TV News LIES

President Trump is doubling down on his insistence that he needs “recognition” from the Kennedy Center in return for planned renovations.

Trump’s assertion Friday afternoon seems to mean he is holding fast to his demand that his name should be added to the center in some shape or form — even though a court ruled against him on that score this past week.

“If we’re going to save the Kennedy Center, I think the Trump administration should be given recognition for doing so,” the president told reporters during an Oval Office encounter that was otherwise dominated by his declaration that he would ban three news organizations — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — from the White House.

The furor over the Kennedy Center has consumed much of the week, with developments coming thick and fast.

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More than 1,600 critically imperiled species protected under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) face losing further federal protections following a new reinterpretation of the 1973 law by the Donald Trump administration.

A September 14 memo distributed to Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) field offices by FWS director Brian Nesvik calls for a reinterpretation of what it means to “take” an endangered species. Under the ESA, “take” is defined as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct”.

The memo, obtained and shared by the Center for Biological Diversity, reinterprets the law to mean that harming or killing an endangered animal would no longer be considered illegal unless the action was specifically intended to cause harm or death.

“A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” the memo said, adding: “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

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While Donald Trump ponders demolishing the Kennedy Center unless his name is added to the memorial for the slain president, the United States Institute of Peace filed an emergency motion in federal court on Thursday asking a judge to block his administration “from carrying out plans to carve President Trump’s name into the façade of the iconic USIP headquarters building.”

The filing was made in a court battle that began in May 2025, when a federal judge ruled that Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, or US Doge service, illegally took over the the non-profit thinktank created and funded by the US Congress through “blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers from three separate local and federal agencies”.

Musk’s Doge staff fired most USIP employees in a late-night email in March 2025, and then forcefully entered the thinktank’s building after cancelling its contract for private security.

In court, the USIP has maintained the organization is an independent creation of Congress and outside the president’s executive authority. The administration argues it is an executive branch organization, and pushed ahead, last December, with affixing Trump’s name to the exterior of the building, using bolted-on lettering. That change already offended the USIP board members who filed the suit, but carving Trump’s name into the stone, they argued on Thursday, “would cause irreparable harm”.

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A federal judge on Thursday declined Rep. Joyce Beatty’s (D-Ohio) request for an emergency hearing to review the Kennedy Center board’s latest vote to close the building for renovations.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper will, however, require the government to provide at least 30 days’ notice if it intends to demolish the performing arts center in the nation’s capital.

Cooper said his requirement seeks to “avoid any confusion on that score given more recent events.”

The Trump administration has described the Kennedy Center as in a state of decay, saying renovations are needed to conduct repairs.

President Trump has publicly suggested the building could soon be razed if courts don’t allow him to add his name to the facade. The president was seen Wednesday night on Air Force One looking at a placard that appears to depict a potential demolition.

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Over the past year and a half, Donald Trump and his administration have launched a campaign to censor American history at US national parks and federal lands.

As part of Executive Order 14253, “Restoring truth and sanity to American history”, the Department of Interior (DOI) ordered park rangers to review all signs, brochures, books and films for content that “inappropriately disparages” Americans by suggesting that the United States was “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive”. It’s resulted in dozens of sign removals across the US, most of them related to slavery, Indigenous history and the climate crisis.

The DOI also placed notices throughout parks inviting visitors to participate in this history-rewriting campaign, asking them to report, via QR codes, “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features”.

Instead, these QR code entries became a mode of resistance for many park visitors who used them as a way to tell the Trump administration that they don’t agree with how they’re reshaping national parks.

Park visitors submitted more than 35,000 comments between June 2025 and January 2026. The Guardian accessed this trove of responses after groups including the Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Association filed a Freedom of Information Act request for it. We analyzed these comments and found that at least 19,000 of them – more than half – expressed support for the parks or opposition to the administration’s censorship campaign.

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After a brief reprieve earlier in the week, President Donald Trump’s approval rating resumed its decline, falling to a new second-term low in the latest Marquette University Law School poll.

The poll, released Tuesday, Sept. 15, found that 37% of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, down three percentage points from Marquette’s July poll.

The president’s approval rating in Tuesday’s poll marks his lowest in Marquette University’s tracking since his return to the White House in early 2025. Before Sept. 15, Trump’s previous low was in June, when the poll recorded a 38% approval rating.

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