When you’re losing a war, but it’s not an existential defeat, your country, your government can continue pretty much as before. Aside from the humiliation, there’s a well-established technique, which is to declare victory and pull out. But it appears that Trump can’t even pull that off.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a Saturday update on the situation in the Strait of Hormuz and all of that. It’s been clear for a while that the United States has basically lost this war. The goal was to achieve regime change, possibly to take Iran’s uranium. Neither of those is going to happen. The Iranian regime is harder line than it was before. Iran has ended up strengthened because it’s demonstrated its ability to shut off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. No way the United States, even under current management, is going to commit ground troops to attempt to really do in Iran’s nuclear program on a sustained basis.
So the indicated strategy was to essentially give up, but claim that something wonderful was accomplished, and that’s certainly something that Trump is good at doing. But he hasn’t been able to pull that off, I think because he himself is incapable of facing reality.
So the Iranians said that they are willing to allow free passage of shipping through the strait, by which it turns out they mean basically passage that stays close to the Iranian coast and pays a toll along the way. Well, what’s our alternative to that? What is it that we want to get?
The United States has started imposing a blockade on Iran, which hurts the Iranians. It does give them a reason to seek a deal, but only if they get something out of it. So if allowing ships to start carrying oil and LNG and fertilizer and helium out of the Gulf allows them to sell their own oil again and to import food, which apparently is an important issue for Iran, then that’s a deal that can be done. It will, in practice, be a strategic defeat for the United States, but something that the Trump administration could try to spin as a victory.
But in order to get that, you have to actually deliver on that deal. You can claim that you’re winning and that they’re surrendering, not us, but you have to actually deliver on the deal. What Trump tried to do was to say, great, they’re opening up the strait, but meanwhile, we’re going to continue our blockade. And also, they have promised that we can have the uranium, which they had not.
That doesn’t work. It’s just basic logic. Why would the Iranians agree to a deal if they don’t get a lifting of the US embargo, don’t get their ability to sell oil and their ability to import food back? If that’s what’s going to happen, then you might as well keep the strait blocked. So what was this supposed to be? What was the idea? What was the thinking?
Well, as best I can tell, and this is all speculation now, I don’t think that Trump has taken on board, maybe he’s emotionally incapable of taking on board the reality that he screwed up, that he took us to war and lost, that he, in his mind, still thinks that America has the upper hand and that the Iranians are cowering in fear over the might of the U.S. military, and that he doesn’t need to make any concessions,
Does he really believe that? Do we even know? Is really believing a thing that makes sense in his case? Probably not. But to some extent, he is at least incapable of accepting as a basic proposition, never mind in public, but at least in terms of actual policymaking, accepting as a proposition that, well, the U.S. just found the limits to its power, and they turn out to be closer to our goal than they are to the Iranians’ goal. So we basically have to cut our losses by making a deal that leaves the Iranians with some stuff that they didn’t have before.
He can’t seem to do that. But if he doesn’t do that, then the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed. In fact, it’s more closed than before because the Iranians are not managing to export oil, which is new. They were exporting oil before, and now that little bit of supply to the world market has been cut off. It’s about 2% of world oil supply. Not huge, but in a very tight oil market, it is significant. And I have no idea where it goes from here. Once again, we’re in a situation of total uncertainty.
Now, I might be willing to say, maybe I’m misunderstanding, maybe the United States does have, in some sense, more leverage. But, you know, we do have markets. The futures markets are closed for the weekend. So let’s see what happens when they reopen Sunday night. But the prediction markets are open, and for all the problems with the prediction markets, they show very clearly that the perceived probability that the strait would reopen by June 1stspiked last week and is now back basically to where it started. All of a sudden, we’re down to a 30% or so probability of getting the strait open anytime soon, which looks about right. Maybe that’s even a bit high.
But, my God, like I said, we are led by people who not only can’t plan a war right, they can’t even successfully execute a surrender. And that’s a really bad omen, not just for the Iran conflict, but for everything else.
On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash
Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log into an
internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked
out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he
had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his
outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Patel oversees an agency that employs
roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify
information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his
emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among
officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The
White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking
who was now in charge of the FBI.
It turned out that the answer was
still Patel. He had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar
with the matter said, appears to have been a technical error, and it was
quickly resolved. “It was all ultimately bullshit,” one FBI official told me.
But Patel, according to multiple
current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is
deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think
so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of
excessive drinking. My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported earlier this month that Patel was
among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s
ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is
officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former
official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.”
Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might
replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to
the White House who were familiar with the conversations.
In response to a detailed list of 19
questions, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement
that under Donald Trump and Patel, “crime across the country has plummeted to
the lowest level in more than 100 years and many high profile criminals have
been put behind bars. Director Patel remains a critical player on the
Administration’s law and order team.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told
me in a statement, “Patel has accomplished more in 14 months than the previous
administration did in four years. Anonymously sourced hit pieces do not
constitute journalism.”
The FBI responded with a statement,
attributed to Patel: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your
checkbook.”
The IT-lockout episode is emblematic
of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious
of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary
evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about
Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at
law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers,
members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and
private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure
and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.
They said that the problems with his
conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both
conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often
alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won
support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to
turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political
enemies.
Several officials told me that Patel’s
drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They
said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many
cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of
White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess
at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his
weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for
later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and
former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.
On multiple occasions in the past
year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was
seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department
and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by
SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made
last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to
multiple people familiar with the request.
Some of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI
worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety. An FBI
director is expected to be available and focused on his job—especially when the
nation is at war with a state sponsor of terrorism. Current and former
officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the
event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said
that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump
launched his military campaign against Iran. “That’s what keeps me up at
night,” one official said.
Patel arrived at the FBI in early 2025 as a
deeply polarizing figure. He had risen from being a public defender in Miami
to a congressional aide and, ultimately, a national-security official during
the first Trump administration. During Patel’s confirmation hearing to be FBI
director, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck
Grassley, expressed optimism that Trump’s nominee would implement much-needed
reforms. “He’s the right change agent for the FBI,” the senator said, adding
that the bureau was in need of “a big shake-up.”
Under questioning from skeptical
Democrats, Patel vowed that “there will be no retributive actions” and that he
was not aware of any plans to punish FBI staff who had been part of
investigations into Trump. Democrats were not the only ones who were leery of
Patel, who had a record of embracing far-fetched conspiracy theories—including
the notion that the FBI and its informants had helped instigate the January 6,
2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to sabotage the MAGA movement. Several
Republicans wavered on whether to back him. But a pressure campaign by the
White House and its allies ultimately prevailed, and Patel was confirmed by a
vote of 51 to 49.
Inside the FBI, which had been wounded
by a number of scandals, many hoped that Patel could give the bureau a fresh
start. But even many of those who had been enthusiastic about his arrival have
since been disappointed. Officials said that Patel has been an irregular
presence at FBI headquarters and in field offices, and that he has compounded
the agency’s existing bureaucratic bottlenecks. Several current and former
officials told me that Patel is often away or unreachable, delaying
time-sensitive decisions needed to advance investigations. On several
occasions, an official told me, Patel’s delays resulted in normally unflappable
agents “losing their shit.”
Patel has also earned a reputation for
acting impulsively during high-stakes investigations. He announced triumphantly
on social media, for instance, that the FBI had “detained a person of interest”
in the Brown University shooting in December. That person was soon released
while agents continued to hunt for the killer.
Still, Patel has his fans. The
president has been pleased by Patel’s efforts to purge agents who worked on
January 6 cases and other probes into Trump. The president has also indicated
that he is relatively unbothered by grumblings about Patel from within the FBI,
according to White House and other administration officials. That’s not
surprising: Patel views many of the bureau’s veterans as anti-Trump “deep
state” agents who have worked against him and his followers. But Patel has, on
occasion, earned the president’s ire. Trump has complained that the FBI
director has seemed unprepared for TV appearances and that some high-profile
investigations that he directed Patel to pursue have not moved quickly enough.
These include inquiries into former Biden-administration officials and other
political opponents.
Patel’s spotty attendance at the
office and the eagerness with which he’s embraced the perks and travel that
come with the job have also been sources of concern at the White House. Some in
the West Wing have followed the headlines about Patel’s use of the FBI jet for
personal matters—as well as the whispers about his love of partying—and said
that they fear that Trump would react badly were he to focus on those
storylines.
DOJ’s ethics handbook states that “an employee
is prohibited from habitually using alcohol or other intoxicants to excess.”
The department’s inspector general has warned that off-duty alcohol consumption
can not only impair employees’ judgment; it can also make them vulnerable to exploitation
or coercion by foreign adversaries.
Patel’s drinking is no secret. While
on official travel to Italy in February, he was filmed chugging beer with the
U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team following their gold-medal victory. The incident
prompted the president—who does not drink and whose brother died following a
long struggle with alcoholism—to call the FBI director to convey his
unhappiness, according to two officials familiar with the call. But officials
told me that Patel’s alcohol use goes far beyond the occasional beer. FBI
officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether
alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate
information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following
the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Many of the people who spoke with me
said that they have been afraid to reveal their concerns about Patel publicly
or through traditional whistleblower channels, because he has been aggressive
in cracking down on anyone he deems insufficiently loyal. At Patel’s direction,
FBI employees are polygraphed in an effort to identify leakers. One former
official told me that bureau employees have been asked in these sessions for
opinions about Patel’s perceived “enemies,” as well as whether they have ever
said anything disparaging about the director or the president.
Patel has held on to his job in part
because of his commitment to using the federal government to target political
or personal adversaries of the president. In his 2023 book, Government
Gangsters, Patel designated a list of government officials past and present
that he alleged were corrupt or disloyal. In an interview that year on Steve
Bannon’s podcast, Patel said that he planned to “come after” members of the
media for their 2020-election coverage with criminal or civil charges. Patel has led a purge of people who he
believes are anti-Trump “conspirators” or “enemies” within the FBI. This has
included firing people, opening internal investigations, and pressuring agents
to quit when they pushed back—or were perceived to have pushed back—against
Patel’s demands or questioned their legality.
Some at the FBI are concerned that
Patel’s behavior has left the country more vulnerable. One former senior
intelligence official told me that there is a lack of experience at FBI
headquarters and that the turnover rate is high in field offices, because of
both voluntary departures and Patel-ordered purges. The result is an FBI
workforce being asked to accomplish more with fewer resources, and with less
direction from the top. “The instinctive level of muscle memory or discernment
that is necessary to identify and counter a terror attack is missing,” the
former official said. A current official described people inside the bureau
feeling besieged and disillusioned—or even angry.
Days before the United States launched
its war with Iran, Patel fired members of a counterintelligence squad that was
devoted, in part, to Iran. The director said in testimony before Congress that
the agents had been let go because their work investigating Trump’s handling of
classified documents had placed them in violation of the bureau’s ethics rules.
But multiple officials told me that they were concerned that the firings had
been rushed and would leave the U.S. shorthanded at a crucial moment.
Patel has publicly proclaimed that the
FBI needs to demonstrate that it is “fierce,” and officials I spoke with said
that he is fixated on that image in private as well. He recently expressed
frustration with the look of FBI merchandise, complaining that it isn’t
intimidating enough. Officials have grown accustomed to such behavior, and they
have learned to roll their eyes at it. But they said that the absurdity masks
real concerns about what Patel’s leadership has meant for an institution that
the country relies on for national security and the safety of its citizens.
“Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less
dangerous for rule of law, for the American public,” one official told me, “but
it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”
Jonathan Lemire, Isabel Ruehl, and
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.
Sarah Fitzpatrick is a staff writer at The
Atlantic covering national security and the Department of Justice.
Sarah can be reached on Signal at sfitz787.165.
My mother always told me
that the Catholic Church was greater than the men running it.
But I grew so
disillusioned with the men running it while I was covering the sex abuse
scandals that I could no longer stomach going to Mass.
The church that had
helped form my sense of right and wrong as a child suddenly seemed blind about
right and wrong.
But Pope Leo XIV, or Pope Bob, as the
first American pope is sometimes affectionately called, may win me over.
President Trump has been
rampaging around the globe like Grendel at dinner time, a rapacious, feral
creature. Who could stand up to him?
The soft-spoken, humble
Leo, who strives to unify, squared off against the bombastic, solipsistic
Trump, who strives to divide. And watching the saintly pope school the amoral
president is a blessed sight.
I’m sure His Holiness
watched askance as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cast the conflict with Iran as a holy war, trying
to put God on the American side as our troops are asked to rain “death and
destruction from above” on “apocalyptic” Iranian foes.
In March, Hegseth called
for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,”
asking God to “break the teeth of the ungodly.”
This past week, he recited a passage
that was an adaptation of a Quentin Tarantino “Pulp Fiction” adaptation of a
biblical passage: “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and
furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.”
He also denounced the
press as the “Pharisees,” plotting to harm the Trump administration the same
way the Pharisees plotted to harm Jesus.
George W. Bush had to
walk back his use of the word “crusade” in reference to the war on terror,
given the offensive echo of the papacy’s crusaders wiping out Muslims in the
holy land.
But Hegseth is no
historian. His book is called “American Crusade.” He carries a Crusader
Bible, known for
violent pictures of early Christian wars. He is tattooed with a Crusader cross
and the words “Deus vult” — Latin for “God wills it.”
Hegseth could learn a
lesson from George H.W. Bush. As a young pilot in World War II, Bush was shot
down near a Japanese island. When he campaigned for president, Bush was asked
what he was thinking as he floated in the Pacific, fearing he would be picked
up by the enemy.
He replied that he was thinking about
“fundamental values,” such as “the separation of church and state.”
During Easter week, the
pope seemed to chide Hegseth, saying that the Christian mission has often been
“distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus
Christ.”
On Easter Sunday,
Trump blasted out one
of his assorted threats to destroy Iranian civilization, crudely appending the
phrase “Praise be to Allah.” Leo called the existential extortion “truly
unacceptable,” a transgression against moral law.
Trump escalated. He
posted a meme of himself as a Jesus-like figure healing a sick man and he
attacked the Holy Father on social media with sinful aspersions, saying the pope
is “WEAK on crime” and “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have
a Nuclear Weapon.”
Leo, who’s
Chicago-tough, hasn’t backed down. On X, he said: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a
disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once
wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”
He reminded the authoritarian,
Strangelovian president that he should be promoting peace through dialogue and
multilateralism.
“Too many people are
suffering today, too many innocent people have been killed,” Leo told reporters, “and
I believe someone must stand up and say that there is a better way.”
JD Vance, a fairly
recent convert to Catholicism, dutifully jumped into the fray to try to brush
back the pope and butter up Trump, lecturing Leo to “be careful when he talks
about matters of theology” and yapping about
the “tradition of just war theory.”
When you’re down in the
weeds about whether it’s a just war or not, the answer is: probably not.
In a puerile fit of
apparent retribution on Thursday, Trump canceled an $11
million federal contract with Catholic Charities in Miami to house and feed
migrant children coming to America alone. (Even my Trump-indulging sister found
that disgusting.)
It’s hard for the
president to give the pope the respect that he deserves because Trump clearly
thinks that he’s the Messiah.
Right before Leo was elected, Trump
put out a meme of himself as the pope. He struts and peacocks, playacting as
everything — a king, a pope, Jesus.
But the president should
read the Grimms’ fairy tale about the poor man in a hovel who caught a magic
fish. His wife pestered the man to ask for a bigger house, then a mansion, then
to be king, then emperor, then pope. The fish granted all these wishes. But
when the wife coveted even more and told the man to wish her to be “equal to
God,” the fish cast them back into their hovel.
This morning, after a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect Thursday, Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz was open to commercial ships. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon, where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Iran’s leadership has said it would not recognize a ceasefire with the United States until Israel’s bombing of Lebanon stopped.
With Iran’s announcement the strait was open, Trump hit the media circle, announcing through interviews and social media posts that the war with Iran was over and peace talks were all but done, although Trump said the U.S. Navy will continue to blockade Iran’s ports. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted that Trump posted thirteen times in an hour claiming total victory.
He claimed that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” He said that the United States would work with Iran at “a leisurely pace” to retrieve and capture Iran’s highly enriched uranium and that Iran would receive no money for its cooperation despite a report from Axios that the U.S. is considering the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for Iran giving up its stockpile of enriched uranium.
Right on cue the stock market jumped and the price of oil futures dropped. Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”
But, as Ashley Ahn of the New York Times reported, Iranian officials’ interpretation of events was quite different from Trump’s characterization. Iran’s top negotiator, speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour, and all seven of them were false. Iran rejected Trump’s claim that it had agreed to hand over its uranium stockpile, and also said that the strait was open for commercial vessels—not military ships—but would close again if the U.S. blockade continued.
Tonight on Air Force One, after the stock market closed, when asked if Iran would turn over its nuclear material, Trump said: “We’re taking it. We’re taking it. Very simple. We’re taking it. With Iran. We’re going in with Iran. We’re taking it. We will have it. I don’t call it boots on the ground. We’ll take it after the agreement is signed. After there— there’s a very big difference. Before and after. BC. It’s before, and after. And after the agreement is signed, it’s a lot different than before. We would have taken it. If we didn’t have an agreement, we would take it. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”
When a reporter asked Trump whether he would extend the ceasefire “if you don’t have a deal by Wednesday” when it ends, the president answered: “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t extend it. But the blockade is gonna remain. But maybe I won’t extend it. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”
While being able to announce the end of the Iran war—at least for now—relieves Trump’s immediate crisis, there are many others in the wings. This evening, an article in The Atlantic by Sarah Fitzpatrick portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endangers our national security. Fitzpatrick notes that Patel has kept his job thanks to his willingness to use the FBI to target Trump’s perceived enemies, but his focus on things like whether FBI merchandise looks “fierce” has made officials think “we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”
Writ even larger than the behavior of the director of the FBI is the growing focus on corruption in the Trump administration. On Wednesday, House Democrats announced they have created a task force to reinforce ethics rules and highlight the Trump family’s self-dealing when in office. The task force is made up of members from across the country and from different caucuses in the Democratic Party. Representative Joe Morelle, a fellow New Yorker and close ally of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries who is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, will lead the task force along with Kevin Mullin of California, Delia C. Ramirez of Illinois, and Nikema Williams of Georgia.
Also on the task force are the top-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Robert Garcia of California, and the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, as well as Congressional Progressive Caucus members Greg Casar of Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the head of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, Brad Schneider of Illinois.
They will be looking into self-dealing like Trump’s current negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service to settle the $10 billion lawsuit he filed against it after an IRS contractor during his first term leaked some of his tax information, along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers, to two news outlets during Trump’s first term. Trump, along with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, said the leak caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”
Peter Nicholas of NBC News noted in February that $10 billion is more than 80% of last year’s IRS budget.
Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press notes that several watchdog organizations have filed briefs challenging Trump’s lawsuit. Democracy Forward argued that the case is “extraordinary because the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics,” and that “the conflicts of interest make it uncertain whether the Department of Justice will zealously defend the public [treasury] in the same way that it has against other plaintiffs claiming damages for related events.”
On Wednesday, Democratic representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Dave Min of California, along with Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York, introduced the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act to ban presidents and vice presidents from stealing taxpayer money.
Pointing to the Department of Justice’s recent settlement of $1.2 million with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians before Trump took office, after he sued for $50 million on the grounds that the criminal case against him was malicious prosecution, Raskin warned of an “emerging MAGA grift of suing the government as a ‘plaintiff’ on bogus grounds and then settling the suit as a ‘defendant’ for big bucks.”
“Over the past 15 months, we have seen unprecedented corruption from this administration, but this new abuse of power of providing huge cash payments to ‘settle’ baseless lawsuits brought forward by Trump and his allies is a new low. The bill that Senator Warren, Leader Schumer, Ranking Member Raskin, and I are bringing forward would stop this backdoor bribery and bring some accountability back to the federal government,” said Representative Min.
In February, when the lawsuit came to public attention, Trump noted that it seemed odd for him to be negotiating with himself over the issue, but told reporters that he would give whatever monies he was awarded to charity. “We could make it a substantial amount,” he said. “Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”
On the day I was laid off from the Kennedy Center, I felt a little like Dolley Madison saving the Stuart portrait of Washington before the British sacked the capital. I was the staffer in charge of the artworks in the building. A crucial difference is that my institution, unlike the White House in 1814, had been on fire for months.
About a year elapsed between the moment President Trump took over the Kennedy Center in early 2025 and his declaration this past February that he’d decided to shut down the nation’s cultural center for two years. In between, we had seen artist cancellations, shrinking audiences, firings of old staffers and influxes of new ones—a lot of drama, just not onstage. The date Trump announced for the closure was July 4, the country’s 250th birthday, an event that I had been hired to help commemorate as the institution’s first curator of visual arts and special programming.
Though staffers had been assured that we’d have our jobs until July, I was one of dozens of people let go on March 26. From the moment I received a calendar invitation for a meeting with human resources, I knew I had to scramble. Shortly after Trump’s shutdown announcement, the center’s president, Richard Grenell, told me to “get rid of everything” in the permanent collection because we needed all new art for the reopening. Although I had slow-walked this demand for several weeks by pretending I was waiting on another colleague for updates, I now had only two hours to tie up loose ends. I hurriedly emailed the families of the late maestro Julius Rudel, the center’s first artistic director, whose bust sits outside the Opera House, and of the late Nehemia Azaz, whose wood-carved installation depicting 43 instruments mentioned in the Jewish Bible covers a wall in the historic Israeli Lounge. They had been anxious about the coming closure, and I told them I would no longer be able to give them updates about the artworks. (A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center says that it is taking inventory of all artwork as part of preparations for the closure.) I was told to pack up my stuff that day, although at least my exit was more dignified than that of a colleague from the development office, who, a couple of months earlier, had been terminated while conducting a tour for donors.
The ostensible reason for the Kennedy Center’s closing is a renovation to make it—in Trump’s words, and capitalization—“the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World.” For months, my colleagues and I had been hearing chatter about a shutdown, but we suspected it wasn’t just because of problems with the physical structure (which certainly had issues but could have been upgraded piecemeal, without needing to close the entire complex), but also because a year of tumult had left the organization barely able to function artistically and financially. Trump had come in promising that “for the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” On the inside, my colleagues and I instead saw cronyism, incompetence, and a series of bizarre moves that would lead to the Kennedy Center going dark.
Last April, after reading about how Grenell was responding directly—if punchily—to artists who wrote to him, I sent him an email pitching a public art project I had been developing with a major nonprofit for America’s semiquincentennial: a series of ephemeral happenings on the National Mall, each dedicated to a Stoic virtue. Like much of the philanthropic world after the 2024 election, the private foundation that was sponsoring my project had reassessed its priorities and withdrawn its funding. Might the Kennedy Center be interested?
One of Grenell’s deputies reached out to me. Not only did Grenell want to include my project in the center’s America 250 programming, but he wanted me to join the staff and build out a visual-arts program to give visitors something to see when the center didn’t have a show running.
I was wary at first. For Washington’s arts community, the Kennedy Center takeover had felt like an assault—the old leadership had been purged, and Grenell had brought in people of his own (many of them with ties to Trump and Republican politics). Many artists (including Issa Rae and Lin-Manuel Miranda) had severed relationships with the center, often citing Trump’s politicization of an arts center that was supposed to be welcoming to all.
I told my prospective employers that I had never voted for Trump. They assured me that it wasn’t a problem. I was also concerned about potential political interference, which I had seen up close when I served on D.C.’s arts commission. After being told that my personal political views wouldn’t preclude my employment—that, in fact, it was preferable that the Kennedy Center’s new hires not exclusively be MAGA loyalists—I responded that I would need to have full creative control of my exhibitions and programming. The deputy assured me that there would be no interference with my work.
Ultimately, I decided the Kennedy Center was too important an institution to abandon. It’s one of the most prominent venues through which we present a national cultural identity to the world, and taking part in that mission was an unmissable opportunity. I earnestly believed I would have a chance to develop programs with wide appeal, centered on themes related to our collective identity and set against the backdrop of a historic national birthday. While I sympathized with those choosing to boycott it, simply bashing the institution for the sake of virtue signaling seemed to me like the wrong move for anyone who professed to care about the arts. And if I was ever asked to do something that violated my conscience, I promised myself, I would quit. Maybe I was naive, but as critics compared the institution to a burning building, I resolved to run, Dolley-like, toward the fire to save what I could. Perhaps I had a chance to create something for the Kennedy Center that would outlast this current moment.
Most of my friends in the city’s arts community were surprised by my decision. But after I explained my reasoning, they largely expressed cautious optimism. The outlier was a dear friend who told me I was the equivalent of a Nazi collaborator. But you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
I was excited to work and started to develop three exhibitions, each devoted to a revolution in American artistic production that had global impacts: one about trailblazing musicians, another about the legacy of street art, and a third showcasing American artists using artificial intelligence, robotics, and augmented reality in their work. But these exhibitions never came to be, because I couldn’t get anyone on the executive team to allocate institutional resources, or money, to them.
One red flag: the sudden decision to sell sponsorships of the center’s lounges, fixtures of the institution since its opening in 1971. That year, as a gift to the American people and in tribute to President John F. Kennedy, the Israeli government paid for the decoration of one of the center’s rooms to celebrate the connection between Judaism and music. The Israeli Lounge and other spaces—the Chinese Lounge, the Circles Lounge (which, until the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, was the Russian Lounge), the African Room—have been used for receptions and private dinners. They’ve also underscored the Kennedy Center’s role as a venue for cultural diplomacy.
Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg / Getty
The Kennedy Center
Last fall, I organized an exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks in the Israeli Lounge, featuring the paintings of an American Israeli artist. Speaking at the opening reception, Grenell warned the mostly Jewish audience that unless donors came forward to sponsor the space and pay for renovation costs, the lounge would be given away to a new donor. “It certainly would be a shame if we lost this room to a corporation or an individual and it was no longer the [Israeli] lounge,” he said. Such a strong-armed fundraising pitch, at an event commemorating a pogrom, struck many of us in the room as inappropriate. I was mortified.
Then there was the renaming of the Circles Lounge—a reserved space for donors who make annual gifts at a certain threshold—to the SyberJet Lounge, named for an aircraft manufacturer whose CEO was previously convicted of defrauding investors and who received a pardon from Trump in March 2025. According to TheWall Street Journal, the CEO paid “millions” for the naming rights. What was once the African Room now has a plaque on the door reading A Tribute to America’s Intelligence Community. This was a strange choice, not least when you considered the named donor for the new room: Gaurav Srivastava. Last year, Srivastava was the subject of a deeply reported profile—the Journal described him as “part Austin Powers, part James Bond,” someone who allegedly lied about having been in the CIA, and a living symbol of how anyone with enough “money and moxie can access Washington’s most influential people.” (A lawyer for Srivastava told the Journal that his client “never participated in any blackmail, fraud, threats, or extortion.”)
Among the priceless items that were taken down: beautiful handmade textiles from across the continent, a wooden sculpture donated by Ghana to represent Africans’ grief over President Kennedy’s assassination, and a pair of doors carved from 700-year-old wood depicting Yoruban village scenes. I was never told what happened to these items. A current Kennedy Center staffer told The Atlantic that they are now in the building’s archives. (A spokesperson said this was to “ensure safekeeping” during construction.) A long-empty room next to the center’s permanent exhibition on President Kennedy and the arts was prime real estate. When I wrote a memo to the executive team proposing that we convert it into a dedicated gallery for the new visual-arts program, a member of the team instead suggested that we sell the room as a lounge and drew up a list of Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations to approach. The center did bring in donations from Kazakhstan and other countries, but that space is currently still empty, the staffer told The Atlantic.
In the 10 months that I worked at the Kennedy Center, Grenell never held an all-staff meeting, a fact that was widely discussed among staffers but that the Kennedy Center now denies. He seemed more interested in fighting Katie Couric on Instagram than doing the job he’d been hired to do. Indeed, he spent a lot of his time attacking people on social media, politicizing what is meant to be an apolitical arts institution while accusing others of doing the same exact thing. (“You sound vaccinated,” he once wrote to a critic in the comments section beneath the Kennedy Center’s Instagram post promoting The Sound of Music.)
Though Grenell had instituted a return-to-office mandate upon his appointment, the rule didn’t apply to him or his immediate inner circle. Colleagues told me their requests for meetings with Grenell were routinely denied or ignored. When I inquired with his scheduler in the middle of August if I could get a meeting to discuss my projects, I was told that he would be out of the office for several weeks. We knew where he was—a yacht off the coast of Croatia, then in California—because he posted about it on Instagram. (A spokesperson at the Kennedy Center now denies this.) His trip to the Balkans wasn’t all pleasure; in Montenegro, he made time to meet with the pro-Russian former president of Republika Srpska, as well as government officials in Albania. In November, TheNew York Times reported that Trump was bypassing Grenell and having almost weekly phone calls with the center’s facilities manager (who ultimately replaced Grenell as the head of the center).
Grenell, who was also Trump’s special presidential envoy for special missions, seemed to blur the lines between his two jobs and his other activities. A colleague once told me she’d noticed documents concerning Venezuela (where he had been leading controversial negotiations with the government in his role as “envoy for special missions”) on office printers. One of Grenell’s top lieutenants once texted me about an artist whose work Grenell owned and asked if we could “do something with him.” Displaying that artist’s work could have raised their prices at auction and benefited Grenell, so doing so would have been a potential ethical breach. I ignored the request.
Grenell—a former ambassador to Germany who came to the Kennedy Center with no arts expertise—is rumored to have wanted to be Trump’s secretary of state. Several of his hires were similarly miscast—including, crucially, Lisa Dale, the top fundraising officer, a friend of the Trump ally Kari Lake. We rarely saw her in the office except during weeks with red-carpet events. In conversation, she professed unfamiliarity with the terms permanent collection, performance art, and emeritus (as in “emeritus trustees”), concepts that senior leaders at a prominent cultural center ought to know. Other top staffers included figures with connections to Republican politics who hadn’t worked in the arts, including one spouse of a Republican National Committee leader whose longest professional experience was working as a marketing and events manager at a Toyota dealership in Ireland. Many seasoned employees from every corner of the center fled under Grenell, and the departures intensified, culminating with the exit of the entire Washington National Opera and the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, which has a tough road ahead of it as it seeks a home outside the Kennedy Center for two years. (Grenell did not respond to repeated requests to speak with The Atlantic’s fact checkers for this story.)
Some days felt like being in Shear Madness, the theatrical farce that has been playing at the Kennedy Center since 1987. When Trump announced that the FIFA World Cup Final Draw would take place at the center (the same weekend as the Kennedy Center Honors), many of us were caught off guard. Scheduled concerts and other shows had to be moved. For security purposes on Honors night, guests had to come early and wait in the building’s Grand Foyer for about an hour before the program began. None of the bars was open, creating an anarchic scene in which I saw old men plead for water and women in ballgowns argue with catering staff for cans of Diet Coke. For the show itself, senior-level staff and their friends occupied prime seats that might otherwise have been occupied by donors. “Peter Gelb at each gala sits in back row,” one of my colleagues observed, speaking of the Metropolitan Opera’s legendary general manager.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty
Donald Trump stands in the Grand Foyer during a tour at the Kennedy Center last year.
While emceeing the Honors event, Trump joked about adding his name to the institution. “This place is hot,” he told the audience, referring to “the Trump-Kennedy Center.” But few of us thought that Trump would go through with it. I found myself thinking most of Caroline Kennedy, whose daughter lay on her deathbed at the time, and I hoped that the president and his team would think better of this narcissistic scheme. But he went ahead with it. The rechristening immediately made our jobs more difficult. One artist I was corresponding with for an exhibition told me they had decided to go “in a different direction.” A jazz ensemble canceled its New Year’s Eve show, and a New York dance company canceled two performances in April that were meant to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Grenell lashed out at them for being “far-left political activists” who suffered from a “form of derangement syndrome.”
With an absentee leadership, a growing list of artist cancellations, declining ticket sales, and a lack of financial resources, my projects never got off the ground. Two former colleagues told me that Grenell tasked them with planning an America’s Got Talent–style talent show for the 250th anniversary, basically turning the nation’s cultural center into a community recreation hall. The institution’s spending priorities seemed dubious. The roof has been leaking for years, and the willow trees in the River Plaza outside the Grand Foyer were visibly rotting, and yet the high-priority renovations made to the building involved adding gold gilding to the chandelier of the presidential box in the Opera House.
I first started hearing whispers of a possible shutdown in August. Our chief financial officer, colleagues told me, proposed closing the center at the end of September, before the start of the next fiscal year. Around this same time, a colleague told me that the center hadn’t paid its invoices from the company that handles its fundraising postage. Were the center to close, it would be done under the guise of a renovation, and the blame would be laid at the feet of the former leadership.
All year, the Kennedy Center had boasted of big fundraising hauls even as it saw ticket sales decline. But Politicoreported that the development efforts were actually in deep turmoil, so much so that the center was bringing in a top Trump fundraiser to help Dale, the nominal head of fundraising. Though Grenell told Politico that its story was “fake news” based on “anonymous gossip and lies,” it elicited nods around the center. The announcement of the closure followed soon after, and then Grenell’s departure. Dale and other members of the fundraising team were let go on the same day I was.
When Grenell instructed me to “get rid of” the center’s permanent art collection because we needed new art to adorn the building’s walls after its renovation, I was taken aback by his cavalier attitude. If the donors of the works didn’t want to pay for their removal, he said, we could put them up for auction or give them away. My mind raced immediately to the eight-foot, 3,000-pound brass bust of President Kennedy standing in the Grand Foyer. Designed by the sculptor Robert Berks, it is surely the most significant item in the center’s collection. When I reported the order to another top leader, his eyes grew wide; he told me not to do anything, and said his office would handle it. I can only hope that the bust—and all the other works—will be safe when the center closes its doors.
In a final indignity, those of us who lost our jobs would be eligible for another month of severance benefits (including health-care coverage) only if we signed a separation agreement with confidentiality and nondisparagement provisions. I rejected this offer because I believe Americans deserve to know about the desecration of our nation’s cultural center. This is also why I have begun participating in the ongoing investigation led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and been in touch with Representative Joyce Beatty’s legal team to share information that may help her lawsuit. (She is suing the center in an attempt to stop its renaming.) There must be a firewall put in place by Congress to prevent this kind of hostile political takeover of the Kennedy Center from ever happening again. I hope that more of my former colleagues come forward too, even if anonymously.
