Group That Escaped Trump’s Kennedy Center Takeover Is Thriving

The Washington National Opera is having a great season. The Kennedy Center, not so much.

The Washington National Opera has found new life since it steered away from Donald Trump’s control.

The 70-year-old opera company departed its longtime home at the John F. Kennedy Center when the president and his allies assumed control of the historic cultural institution last year. Yet the difficult exit has apparently not hurt the company—instead, it is well on its way to a full reinvention, raising questions about whether or not the group needs the $2.75 million federal subsidy and support of the Kennedy Center in order to survive, The New York Times reported Friday.

“We didn’t lose any artists,” Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera, told the Times. “We didn’t lose any staff when we rebooted as a new company. Nobody lost a paycheck. Nobody lost their benefits. Everyone has been very united.”

Zambello added that it has been difficult to fundraise and, effectively, create “an opera company out of nothing,” though they have also found “incredible freedom” in the process.

The opera company’s program has shifted. It has more operas scheduled this year than it did during the 2024-25 season, but it will also have fewer performances of each opera.

“This reflects the competition for stages at auditoriums that have already booked shows well in advance,” noted the Times.

The company’s budget has also grown, from $25 million last year to about $30 million next year. That’s due to the additional costs tied to renting venues, and the loss of in-house staff and government subsidies. A $17 million endowment also hangs in the balance.

“We had to increase our fund-raising budget significantly to cover new costs and to account for limited weeks available in new venues, which means fewer revenue-earning performances per production,” Timothy O’Leary, the general director of the opera, told the daily. “Thankfully, we have received leadership support from our board and donor base, as well as a groundswell of new donors from around the country.”

Long before Trump’s meddling, the Kennedy Center was widely considered a premier global arts institution. But since the White House became directly involved in its operations and programming, its normally star-studded lineup has fallen apart.

In December, the president suddenly decided to rename the venerated cultural institution “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” in a flagrant rejection of the laws that created the center in the first place.

The GOP Is Fuming After the Pentagon Abruptly Pulls Back from Europe

The Trump administration called off the deployment of thousands of troops to Poland without explaining its decision to Congress.

Republicans are furious with the Trump administration after its decision to cease all troop deployment to longtime U.S.-ally Poland. The decision is the latest of Trump’s anti-European defense tendencies, coming just a month after the Pentagon removed 5,000 troops from Germany after criticism from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the Iran war.

“I just want to say this is a slap in the face to Poland; it’s a slap in the face to our Baltic friends,” Representative and Armed Service Committee member Don Bacon told Politico. “It’s a slap to the face of this committee … “I may not represent 100 percent of people on this committee, but I think I represent the views of the vast majority … We disagree.”

“We don’t know what’s going on here, but I can just tell you we’re not happy with what’s being talked about, particularly since there’s been no statutory consultation with us,” said Armed Services Chair Representative Mike Rogers, suggesting that the move was made without congressional oversight. Although the Pentagon stated that pulling troops was “not an unexpected, last-minute decision.”

Top Armed Service Democrat Adam Smith felt similarly.

“The only answer I’ve got is, ‘Well, that’s what they told us to do.’ Okay, why?” Smith said. “If there’s some strategy behind it, then you guys ought to know and you ought to be able to communicate it to us.”

Poland is the only European country that prefers a U.S. military presence.

JD Vance Humiliates Himself as Crowd Stays Silent During His Speech

The vice president used a memorial service to try to score political points.

A charisma-less Vice President JD Vance was met Friday with humiliating silence when he tried to transform a memorial event into a political stump speech.

Speaking at a memorial service outside the U.S. Capitol for the Fraternal Order of Police’s National Peace Officers, Vance got a quiet reaction to his raving about the Trump administration’s efforts to end cashless bail.

“How about we have a federal government that puts violent criminals in prison, as opposed to letting them out of jail?” Vance said. There was a long, awkward pause, before the quiet members of the audience slowly started clapping.

please clap pic.twitter.com/RkKrK9HAhG— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2026

please clap pic.twitter.com/RkKrK9HAhG

It’s possible that the crowd of law enforcement officers and their families are aware that there is no significant documented increase in violent crimes among arrestees out on cashless bail, which allows people suspected of a crime who can’t meet bail to avoid spending time in a cage before they’ve been convicted.

Or perhaps the audience weren’t impressed by how Vance used his pulpit to deliver a political speech.

In honoring the fallen law enforcement officers, Vance took credit for a historic drop in violent crime—when rates were already dropping nationwide before Donald Trump came into office. Experts have said there is little evidence to suggest that Trump has had a significant impact on crime rates.

Still, Vance attributed a drop in violent crime to the Trump administration’s efforts to stop “the tide of narcotics and migrant crime flooding across our borders.” Of course, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. But this is just the run-of-the-mill xenophobia one can expect from Vance, who has admitted to telling racist lies for attention. And who could forget when he readily put a target on the back of immigrant children?

This painfully cringey racist is the person Trump wants to prop up in 2028, and maybe we should let him. If Vance’s performance Friday is any........

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