Trump: If I Can’t Have the Kennedy Center, No One Can

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

The Grinding Long Haul of Trump II

The news this week is littered with examples indicating that accountability for the depredations of Trump II — if it ever comes — will be so slow, drawn-out, exhausting, and limited that it will never feel satisfying, complete, or just.

Part of that is the nature of the legal and political systems. Part of it is the ravages of time. But a key part of it is the unrelentingness of Trump and the people around him to keep pushing on his campaigns of retribution and corruption well after any chance of succeeding has evaporated, leaving sheer destruction as the only remaining outcome.

That’s not grudging admiration for Trump’s relentlessness. It’s clear-eyed recognition that Trump doesn’t believe in anything, not even himself. With a nihilist, there is no principal at stake, nothing that constitutes a win or a loss, no compelling self-interest or sense of self-preservation that forestalls destroying the thing he pretends to care about for a time. Trump is a hostage-taker without a conscience.

For those fighting the good fight to defend that which Trump would destroy, the battle seems never to end. He’s not chastened by setbacks or losses or adverse verdicts, but rather just adopts the next most aggressive litigation posture, no matter how much moral opprobrium and ethical revulsion has been heaped on his misconduct or litigation strategy. It’s like a Seinfeld episode: no story arc, but instead a flat line with no growth or discovery.

Trump has taken the worst features of the federal government — big, lumbering, inexorable, and indiscriminate — and weaponized them against individuals and institutions. Political foes, arts venues, undocumented immigrants, and a host of other Trump targets may weather the initial storm, but they are ground down under the continuous onslaught.

In many cases, by the time accountability comes, public interest has long since waned because the slow pace of the fight exceeds our cognitive ability to track all the details, the twists and turns, and what the fight was about in the first place.

The Destruction: Kennedy Center Edition

Trump’s months-long attack on the Kennedy Center is this week’s best example of “Wait, didn’t Trump already lose on this?”

Ordered by a federal court to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center facade, the board grudgingly obliged but since then has kept the restored marble sans Trump’s name under cover of a tarp and then voted to put his name back on the building — in two different ways — and name the site for Trump, too.

A judge yesterday handed Trump yet another loss, ruling that this new renaming scheme would violate his original injunction and ordering it stopped again. The administration immediately appealed that ruling, too.

Meanwhile, the board was already plotting to just shut the whole thing down, which it voted to do yesterday and then actually did do late in the day. It’s ostensibly closing for “the Reconstruction and the Renovation,” as Trump put it, on the pretext that the building is on the verge of collapse. “Reconstruction” implies deconstruction, so we may get a literal tearing down of parts of the existing Kennedy Center, not just the figurative collapse of the first-rate venue that Trump has already precipitated.

The cycle is so clear: Attack, attack, attack — even if it means destroying the thing you purport to covet. If I can’t have the Kennedy Center, then no one can.

Up against this relentless onslaught is Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio board member not captive to Trump, who never in her wildest dreams imagined that she would spend her seventh term in Congress fighting in court to save the Kennedy Center.

The power imbalance is a critical element of many of the Trump II legal fights. The full weight of the federal government, being flagrantly abused by Trump, versus cobbled-together-on-the-fly plaintiffs and attorneys, assembled sometimes by happenstance and the need to thread the needle of having legal standing to sue in the first place.

The Retribution: James Comey Edition

Here’s another good example of the never-ending Trump fights. Since former FBI Director James Comey handed the Trump DOJ a humiliating defeat in his first indictment, the Justice Department has appealed that ruling and then indicted him a second time.

You can be forgiven for losing the thread. What started as a well-lawyered legal attack on Trump’s vindictive prosecutions of his political foes morphed into an attack on Trump’s corruption of the Justice Department, specifically his scheme to install loyalists as U.S. attorneys in blue states.

Perhaps the most egregious episode of the scheme was firing the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and replacing him with White House aide Lindsey Halligan, who had zero experience as a prosecutor, just in time to indict Comey before the statute of limitations expired. A judge found Halligan’s appointment unlawful, making the indictments she secured void.

Halligan’s appointment — which also produced the bogus indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James — was before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond yesterday on a consolidated appeal by the Trump DOJ. The three-judge panel — two Obama appointees and a Trump appointee — seemed likely to split along partisan lines in upholding the lower court’s disqualification of Halligan and dismissal of the Comey and James indictments.

Trump DOJ Targets Reporter’s LinkedIn Account

LinkedIn has been secretly fighting a Trump DOJ subpoena for a reporter’s 1,900 interactions with six users on the social media platform in a national security leak investigation, Politico reports.

Limited details about the still-sealed case in the Eastern District of Virginia spilled out yesterday during oral arguments in front of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. It’s not clear what leak is being investigated or which reporter is involved. The precise nature of the subpoena also remains unclear, but it was accompanied by a “non-disclosure order” from a federal judge prohibiting LinkedIn from alerting its users to the subpoena.

Judge Blocks ICE Warning to Critic

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras of D.C. found that ICE likely violated the First Amendment’s right to free speech when it issued a bizarre “Warning Notice” to a New York man who sent then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons a critical — but not threatening — three-paragraph email in the aftermath of the fatal ICE shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis during January’s Operation Metro Surge.

Judge Contreras issued a preliminary injunction barring the Department of Homeland Security from retaking further actions against David Streever based on either the “Warning Notice” or his email to Lyons.

In an opinion that began by invoking the Declaration of Independence as itself a bill of grievances, Judge Contreras concluded, “The notice practically shouts that Mr. Streever may be prosecuted if he continues to engage in his political speech.”

The DOGE Purges: $9.5 Billion Not to Work

The Trump administration paid federal employees $9.5 billion not to work during 2025, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

EU Leader Embraces Canadian Proposal

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said publicly she would work to make Canada the EU’s first associate member — a goal of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as he looks for shelter from the Trump II storm.

Pentagon Hides Iran War Damage

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Trump administration is not being candid with the public about the extensive damage that Iran has inflicted on U.S. facilities and military assets during the conflict.

A new Pentagon inspector general report released this week — covering only April 1-June 30, 2026 — offers a glimpse of the toll that the conflict has taken on U.S. resources in the Middle East:

• Iranian counterstrikes have “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan.”
• Dozens of U.S. aircraft have been destroyed or damaged:

Last evening, CBS News published exclusive photos provided by active duty service members of damage to U.S. assets in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The photos were undated.

“This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public,” one deployed service member told CBS News. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”

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