Donald Trump wants to crush The Swamp. The leaks, the sneaks, and the secrets are all there. Our writers, David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, and Sarah Ewall-Wice, are sifting through the ooze so you don’t have to. Don’t miss out.
In this week’s news from the ooze: Issa Rae, Julian Edelman, Steve Bannon, Renée Fleming, Alina Habba, Bad Bunny, E. Jean Carroll, Evander Holyfield, Ben Rector, and The Mona Lisa.
The Kennedy Center’s Shocking Final Act
Trump’s casually dropped announcement that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will shutter for two years is still detonating across Washington—and the fallout is getting louder, uglier, and more embarrassing by the day.
Well-placed sources have told The Swamp that Trump’s decision blindsided nearly everyone involved—including, awkwardly, Ric Grenell and his inner circle. “It cannot be overstated the degree to which this came as a complete surprise to everybody in the organization, including the office of the president,” one insider said of Grenell, who replaced long-time president Deborah Rutter after she was fired by Trump last year.
The Swamp can also reveal that acclaimed singer-songwriter Ben Rector has now cancelled his upcoming Kennedy Center show outright, while the storied National Symphony Orchestra was forced to postpone this week’s much-touted world premiere program, “American Promise” (a collaboration with folksy trio Girl Named Tom) due to painfully low ticket sales. This comes after a string of other withdrawals, including composers Philip Glass and Stephen Schwartz, soprano Renée Fleming, and actress/producer Issa Rae.
The timing has not helped Grenell’s optics, either. On Monday night, the Kennedy Center’s social account posted a photo of him striding through Capitol Hill (in what appeared to be red-soled Louboutin shoes) to “discuss responsible use of taxpayer dollars to renovate the Kennedy Center.” The image landed less as reassurance than as performance art—one man power-walking through Congress while the institution he oversees hemorrhages artists, audiences, cultural significance, and credibility.
Sources say the shutdown announcement is being widely interpreted inside the building as an attempt to “control the narrative.” But that narrative is slipping fast. Artists are pulling out of contracts. New shows are refusing to book. Ticket buyers are staying home. And staff morale, already fragile, is sinking further as uncertainty spreads.
Opens in new windowThen there’s labor. Multiple sources describe the looming closure as a not-so-subtle attempt at union busting. Professional labor unions at the Kennedy Center are heading into negotiations this spring and summer, and new management has made little effort to hide its disdain for unions, labor costs, and regulatory constraints. The goal, insiders say, is a shift toward a more “commercial model”—a phrase that tends to translate as fewer protections, cheaper labor, and more pliable workers.
In other words: close the building, disrupt the workforce, and rebuild on your own Trumpy terms. For an institution that once symbolized cultural continuity and national prestige, the Kennedy Center is now a sad indictment of how quickly politics can hollow out the arts. Oh and Grenell, a prolific tweeter, hasn’t responded to our request for comment.
How Tyson Became the MAHA Man in the Arena
If you’ve felt like Mike Tyson has been haunting Trump’s second term like a very intense ghost, you’re not imagining it. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the ear-biting former boxer has been a regular fixture in the president’s orbit. He was there for the inauguration of Trump 2.0. He was spotted in the White House the same day New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani visited the Oval Office last year. He posed for selfies with MAGA lawyer Alina Habba during Alex Bruesewitz’s wedding at Trump’s Doral Miami golf course and also attended Melania Trump’s private movie screening at the White House.
Opens in new windowThis Wednesday, he’ll even front a press conference celebrating new nutritional guidelines alongside beef tallow-loving Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To understand why Tyson is now a semi-official Trump administration mascot, you have to go back to Atlantic City in the late 1980s, when Trump hosted Tyson’s biggest fights at Trump Plaza and Trump Taj Mahal. Tyson’s knockouts filled seats and pay-per-view buys while Trump’s casinos quietly sank. What the two also shared—even back then—was scandal. Tyson’s 1992 rape conviction made him untouchable to much of polite society, but Trump never fully disavowed him, welcoming him back to Atlantic City after prison. Tyson, in turn, has repeatedly praised Trump for “standing by him.” Trump, meanwhile, now carries his own sprawling history of sexual abuse allegations and a civil verdict finding him liable for sexual assault against New York writer E. Jean Carroll. The 79-year-old president dismisses these claims, as Tyson once did, as media-driven persecution. Which brings us to the truly surreal pivot: Mike Tyson as a face of the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. That’s right: the man whose most infamous act on live television was biting a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear is now here to talk about what Americans should put in their bodies. It’s an almost perfect union: RFK Jr. thrives on contrarianism and distrust of experts. Trump thrives on celebrity loyalty and spectacle. And in Trumpworld, nothing says credibility like having survived disgrace.
Epstein, the Vatican, and the Art of Looking Powerful
The Epstein files reveal many ugly things. Add this to the list: Jeffrey Epstein’s bizarre obsession with the Vatican and his dark texts with MAGA acolyte Steve Bannon about “taking down” Pope Francis. While Epstein was Jewish, the convicted child sex trafficker developed an intense interest in Vatican history and politics in the 2000s, poring over Catholic texts and papal biographies, posing with Ghislaine Maxwell alongside Pope John Paul II, and collecting symbols of proximity to power the way other billionaires collect art. But the newly released files also show a broader pattern of Epstein surrounding himself with Vatican critics determined to stop the late Francis, who many in the MAGA world viewed as less like a religious leader and more like a political adversary. Bannon, who served in Trump’s first administration, was the most incendiary, telling Epstein in a 2018 text message: “Will take down Francis.” The material doesn’t substantiate claims of a literal plot to kill the Pope, but they do expose an ongoing campaign to weaken his moral authority. The campaign failed, and eight years later, Donald Trump’s approval among Catholics has sunk to 39 percent according to the Pew Research Centre. The collapse coincides with a growing willingness among Catholic voters to break from MAGA politics as Francis’s successor, Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, has more forcefully asserted the Church’s moral distance from Trumpism on everything from the “inhuman” treatment of migrants to foreign policy and climate change. And the National Catholic Reporter has taken multiple swipes at new convert JD Vance for good measure. How’s that takedown working out for you, Steve?
The New Mona Lisa Mystery Courtesy of…Pam Bondi
Buried in the Justice Department’s latest Epstein document dump is a truly inspired act of bureaucratic absurdity: a redaction of the Mona Lisa. Yes, that Mona Lisa—the most reproduced, recognizable face on Earth, visited by millions every year, printed on mugs, tote bags, and high school art textbooks. But somehow, in the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files, Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th-century subject was deemed too sensitive for public view. The altered “Mona Lisa” appears in a document containing photographs emailed to Epstein in 2009, with the subject line “simply paris.”
The photos show a woman (whose face has also been redacted) and an unnamed man visiting famous tourist sites in Paris. If Attorney General Pam Bondi’s goal was to inspire confidence in the transparency and seriousness of this process, putting a black bar across Mona Lisa’s famously enigmatic smile achieves the opposite—turning what should be accountability into unintentional surrealist art.
The Super Bowl MAGA Mystery Karoline Won’t Solve
The president argued that the administration had a P.R. problem, not a killing-innocent-civilians problem when it comes to ICE. The solution: a multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad buy. But who’s behind the ICE ad that aired moments after Bad Bunny’s halftime show? That remains a mystery. The ad was paid for by American Sovereignty. And who, pray tell, is behind American Sovereignty? Amazingly, thanks to some very opaque laws, we do not yet know who managed to buy an ad at a Super Bowl. If you’re wondering, it could have cost up to $10 million depending on exactly how many markets it ran in. And handily, it definitely caught one viewer’s eye: The White House shared the ad as did Karoline Leavitt, the New Hampshire native, who made a visit to the deep blue Califorinia for the big game and was posting pictures with family at events including a private Super Bowl eve party with former Patriots stars Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman as well as inside Levi’s Stadium before kickoff. But did she watch the Bad Bunny halftime show live and in person? The Swamp has asked…behind
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