Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos: Sharon Steinmann/Houston Chronicle, and Mark Felix and Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg via Getty Images
May 28, 2026
May 27, 2026
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Saturday branded the federal judge who blocked his renovation of the Kennedy Center as “an anti Trump Hater” and predicted that the nation’s premier performing arts center he wanted to shutter for a two-year overhaul will “soon be closed, probably never to open again.”
In a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform, Trump fumed about the Friday decision from U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper who also ordered Trump’s name removed from the center. Clearly angered by his latest legal setback, he said it was “impossible for me to be treated fairly,” tying Cooper’s ruling to earlier losses, including the Supreme Court’s rejection in February of his sweeping tariffs.
His post aimed to make the case for the project even as he says he’s giving up on it. Hours after Cooper’s decision, Trump said he was backing away from the renovations and making arrangements to relinquish control to Congress of what, until the Republican president’s second term, had been known as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
In another post on Saturday, Trump invoked the Kennedy Center episode as he addressed a spate of musicians backing out of a celebration for the country’s 250th anniversary.
“Cancel it,” Trump wrote, “just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN.”
The White House did not immediately say whether Trump would keep serving as the center’s board chairman.
Trump’s signal that he’s retreating from the center gave hope to artists who had been alienated by his takeover, said Norm Eisen, a former White House ethics lawyer who is involved in a lawsuit challenging Trump’s Kennedy Center plans.
“I have already heard from artists and from audience members alike who are excited about the Kennedy Center returning to non-partisan normality,” Eisen told The Associated Press in a text message on Saturday. “It’s early days yet but as and when the court’s order is implemented, including Trump’s name coming off the building and the Board otherwise complying with the law, I’m optimistic that the Center will begin the long journey back.”
Without offering evidence, Trump suggested that Cooper’s wife, lawyer Amy Jeffress, was to blame in part for the ruling. The president noted that Jeffress, a partner at the Hecker Fink law firm, is a former federal prosecutor who served as a counselor to Attorney General Eric Holder during the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama. Cooper was nominated for the bench by Obama.
Trump also noted that Hecker Fink is representing former President Joe Biden in a lawsuit against the Department of Justice to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts from the Democrat’s interviews with a ghostwriter that were obtained in an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time as a senator and as vice president.
Trump asserted that the Kennedy Center, named for the late Democratic president and opened in 1971, was “rusted, rotted, and rat and bug infested” and that the ”new Building would have been incomparable.”
Cooper said in his ruling that the center board’s March 16 vote to close the venue was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” with no regard for its legal obligations. The administration had announced the work would begin in July and last approximately two years. Cooper’s ruling halts those plans for now.
The judge also found that the board “overstepped its statutory bounds” by adding Trump’s name to the center. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it, he said. Cooper ordered that Trump’s name be removed within two weeks.
Trump on Saturday said it was the board, not him, that added the Trump name to the center. “They thought it would be good for this dying Institution,” he wrote.
Shortly after returning to office in January 2025, he ousted the center’s previous leadership and replaced it with a handpicked board of trustees that named him chairman.
Cooper held hearings in late April for parallel lawsuits challenging the project. One lawsuit was filed by a group of cultural and historic preservation organizations. The other was brought by Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who serves as an ex officio member of the board through her position in Congress. He ruled in favor of Beatty’s request but rejected the other challenge.
Trump, in his post, also noted that Jeffress’ firm represented E. Jean Carroll, the longtime advice columnist whose claims against Trump won her a $5 million award in 2023 for sexual abuse and defamation after a jury agreed that Trump sexually abused her in a New York department store dressing room in 1996. Another jury in 2024 awarded Carroll an additional $83 million for defamation. Both awards are under appeal.
Jeffress did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this report.
A federal judge is reviewing a $1.8 billion fund set up to pay people the president says were wronged by the federal government.
A federal judge will review the Trump administration's nearly $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" after a group of former federal judges questioned its legitimacy.
The fund was established following Trump's lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. Instead of going to trial, Trump administration lawyers and the president's personal legal team settled by agreeing to stand up the taxpayer-supported fund.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Florida on Friday ordered Trump's lawyers to respond to the motion filed by 35 former federal judges who argued that Trump is in a sense both the plaintiff and the defendant in the case, having filed it as president and also the leader of the executive branch overseeing the IRS. Thus, the judges wrote, the lawsuit "is itself a fraud on the court."
The former judges, appointed by both Democrat and Republican presidents, wrote that the lawsuit was used as a justification for the "looting" of American taxpayers. They described the case as a type of "collusion" between the president's lawyers and the federal government and asked the judge to re-open the case to determine if the settlement was reached only after the court was "deceived."
Williams, appointed by former President Barack Obama, had initially granted a dismissal of Trump's lawsuit following the settlement, but, in light of the former judges' motion, she said the court is "empowered to investigate serious misconduct."
It follows another judge in Virginia temporarily freezing the fund, which Trump officials have described as an effort to compensate Trump allies, Jan. 6 rioters and others the president says have been unjustly targeted.
That judge, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia, ordered on Friday that Trump officials stop setting up the pool of money to "ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed."
Brinkema, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, set a June 12 hearing for arguments over whether the order should be extended.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to an NPR request for comment on Saturday. Justice Department officials said on social media, "We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes."
Taken together, the orders are an early legal setback for the fund, which has caused divisions within the Capitol Hill, with critics describing it as a slush fund for Trump supporters who claim they were the victims of political persecution.
Brinkema's order pausing it was the result of a lawsuit brought by former Justice Department lawyer Andrew Floyd and other plaintiffs, who argued that the nearly $2 billion was never approved by Congress and "rewards and incentivizes unlawful behavior and facilitates an astounding abuse of taxpayer funds."
Legal experts have expressed particular alarm over the fund's lack of oversight, in addition to the bucket of money having no connection to the claims Trump alleged in his lawsuit against the IRS.
Adam Zimmerman, a law professor at the University of Southern California, told NPR that past examples of mass compensation funds directed by past presidents, whether related to the Holocaust or the BP oil spill, resolved sprawling class-action lawsuits, which is not the case here.
"All those cases involved identifiable injuries, to discrete groups of people, for violations of real laws, under neutrally applicable rules, often brokered in the shadow of a class action litigation or mass litigation," Zimmerman said on Saturday.
This fund, however, "doesn't address real legal injuries."
Zimmerman added: "It offers money to an indeterminate group of people, who never threatened or commenced any kind of legal action," he said, describing it as "unlike anything we've seen in the history of the republic."
