Donald Trump is the biggest loser

Just after 5:31 pm this evening, Donald Trump finally broke. After a day of court losses, one after another, he opened his personal social media platform, Truth Social, and unleashed a meltdown that must have surprised even some of his most loyal enablers inside the White House. He declared himself America’s “favorite President,” attacked a federal judge, took a swipe at Barack Obama, blamed “Radical Left Democrats” for his problems, and then announced that if he wasn’t given complete control, “I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into NEVER NEVER LAND.” He was talking about a judge ordering his name removed from the Kennedy Center, but what he was really saying was that if he cannot have it his way, then no one can have it at all.

This outburst was not really about a building. It was about a name. And it was triggered by something Donald Trump has never handled well: being told no. Because today, on what would have been John F. Kennedy’s birthday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that adding Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center was unlawful, and he ordered it removed within fourteen days. And it wasn’t just the building it needed to be removed from. It was also the website and every piece of official material. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” Cooper wrote in a 94-page opinion. The administration had tried to argue that “Trump Kennedy Center” was just a nickname, a secondary label. Cooper was not persuaded. The lettering installed on the building, he noted, “literally reads: ‘The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.’” Then he asked the obvious question. “If that is not a renaming, what is?”

This was a monumental blow to Trump’s ego and, maybe even worse, unimaginably embarrassing. The Kennedy name means something in this country that Trump has never been able to touch. It means Camelot. It means an idea of America that people still reach for, country over party, service over self, a borrowed sense of innocence we attach to better days. He cannot compete with that. He never could. And this was his way of annexing the emotion behind the name. And also a way to upstage it. No doubt Trump wanted this ego project, but this wasn’t just about repairs, renovations, or a golden age of the arts. It was about putting his name first, ahead of Kennedy’s, on one of the most American buildings we have. His name went literally in front of Kennedy’s on that wall. And now it comes down, and he is lashing out.

And maybe that is also why he keeps a Kennedy close. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits in his cabinet, running a federal department in his name. Trump can never be a Kennedy. He can never earn that name or what it used to carry. But he can own one. He can keep one beside him, useful and obedient, a Kennedy who answers to him. If you cannot join the family that came to stand for the best of the country, who sacrifice members in the name of service, then maybe the next best thing, for a man like Trump, is to make one of them serve you.

And this isn’t just a simple loss for him. He did everything he could to permanently add his name to the building. Including when he fired members of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and announced he would “make the Kennedy Center GREAT AGAIN.” He named himself chairman. He filled the empty seats with loyalists, including his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles. That handpicked board then voted to put his name on the building. He built the very body that would hand him what he wanted, and it still did not survive the courts. Rep. Joyce Beatty, the board member who brought the case, said it plainly. “The Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump,” she said. “He has desecrated this sacred memorial for his own vanity.”

And the name was not the only thing the judge stopped. Cooper also blocked, for now, the plan to shut the Kennedy Center down for two years beginning after July 4th. He found that the board’s vote to close it was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained,” based on “an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information.” He was careful here, and we should be too. He did not say the building needs no work. The repairs, he wrote, are “sorely needed,” and the board can still vote to close for them if it follows a proper process. What he stopped was not maintenance. What he did stop was Trump turning it into an unrecognizable shrine to himself.

And upon hearing the news, Trump let us all see what this was really all about. He did not push back. He said he would hand the Kennedy Center off entirely, instructing the Commerce Department to begin transferring the “failing Institution” to Congress so they could decide what to do with it. His long rambling post showed it was really about his name on the building more than care for the cultural institutions; he had nothing to say about the music, the artists, the students, or the building itself. Only that unless he was “free to do what I do better than anyone else,” he was finished with it. He would rather walk away from the place than keep it without his name on the front.

And the Kennedy Center was only the first loss of the day. Because two more judges were doing the same thing to him in two more courtrooms.

In Virginia, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema froze his nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. “It is important that the status quo be maintained,” she wrote, so that no money is “irreversibly disbursed” before the court can rule. This is the $1.776 billion in taxpayer money, pulled from a federal account meant to cover the government’s legal settlements, set aside to pay people who say they were politically targeted. Two of the officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th have now sued to stop it. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called the fund “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption.” Even his own party recoiled. Republicans were split enough over it that they abruptly dropped a vote on a major spending bill this month. And to win the holdouts back, the administration reportedly floated that senators whose records had been secretly subpoenaed could apply for a payout, too. They tried everything to buy the votes with the slush fund itself.

Because that fund did not come from nowhere. It was created when the administration settled Trump’s own $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. And then a third judge went after the root of it. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami reopened that IRS case to investigate whether the whole thing was, in her words, a “product of collusion” and “a fraud on the court.” She acted after thirty-five former federal judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, asked her to. One of them was J. Michael Luttig, the conservative who testified before the January 6th committee. “The Court was deceived,” they wrote. Their argument was simple. Trump was the plaintiff suing the IRS, and Trump, as president, runs the branch of government the IRS answers to. He was on both sides of the table at once. Williams gave him until June 12th to explain himself.

This was a very bad day for Donald Trump. Three losses in one day, and he took his rage to social media. That is what we need to hold onto. And also that this buys us time. None of these are clean victories. The fund could still go through. He could still keep fighting for his name on the Kennedy Center. The IRS case could be argued for months. None of these were expected to be slam dunks. But they are still huge wins. Some might hold, but what we want today are delays. Every motion, hearing, and response window is time. And time is the thing we need more than anything right now. Authoritarian movements run on speed. They move fast because they are counting on us being too slow, too tired, or too scattered to catch up. So when a court makes him stop, even for two weeks, even temporarily, it is not a small thing. It is the gears catching and the clock running toward the midterms, which is exactly where this gets decided.

I know how this stretch has felt. It has been roughly a year and five months of nonstop chaos, instability, and cruelty. And for so much of it, the news has come in one direction, bad piled on bad, until it started to feel like that was simply the shape of things now. We have had ups, and we have had downs. We have had days that knocked the wind out of us. I’m sure you have heard it in my voice, the way I have struggled through those nights when we couldn’t see a way out of this. So I do not say this lightly, and I am not going to pretend tomorrow can’t bring something hard, because it can. But tonight was not one of those nights. Tonight, three different judges looked at the most powerful man in the country and told him no.

And here is something concrete we can do with that. None of these rulings happened on their own. Behind each one is a legal organization that did the work, filed the case, and carried the cost. The plaintiffs who froze the slush fund were represented by Democracy Forward. The watchdogs pressing on it include Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The case that pulled Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center was carried by the lawyers at Democracy Defenders Action. These groups, and others like them, are the ones putting friction in the gears every single day, often on behalf of people who could never afford to fight back alone. So look at who is doing this work. Find the ones litigating the cases that matter most to you, and support them however they allow it, with your time or with your money. That is money very well spent.

And if you are here in California with me, we have something else in front of us this weekend. The primary is only days away, and this is the last weekend to make a plan. A lot of people are saying that at this point it is too late to trust the mail, so take your ballot to a drop box or a polling place instead. I plan to hand-deliver mine. However you do it, we cannot sit this one out. The whole fight we just watched in those three courtrooms runs straight through who we send to govern us, and that begins now, with the primary.

Because the trajectory is turning, and tonight is the proof. The courts are holding. Some of his loudest enablers have gone quiet, backing away from the cameras they used to chase. Democrats are no longer only reacting; they are planning for what they do when they take back control. And those with an audience are continuing to refuse to lend him their names. The Trump-backed Freedom 250 concert for America’s birthday has lost even more of its headliners. We are close to 75% of the announced performers refusing to perform.

I am not promising the way out of this will be a straight line, because it won’t be. We will have to walk through both peaks and valleys before we reach where we are going. But step back and look at how far we have come. The highs are starting to outnumber the lows. Tonight, three judges held the line. We are closer to the midterms than we were yesterday. More people are finding their voice.

And we are going to survive this. I believe that more tonight than I did yesterday. We are not going to come out the other side the same as we went in. We are going to come out clearer about what we actually want this country to be, and more determined to build it. We are going to come out with the guardrails we should have had all along, the ones we now know we need, so that no one can ever do this to us again. That is the work waiting on the far side of all this. But it starts with nights like tonight. A name coming off a wall. A slush fund frozen. A fraudulent deal cracked open. Three judges who refused to look away. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: Forgot how good a drive up the coast can be.

Sources:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/judge-temporarily-halts-kennedy-center-closure-trump-name-removed-rcna347598

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/29/g-s1-124865/judge-temporarily-blocks-trumps-1-8-billion-anti-weaponization-fund

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5902065-trump-irs-lawsuit-reopened/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-cancel-votes-fight-trumps-anti-weaponization-fund-rcna346113

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/05/29/great-american-fair-loses-performers-amid-divisive-backlash/