Six-and-a-half hours afterDonald Trumpput the world on notice that he was entering the White House Situation Room to make his “final determination” on whether or not there is peace in Iran, the president finally returned to social media to posta 578-word statementon an entirely different matter: his rage at the federal judge who ruled that his name has to be removed from the Kennedy Center.
The president first attacked the judge for having been nominated to the federal bench by Barack Obama, and largely focused on the part of the ruling that also instructed theTrump administrationto halt the closure of the performing arts center for a two-year renovation.
Trump then turned to his anger over the part of the ruling that gave him 14 days to have his name removed from the Kennedy Center’s facade and website.
US district judgeChristopher Cooper, Trump noted, had ruled that his handpicked board members, who “unanimously voted to add the name ‘TRUMP’ onto the former Kennedy Center, making it The Trump Kennedy Center, did not have the right to do such an addition, and the name, ‘TRUMP,’ must be removed”.
Many, many more words followed before the screed ended with the entirely unclear fix Trump said that he was ordering: “we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them.”
“I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management,” Trump wrote.
This concludes our live coverage of the secondTrump administrationfor the day. Here are the latest developments:
The US Postal Service could throw the upcoming midterm elections into chaos by requiring states to provide lists of voters who received mail ballots, according toa draft ruleset to be published on Tuesday.
An executive order signed with little fanfare on Friday byDonald Trumpcould have a huge impact on the health of American’s children, because it instructs the CDC to cut the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11.
Members ofJohn F Kennedy’s family celebrated the court order on Friday, the late president’s birthday, thatDonald Trump’s name was illegally added to the Kennedy Center cultural complex in Washington DC and must be removed within two weeks.
Louisiana Republicans approved a new congressional map on Friday which would eliminate a majority-Black congressional district that was at the center of alandmark supreme court rulinggutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The acting attorney general,Todd Blanche,announcedon Friday that the FBI has arrested an anti-ICE protester who was seen on video recorded by the rightwing influencer Nick Sortor threatening a federal officer who beat protesters outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey this week.
Sortor, a former real estate agent from Kentucky who was involved in multiple physical altercations with protesters in Portland last year, celebrated the arrest of the protester seen in his clip one day afterhe saidhe had “forwarded it directly to DHS”.
Sortor’s videoshowedthe protester threatening the life of the officer, and his family, but did not show what preceded the confrontation.
Video recorded by another video journalist offered a clue as to what might have set the protester off. Inthat clip, apparently recorded earlier, the protester who screamed at the federal officer was recorded standing next to another anti-ICE activist who was shoved under a moving truck by another federal officer. The officer who was seen in Sortor’s clip being screamed at then appeared and beat an anti-ICE protester with a baton.
