DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Trump’s bulldozer view of laws hits the Kennedy Center

President Donald Trump governs with the mindset that “there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” his chief of staff said recently to Vanity Fair. It shows this week on the walls of the Kennedy Center – or “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” as it now reads.

Just do it

The move is in line with the overall bulldozer mentality of Trump’s second administration.

President Donald Trump governs with the mindset that “there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” his chief of staff said recently to Vanity Fair. It shows this week on the walls of the Kennedy Center – or “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” as it now reads.
Just do it

The move is in line with the overall bulldozer mentality of Trump’s second administration.

► Don’t like the East Wing? Tear it down. Building plans can wait.

► Disagree with foreign aid passed by Congress? Stop it. And shut down USAID for good measure.

► Want to end the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? No matter that it was created by Congress.

► Dismantle the Department of Education? Fire Democrats on agencies set up by Congress to be bipartisan and independent. Ignore the 14th Amendment. Use the Navy to take out speedboats in the Caribbean. Put tariffs on most foreign goods. Rename the Gulf of Mexico and the Department of Defense. Trump even says he can run for a third term, despite the Constitution, though he currently says he won’t.

Laws are suggestions in Trump 2.0, and the president is fine ignoring them.

Balance of powers is getting out of whack

The US government is supposed to act a bit like rock, paper, scissors — with the courts, the Congress and the White House able to keep each other in check.

But a pliant Congress and a deferential Supreme Court, both run by conservatives, have so far let Trump dominate every shake.

Back to the Kennedy Center

That claim of a “unanimous” board vote has been challenged since one ex-officio board member, Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat, said she was muted and prevented from speaking on the phone meeting where she said the vote took place. Beatty talked about the meeting in an appearance on CNN.

“When you think about not even allowing me to speak, that’s a form of censorship,” Beatty told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Early in his presidency Trump had purged other board members and installed primarily people from his inner circle. They made him chairman. He said he was surprised and gratified by the renaming, but that statement is complicated by the fact that he has referenced adding his name to the Kennedy Center for himself in the past.

Laws should outweigh board actions

The law seems pretty clear. There’s an entire subchapter in US code that deals with the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” and it says nothing about the board being able to change the name.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title20/chapter3/subchapter5&edition=prelim

The law was passed not long after Kennedy’s assassination and it decreed that the center be a “living memorial” to the slain president and that it be called the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

In December of 1983, Congress added language, signed by President Ronald Reagan, that prohibited further memorials be installed at the Kennedy Center.

Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, who is running for Congress as a Democrat in New York, pointed to that ‘83 law in an angry post on X. He didn’t mention another portion of the law that allows for memorials if Congress is notified and the Smithsonian board, which oversees the Kennedy Center Board approves. Adding the name of a living president also does not seem, technically speaking, like a memorial.

Expect lawsuits from members of the Kennedy clan, although at least one notable Kennedy appears to be onboard. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a nephew of JFK whose own father was also assassinated, is a Kennedy Center Board Member. It’s not clear if he was part of the renaming vote, but CNN has reached out for comment.

David Super of Georgetown Law School told CNN’s Betsy Klein that it is unclear who might have legal standing to sue the Trump administration or the Trump-aligned Kennedy Center board over the name change.

“The administration is not concerning itself with laws unless it has a realistic prospect of getting sued,” Super said.

These do not seem like very complicated legal issues

“They don’t have the power to do it,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a press conference on Capitol Hill this week. “Only Congress can rename the Kennedy Center. The wannabe king and his sycophantic minions can’t do it.”

But Jeffries said Democrats are going to stay focused on kitchen-table issues such as the cost of health care, which means that for now, Trump’s allies can, in fact, do it.

The name is on the wall

Whether or not Trump and his allies can change the name of the Kennedy Center is secondary to the fact that they have put his name on the wall, just as they put his name on the wall at the former US Institute of Peace, almost within sight of the Kennedy Center.

From an irony perspective, both changes are rich, according to the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer.

“A president whose administration has mounted a sustained assault on cultural funding — an agenda antithetical to the very reasons the center was created — is poised to have his name placed on the marquee,” Zelizer writes.

Unitary executive

Trump and many Republicans want a more powerful executive, and there’s been a major shift in that direction since the Supreme Court granted presidents the superpower of legal immunity for official and most nonofficial acts, at Trump’s request.

They’re also utilizing a so-called shadow docket of temporary unexplained orders to shut down lower courts that put holds on Trump’s actions, allowing the White House to carry forward with firings that could ultimately be illegal, or ignoring spending mandated by Congress.

Despite some few recent flashes of independence, Republican lawmakers have primarily acted as Trump’s enablers rather than as defenders of a coequal branch of the government.

“Trump’s view is that the president cannot be limited in his management of the executive branch by statutes passed by Congress or regulations enacted by lower-level executive branch officials,” CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig told me. “And he might well be right; recently, this approach - sometimes dubbed the ‘unitary executive’ has gained substantial support in the courts.”

Who could remove Trump’s name from the wall?

The marking of Washington with Trump’s name will present an interesting dilemma for any future Democratic president, assuming courts do not ultimately step in. Does a theoretical future Democrat simply rip Trump’s name off buildings? By the unitary executive theory, they could.

“If Congress doesn’t defend its institutional prerogatives, then the president can act unilaterally, as he has been doing in a variety of areas,” Mark Rozell, an expert on the unitary executive theory and dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University told me in an email. “The Center’s Board cannot officially change what was created by statute, but if Congress doesn’t act, the signage at least remains until perhaps some future Board acts to remove it.”

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/19/politics/kennedy-center-trump-name-change-law-analysis

For I am the great and powerful Oz! I will paste my name on everything!

I don't think anyone has root for him to continue. I believe he lacks the ability to do anything other than continue his ways. Somehow he considers himself the king of the world and acts like it too.

Refusing to allocate funds approved by congress for human trafficking survivors. Disgusting..............

US justice department halts funding for human-trafficking survivors

DoJ has nearly $90m appropriated by Congress to support victims, but organizations say funding has been cut

More than 100 organizations that support victims of human trafficking have lost funding since October, leaving thousands of survivors at risk, a Guardian investigation has found.

Anti-trafficking advocates say the US Department of Justice’s failure to spend nearly $90m appropriated by Congress is impeding law-enforcement investigations and exposing survivors to homelessness and the risk of deportation, jail time or re-exploitation.

This is the latest in a series of Guardian investigative reports, which in September revealed that the Trump administration had rolled back efforts to combat human trafficking across the federal government. That retreat has far-reaching implications beyond those related to the release of the investigative files related to the late Jeffrey Epstein.

“It’s extremely irresponsible, and maybe even immoral,” said Kristina Rose, who ran the justice department’s office for victims of crime under Joe Biden and served as its deputy director during the first Trump administration.

A justice department spokesperson told the Guardian: “The justice department can remain focused on two critical priorities at the same time: support victims of human trafficking and prosecute criminals who exploit children, and ensure the efficient use of taxpayer dollars.”

The Guardian’s report struck a chord on Capitol Hill, where three US senators expressed outrage. Richard Durbin of Illinois said it fit a pattern by the Trump administration of “disregarding congressionally appropriated funds intended to target the most heinous crimes and national security threats – including human trafficking.

“The Trump administration must be held accountable,” Ben Ray Luján, a Democratic senator from New Mexico, said. “Funding for these essential services must be fully restored immediately.”

Gary Peters of Michigan, who sits on a Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds the justice department, said the Trump administration was “illegally” withholding resources approved by lawmakers.

Jordann Hare would be “in prison, dead or strung out close to being dead,” she says, if it hadn’t been for the services she received from the Life Link.

Before she was found in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, hotel raid in 2013, Hare had lived through three years of terror – repeated assaults, and threats to kill her family. Her trafficker even introduced her to heroin in order to control her, she said.

The Life Link stepped in to provide Hare with everything from fully subsidized housing to legal advocacy, much of that support funded by US Department of Justice grants.

But on 30 September, the organization’s two grants, totaling $1.75m, ran out. Before that, the Life Link’s human-trafficking outreach and aftercare director, Lynn Sanchez, said she was able to provide intensive support to 40 to 50 survivors a year, offering a full complement of services and up to two years of housing. Now she estimates she can only keep 20 to 30 survivors housed for up to six months. Her team has shrunk from 11 staff members to only five. Of the six employees she had to lay off or support in finding jobs elsewhere, four were survivors of human trafficking, including Hare, who had gone through a state program to become a certified peer support worker.

Other organizations losing funding designated for human-trafficking survivors include Street Grace, a national non-profit that protects children from sexual exploitation; the YWCA in Kalamazoo, Michigan; and the Reformed Church of Highland Park Affordable Housing Corporation, New Jersey, which used federal funds to offer emergency housing to survivors seeking to escape.

Caseworkers at the Reformed church’s anti-trafficking program said they had had to turn away dozens of trafficking survivors since its federal funding expired in September. Other clients have faced eviction and some – including a single mother with four children and a grandchild – clients with children are back in homeless shelters – which makes them vulnerable to being trafficked again.

The Rev Seth Kaper-Dale, co-pastor of the Reformed church and CEO of its affordable housing corporation, said his program had had to turn away dozens of trafficking survivors since its federal funding expired in September. Other clients have faced eviction and some clients with children are back in homeless shelters – which makes them vulnerable to being trafficked again.

“If we have concerns about people being trafficked, we need to give lavish support to prevent people from being double- or triple-trafficked,” said Kaper-Dale. “We are setting people up for a really disastrous time.”

Current and former staff members at the justice department’s office for victims of crime told the Guardian that over the summer they had completed the bureaucratic steps necessary to make the funding available. But three months into the new fiscal year, funds still have not been allocated.

“I can’t remember a time when appropriated human-trafficking funding took this long to award,” said Rose, the former director. “It just doesn’t make any sense, because the money is there.”

The justice department told the Guardian that it would begin the public process of making the money available in the next few weeks. The department’s statement was identical to one provided to the Guardian in September, when last year’s grants were about to expire.

In October, 74 legal, religious and advocacy groups sent a letter to Congress warning of disastrous consequences from their defunding. “Many regions will lose their only service provider, leaving survivors with no safe emergency housing, case management or counseling,” they wrote.

Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, told the Guardian the Trump administration’s failure to release the funds fits a pattern of diverting “important resources from combating crimes”. Instead, the administration was using “that money for their single-minded immigration enforcement agenda, which has included arresting immigrant survivors attempting to report crimes to the police”.

For Hare, who is now pursuing an associate degree in human services at Santa Fe Community College, the Trump administration’s failure to spend the money represents “an abuse of power that mirrors what traffickers do”, putting survivors in a position where they have “nowhere to turn for help”.

“For some of these survivors, the only support they have is these non-profits,” she said. “You’re getting the same response from the government as you are from the person who exploited you: ‘You don’t matter, we don’t care about you.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...RIyNyup7g1_OI_aem_v-5ZW9IdfoaO3L7t0JcPdA

Whatever. We’re still going to need those Epstein files. You know on trafficking those little girls.

What I hope we never lose sight of is the part the GOP and SCOTUS has played in all of this. They have the power to stop him but have chosen not to exercise it.

Senators and the House of Reps alike have allowed him to make our laws a joke. They are responsible as much as the guy at the top. Supporters of Donald Trump are, IMO, Traitors to America. They are Traitors to the Constitution of the United States of America and all it stands for.


When this is all said and done, I hope we have the courage NOT to dispense "Retribution" in the manner of Donald Trump had vowed to do. I hope we have a better sense of what America was supposed to be and was until Jan 20, 2025.

They do need to pay for their crimes but they also need their day in court. Something Trump and the GOP and SCOTUS don't seem to want for everyone else that opposes them.

It's a shame, but it is what it is.