Trump's Name Added to Plaza Plagued by Controversy
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The board passed a resolution to name the plaza in front of the building after Trump and add his name to the venue’s facade so it would read “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump.” In the filing, Beatty said the board also agreed to add an additional reference to the president if the Trump Kennedy Center Fund reached $100 million.
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NYT ArtsJudge Is Asked to Block Inscription of Trump’s Name on Kennedy Center The request from a Democratic lawmaker follows a decision by the Trump-allied board to add “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” to the building.
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President Donald Trump is set to record an interview Thursday with Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer turned public critic, according to a White House official granted anonymity to describe plans that had not been publicly announced.
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Washington Times CultureWASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is expected to appear Thursday on the radio show of his former fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen, making a public reunion with the man who once called him a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain” and testified against him both in court and before Congress.
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Cohen served as the star witness in the Manhattan hush-money case that ended with Trump convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax and campaign-finance violations tied to payments made to silence women who alleged affairs with Trump, and spent more than a year in prison.
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Washington Times CultureBut the split from Cohen was perhaps the most personal. Cohen once boasted that he would “take a bullet” for Trump and was by Trump’s side during his political rise. After their public breakup, Cohen’s testimony in Trump’s 2024 criminal hush-money trial instead paved the way for Trump’s criminal conviction just as he was trying to make his political comeback.
Vanity FairTo be sure, Cohen may have an ulterior motive for this dizzying rapprochement. He told CNN on Thursday that he had submitted a pardon application to the White House and planned to follow up the next day; Trump is currently appealing his felony conviction related to the infamous hush-money payment. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Trump told Cohen on the air. “And that’s a big thing that you did.” (While it’s not clear what Cohen has privately said to Trump, he has not retracted the testimony he gave under oath.)
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In his tell-all memoir in 2020, “Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump,” Cohen was unsparing, calling Trump an “organized crime don” and “master manipulator.”
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Vanity FairWith that out of the way, Trump began to ramble: about Iran, about Venezuela, about how “the rallies are potentially bigger than ever,” about how Kamala Harris “knew less about the border than a child would know.” Cohen barely got a word in, but he slipped into reminiscence easily: “Boss, you remember when I was by your side?” During the decade-long period when Cohen played Trump’s antagonist in a national psychodrama, he looked agitated and haggard, but now, he sounded as if he had stepped back into a prior state of exhilarated comfort that had never quite worn off. In Disloyal, Cohen asks himself about the source of his “starstruck, moth-to-the-flame compulsion to insinuate [himself] with a man so transparently problematic in myriad ways.”
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Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.
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01 Newsweek So Trump is dealing with a string of unwanted celebrity endorsements…or is he? Upon closer inspection, some might argue that this is less of a problem for Trump than a voluntary format. The president has taken one of the oldest complaints in conservative politics—that Hollywood and popular culture belong to the left—and arrived at a characteristically Trumpian solution: use their supposedly left-leaning stuff anyway. Better still, from the perspective of the attention economy, the artist may then complain, giving Trump’s decision to use the material a second life.
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02 NYT Arts Rosie O’Donnell Ends Late Night Stint With a Ditty to ‘Donny Boy’ “It’s kind of weird to think he spent more nights with me this week than Melania,” O’Donnell said of President Trump on her last night guest-hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
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03 Washington Times Culture Cohen, who served prison time for his role in what he said was covering up Trump’s “dirty deeds,” confirmed that the Republican president will appear in a taped interview airing on his 77 WABC program Thursday evening and Sunday.
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04 Vanity Fair “The American people have spoken and re-elected Donald Trump,” Cohen wrote in an email. “Accordingly, I believe we must all acknowledge and respect the office of the Presidency and dismiss the case forthwith.”
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05 Breitbart Entertainment The interview is scheduled to air later Thursday on Cohen’s radio program, with additional excerpts running on his Sunday show. Cohen confirmed the sit-down after MS NOW first reported it, telling CBS News that he initiated the conversation.
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