The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump-occupied Kennedy Center just lost its brand-new senior vice-president of artistic programming in under two weeks, which is about how long it takes a normal person to realize they’ve accidentally joined a cult. Kevin Couch quietly noped out of the job with no explanation, which is polite-speak for “I saw the group chat and absolutely not.”

This comes after Trump seized control of the board, installed himself as chair, and his loyal trustees voted to rename the place the “Trump-Kennedy Center” — a neat trick, given that federal law designates it as the John F Kennedy Center and any renaming is supposed to go through Congress. But sure, just overwrite a presidential memorial by board resolution; nothing says respect for institutions like speed-running your own branding onto a publicly funded arts center.

Meanwhile, the artists are fleeing like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon. Philip Glass pulled the world premiere of his new symphony, the Washington National Opera packed its bags, and ticket sales have cratered to their lowest levels in years. In other words, Trump took a world-class performing arts institution and turned it into a culture-war theme park so toxic that even the guy hired to program the shows wouldn’t stick around for the second act.

Trump spent decades running a fake university, so of course the next logical step is using the actual federal government to shake down real ones. Under the banner of “combating antisemitism,” his 2025 executive order morphed into a convenient all-purpose weapon: agencies quietly froze or threatened billions in grants and contracts to elite schools, then demanded they rewrite their policies to match Trump’s culture-war wish list. Because nothing says “civil rights enforcement” like turning research funding into a loyalty test for the Dear Leader’s views on gender and DEI.

Universities, staring down the barrel of vanished research budgets and canceled contracts, started cutting deals. Penn and Columbia led the way with settlements; some schools wrote multimillion-dollar checks, others paid in policy and personnel purges—agreeing to kill diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to adopt Trump’s executive-order definitions of gender, which conveniently reach into everything from dorms to sports. Harvard, annoyingly for the regime, fought back and a federal judge ruled that freezing $2 billion in its funding was illegal. The administration’s response? Appeal the ruling and keep leaning on everyone else anyway, because if you can’t win in court, you can still win by extortion.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston declared that in just one year Trump has “completely transformed American higher education” by “restoring merit” and “eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.” In other words: replace academic independence with political obedience, swap DEI for enforced bigotry, and call it a civil-rights crusade. The message to universities is clear: toe the line on Trump’s culture war or kiss your federal money goodbye. It’s not policy; it’s a protection racket with letterhead.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that if you never release the homelessness numbers, homelessness stops existing. HUD is now sitting on the 2025 national “Point in Time” count — a congressionally required census that’s been done since at least 2005 and used to allocate federal funding — while outreach workers head out for the next count with absolutely nothing official to compare it to. The last national figure from 2024 showed a historic high of 771,480 people, up nearly 20% in a year, so naturally the solution is data suppression, not policy.

Local jurisdictions have already released their 2025 numbers — Boston down 4%, Chicago allegedly down 60% — but HUD under Secretary Scott Turner just won’t cough up the national totals. Advocates like Donald Whitehead are calling it what it is: more than a lack of transparency, it’s malpractice. He says he’s repeatedly called Turner and gotten radio silence, because nothing says "we care about homelessness" like ghosting the people trying to solve it.

Former federal homelessness czar Jeff Olivet calls it "incredibly concerning" that the government is unwilling to share the scope of the crisis, which is a very polite way of saying, "What are they hiding?" HUD’s line is that there’s "no standard timeline" and they’re just being thorough and comprehensive — in other words, they’ll release the bad news when they’ve figured out how to spin it, bury it, or both. The Biden administration at least dumped the 2024 numbers quietly between Christmas and New Year’s; Team Trump has apparently upgraded to the advanced strategy of never releasing them at all. But sure, tell us again how this is the administration that’s going to fix America’s cities.