” Beatty told Sanders-Townsend. “I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me. And the facts stand for themselves.”
Indeed, these days, facts across the board are challenging Trump’s image of himself.
Panic is sounding across the U.S. about oil prices. The Houthis in Yemen, backed by Iran, are threatening the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the outlet of the Red Sea on its way to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, threatening another 4% of the world’s oil supply to global markets. Saudi Arabia had diverted oil shipments from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the East-West pipeline across the country, but officials have closed the pipeline after strikes. Today, senior executives from Shell and Equinor warned that the world is looking at tightening supplies of oil and “price volatility” as the industry is losing the ability to offset the disruptions.
On X, Patrick De Haan, a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, charted the rise of diesel prices in the U.S. this week. Diesel jumped $0.82 a gallon in Fort Stewart, Georgia; $0.82 in Moorhead, Minnesota; $0.75 in Athens, Georgia. In the twelve hours before 1:30 this afternoon, Eastern time, gasoline jumped $0.30 a gallon in Lawrence County, Ohio, and Edwardsburg, Michigan. It jumped $0.28 a gallon in Des Moines, Iowa. De Haan reported that gas prices in and around Chicago appeared to be rising to $4.99 a gallon today.
As De Haan noted, it was “no shock, with diesel setting new all-time records and showing no signs of slowing,” that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates today for the first time since July 2023. Trump has been adamant that he wants to see interest rates lowered and has threatened to cut off trade with certain countries unless the Fed lowered them. But rising inflation meant that the board instead voted unanimously to raise rates by a quarter of a percentage point to a target range of 3.75% to 4%.
Trump did not take the news well. “Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World—BY FAR,” he posted. “LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!”
At a political rally in North Carolina, Trump suggested that the Fed is attacking him personally. “They’re raising the rates to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly do,” he said, referring to himself in the third person. “The problem they have is that we have the greatest economy in history.” “So they’re raising that only for political reasons and that’s a raise against Trump.”
In Ireland, where he traveled for the Irish Open golf tournament at his course in Doonbeg, Trump told reporters on Sunday that the U.S. might stay in Iran and “keep the oil” as the U.S. did in Venezuela. He claimed Venezuelan oil has “paid for the war many times.”
But—even aside from the fact invading a country and taking its resources violates the U.N. charter—there is no record of that money or where it is going. In January 2026, a U.S. official told Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters that the U.S. had completed its first sale of Venezuelan oil, valued at $500 million. That money was to be held in a U.S. account in Qatar, not the U.S. Treasury.
Yesterday, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused to answer questions Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) asked about the Venezuelan oil money.
Bessent refused to say how much money from Venezuelan assets—including gold, as well as oil—had flowed through Treasury accounts or accounts managed by Treasury since January, and said he had no knowledge of whether the money was flowing to “the U.S. government, U.S. persons, or U.S. corporations.” He deflected by saying simply: “Again…this is the, uh, one of the largest assets that maybe ever to go on the U.S. balance sheet.”
Yesterday was a big day for revelations about the war on Iran. Jonah Kaplan of CBS News published photographs showing the damage caused to buildings, vehicles, and equipment at U.S. bases in the Middle East by Iranian strikes. Active service members leaked the photos to CBS News because, as one said, “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public. We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.” “We’re not defending these bases,” the service member said. “We’re just watching them get destroyed.”
John Ismay of the New York Times reported on a new report from the Pentagon’s inspector general on Monday explaining that the first four months of the Iran war caused “strategic inventory shortfalls”; that Iranian strikes have destroyed “hundreds of buildings and structures” at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; that dozens of military aircraft have been damaged or destroyed; and that the Defense Department has limited facilities for medical treatment in the region and has had to relocate helicopters for medical evacuations from Iraq and Kuwait.
A new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Iran war, which has taken 18 U.S. lives and wounded more than 800 servicemembers, has also cost the U.S. about $38 billion as of August 1 and could cost as much as $2 billion a month while it goes on, and that it will continue to drive inflation.
For the third time, the House passed a war powers resolution directing Trump to remove U.S. military personnel from hostilities against Iran unless Congress explicitly authorizes him to keep them there. Seven Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the measure by a vote of 220 to 204.
Yesterday Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) blindsided House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) by introducing eight counts of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The first three articles accuse him of “waging war in contravention of the War Powers Resolution of 1973.” The fourth accuses him of “ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties.” The fifth accuses him of directing “the extrajudicial killings of at least 221 persons aboard seagoing vessels” in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The sixth accuses him of “suppressing free speech” through his attempts to silence Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a Navy veteran. The seventh article accuses him of the “kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader,” Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. The final article charges Hegseth with waging an “unlawful war in Yemen,” in 2025.
Massie told CNN that he had kept his plan secret to prevent House leadership from keeping him from the floor to read the articles. To protect Republican lawmakers from having to take a stand either for or against the Iran war, Speaker Johnson canceled votes set for Thursday and sent the House home until November 9, 2026, after the midterm elections.
Johnson blasted Massie, saying: “Secretary Hegseth has done an extraordinary job, the Department of War. We’re in the middle of international conflicts right now, and we should not be playing games with national security.” As for sending lawmakers home early, he said: “It’s time for our members to go home to their districts and make their case to the American people, to go and explain all the great things we’ve done.”
Trump apparently does not think voters will swing behind the Republicans based on their record. News broke on Monday that the Supreme Court would not allow him to implement new rules that would allow the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in ballots, something Trump insisted was imperative to purify voting.
On Tuesday, he dropped the facade that the rule was about anything other than rigging the election and expressed anger that his three hand-picked appointees to the Supreme Court did not do his bidding.
“Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court,” he posted. “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years. These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/business/economy/trump-trade-threats-fed-rate-cuts.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/16/fed-rate-decision-september-2026.html
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-interest-rates-2677870207/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/us/politics/pentagon-inspector-general-iran-war.html
https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/09/2003993626/-1/-1/1/OEF_Q3_JUN2026_FINAL_508%20SECURE.PDF