Trump is losing. I know his character. I've seen it up close and I know he knows he's losing, too. Just look at Iran, Epstein, gas prices. It's all going wrong. And even today, the press is refusing to cover his New York trip to visit Mandani. We all know how much that will hurt his ego. So, Caddy, he needs to distract us.
Cue the Kennedy Center destruction and the drone arch that he's building. We're going to look at all of that in the first half and in the second half of the show, Trump's flip-flopping on whether to join Saudi strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and what it means for Trump's relationship with MBS. So, this is the big arc to triumph, arc to Trump as it's being called in Washington, which looks like something out of some sort of national socialist architect's drawer. Speer would have had it in his bottom drawer and it looks horrendous with a massive kind of gold thing. It now looks like Trump says he's going to push ahead with that. And the way he's going to push ahead with it, Anthony, because he's a little worried that maybe some people are going to object to this, i.e. the Supreme Court, is he's now said that he's going to make this arc into effectively a military bunker with drone launching pads on the roof and sniper positions. And not just sniper positions, but all of the ammunition for the snipers in the arc. I don't know if you've ever driven around the kind of crazy roundabout around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. I don't know if you had to go and grab ammunition quickly from the arc. You'd have to dodge about 10 lanes of cars getting there. You'd be run over on the way there. Anyway, this arc is going to be in the middle of a roundabout that I can guarantee you is going to be a constant traffic jam. And yet somehow this is going to be sniper central. What's going on?
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Okay, so now we got to take out the Trump decoder ring. I'm reaching into the cereal box and I'm clicking through the ring. And I just want to remind people when Trump said he was a doctor when he was wearing the flowing robes of Jesus, it was one of his comms people said just say the photograph was doctored. And so then Trump in his brain said, 'I was a doctor.' Okay. So let me explain what he's doing. Okay. Somebody told him, 'You got to get this done through national security.' The ballroom. National security. You won't get shot at in the ballroom. And if you're going to get the money for the project, because we still don't know how we're going to pay for the arc of Trump, you got to say it's national security. So, he's tweeting out we're going to put ammo and machine gun turrets at the top of the arch. I guess we're going to, I mean, I guess we're back in the Civil War, but...
Well, we're like defending Washington DC against Virginia. Is this, this is like Redux. We've seen this movie. And remember, I want to remind everybody, we were not getting the interstate highway bill passed. Okay? Eisenhower wanted to build this infrastructure around the country and it wasn't going to get passed. And then he came at it from a different angle with the American public. He said that we need this for national security reasons. And boom, got passed. And so somebody told Trump the arch, you'll get the money for it, but you got to say it's national security. You know who told Trump this, right? The Supreme Court. The Supreme Court told Trump this because he knocked down the East Wing in the middle of the night. Said he needed a ballroom. And all of the courts said, 'No, no, no. You can't do that. Historic preservation laws.' And then he said, 'Ah, but actually it's not really a ballroom. It's a bunker disguised as a ballroom. It's a very big national security bunker with a ballroom just happening to be on top of it.' At that point, the Supreme Court said, 'Yeah, you can do it.'
Let me just say this to you about Trump for a second. I'm under the gun with the Epstein files. Massie and Roana have got the 218 votes to get the other three and a half million documents disclosed. I am under the gun with the midterms. And I've got pressure on me in the northern states that are, they're calling the White House every day. Susan Collins saying cut the deal with the Canadians and I've got an unbelievable unmitigated disaster going on in the Middle East. And so what I would like to focus on are reflecting polls, arc the triumphs and ballrooms. So guys, the politics of distraction lives, but I just want to ask Caddyy a question. Why is the House of Representatives closed? Caddyy, because the Republicans likely will lose the house and so wouldn't they be smart by leaving the house open and promulgating policies that they would get in place prior to their departure as leaders.
You talked about this last week, Anthony. The house is closed because the speaker of the house doesn't want to have a vote on the Epstein files.
And now the impeachment of Pete Hegseth.
And now the impeachment of Pete Hegseth as well. So much better to send the house as well. Probably the House also does not really want to be caught up talking about the Kennedy Center. The prospect that the president might actually demolish the Kennedy Center after he had himself photographed through a window of his helicopter with a big board that said Kennedy Center demolition on it. At which point we would all say he's trolling us. He's not going to knock down this monument to a slain president. That's what this was built for. And that this is just a joke. Except that we know he has knocked down the ballroom. So, courts took this seriously enough that there is now a court injunction and he would have to give 30 days notice before he's allowed to knock down the Kennedy Center. You and I did that great series that was so interesting on Trump for our founding members on Trump in the 1980s when he was a builder. He has a long track record. The ballroom was not the first thing he knocked down without permission. He has a track record from his days in real estate of knocking things down without permission. He took down the Bonwit Teller department store to build Trump Tower and broke every law, every zoning law in the process.
With all those lovely friezes that just happened to get demolished in the process.
Smashed into them. Could care less. I think there is a, I've driven past the Kennedy Center in the last few days. There's loads of construction fencing around it now. And this is a place I used to go to the Kennedy Center once a month to listen to music and play. Everybody went there in Washington. It was a very bipartisan place. You got Republicans going there, Democrats going there. It was not a kind of hive of Democratic activity. Republican presidents have always gone there. Now it looks like, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that Trump knocks it down. And I think this is Trump again testing the courts, right? In a sense, he's defying the courts. What are you, as JD Vance said, you know, you can order the administration to do something, but who's actually going to enforce that? And I think this could be a case of him thinking, how can I defy the courts? He's pissed off with the courts for saying he had to take his name off the building. And this is a petty peeve of his. He is annoyed that he can't use national security. He keeps blaming the court for not allowing the national security rationale when it comes to his tariffs. So now he's going to try and use the national security rationale for the arch. He's been told he can't knock down the building. But things aren't going well for him. The polls are terrible. There's the Epstein files. There's Iran. And what does he focus on? He focuses on all these vanity projects, just as a distraction because that's what he actually loves. This is what he, he wants to be a builder again.
Yeah. But it's more to it because I just want to try to explain this to people. He is an uncomfortable outsider. He has a chip on his shoulder. You know, I grew up on Long Island. I am a total outsider, but I'm a comfortable outsider. I don't care that I'm an outsider. You don't want to let me in your country club. Who cares? Okay. But Trump cares. They didn't let him into a country club out here, which is like one of the most famous prestigious clubs. He goes out and builds 18 clubs. Okay, that's his personality. You guys don't like me, I'm going to shove myself up your, you know what, by trying to become president and irritating and triggering you. And the Kennedy Center is all of that in one, Caddyy. So, just hear me out for a second. I am the biggest celebrity. There's no bigger celebrity than me. And oh by the way, you other celebrities, you don't like me. You won't come to the Kennedy Center if I'm there. And so the Kennedy Center had four years of honoring humanitarians, honoring the arts, honoring people that contributed to the culture of American and global society without the presence of the president of the United States. And you know the ritual because you've done it. I've gone to Barack Obama's White House and when George Lucas was being nominated, he just built this beautiful visual arts museum in LA. When George Lucas was being nominated, I went to the White House. We had the celebration inside the White House in the East Wing and then we all went over to the Kennedy Center with the president to see the rendition. This destroys Donald Trump that he never did that in his first term. So what did he do? He fired everybody. But he took out David Rubenstein who gave hundreds of millions of dollars plus to the center, the chairman. He made himself the chairman. He put all of his cronies in there and then he selected a few people that would accept an honor from him and he went to the Kennedy Center as president and it was an unmitigated disaster. So you know what? You guys don't like me and I am going to blow up and demolish your center to punish you for not liking me. Okay. And that's it, Caddyy. And if people don't understand that, start understanding it because that is him. That is the low-level primordial thinking of the orange maniac. So he ordered a renovation fund back in February, $257 million in renovations. And he has done some renovations. He's renovated particularly the outside lobby outside the president's box. Has now got guess what color? Go on, guess. I guess it's going to take you a while to guess what color.
It's got to be gold, I'm assuming, right? Gold, right?
It's got a lot more gold. It's got a kind of gold circular sofa thing right in the middle of it. Anyway, so he wanted that. That was, he was very focused on. Apparently, there was a stage where he was calling the renovators of the Kennedy Center once a week. I mean, this guy's got a war going on, a tariff war going on, but he's calling because he wants to make sure that the marble is installed properly next to the chairs in the Kennedy Center foyers. So, he's been calling the Kennedy Center people about that. He's very involved in the renovation process, but now the judge comes along and says, 'You can't have your name up there.' He has to take the name down. And that's when he starts floating the idea of demolishing the building entirely. And here's my question to you when he came in and I get all of that. I think you're quite right on the background that he didn't go in the first term and that's now pissed him off. So he comes in and he wants to make it his. He makes it all his lackey. Rick Grenell, his very pugilistic former ambassador to Germany takes over running the Kennedy Center with Trump as chairman of the board. And suddenly all of the acts pull out. They don't want to perform there. They have the prospect of no seats, no performances, there's nothing in the schedule anymore beyond, I was told, this fall and so they have nothing to put on. And at that point, the Kennedy Center is no longer viable. But do you think Trump when he took over January of 2025, made himself chairman, do you think he thought this was going to be a kind of thriving MAGA cultural center? Or do you think he anticipated that all of these acts would drop out and they would have nothing left to show and it would be a disaster?
No. He thought that he was going to get the Kid Rock and the YMCA, the Village People, and he was going to get his coterie of people to re-establish the Kennedy Center. It was going to become the MAGA center, which is why it was going to be the Trump Kennedy Center. And so he underestimated the amount of cultural hate he was going to get there because he's getting pumped. You know, Rick Grenell, put him in charge. He's going to pump you. And by the way, these people are so hated that they just dropped to the New York Times the emails from Rick Grenell telling, you know, send back the artwork to the countries it came from.
Exactly. The slain president of the United States, when the center opened, art was contributed from around the world. But we're America first people. Send back the art.
We don't want that foreign art.
Yeah. It's unbelievable. But Caddyy, my question back to you. Ready? The president is sitting there with his baseball cap on and he's looking at a thing that says Kennedy Center demolished and a picture is taken through the window. Okay. Is that, you can see it. Was that intentional or accidental?
Was it totally intentional? Of course it was. Totally intentional. The press people said to the reporter, 'Hey, heads up. When the president's about to take off, if you stand right there behind the window, you're going to get a great shot.' People in Washington are asking, is he trolling us because he does that? We've seen him do it repeatedly. Or is there a world in which he's actually serious and he's so annoyed? And I've heard also that he's really annoyed that he's not being thanked, that why aren't they thanking me for rescuing the Kennedy Center? And the only way now, his argument is to rescue the Kennedy Center is to put my name on it, to make this actually the Trump Center because when they tried to take my name off it, everything went wrong. So he's in a mode of a lot of grievance about the Kennedy Center. It's occupying an awful lot of his time. That and the Arch at the moment seem to be occupying an awful lot of his time. But here's my question to you is why didn't he manage to get all of those MAGA performers, the Village People? Why didn't he manage to get them to come and play there?
Because they can support Trump, but they're still in the entertainment ecosystem. It's the same reason why Sylvester Stallone, as reported in the Times of London interview, he was asked to be the Hollywood ambassador for Donald Trump and MAGA and he turned it down.
Interesting. Kid Rock has got to deal with all of those people and he doesn't want to be shunned by all those people entirely. He can piss off those people by supporting Trump, but he doesn't want to cross the union line of going into the Kennedy Center. You know, JFK had a famous line in his inaugural address, you know, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Trump is asking what the Kennedy Center can do for his name. Okay, it's all about me. It will always be all about me. And I just want to disrupt a very big lie that Trump is saying, which is about the money. Okay, the money is very easy for the Kennedy Center to raise. And let's just go back. Okay, in 2019, you know, they did this thing called the Reach expansion. The FT, the Financial Times, who's a good friend of this program, did a weekend festival there, which I actually spoke at. It's in the Reach area.
Yeah. It's very nice. It's a little modern, couple of modern buildings right next to the Kennedy Center.
Yep. $250 million of private equity. Okay. Went into the system. Chairman David Rubenstein helped to open it in 2019. And by the way, 100% private and it came with no renaming demand. Okay, so here's where we are. And you and I are talking about this for a reason because Trump is losing because I know his personality. He would not be talking if he was winning in Iran. If he was winning the midterms, if he was winning the House of Representatives, if he was beating up on Massie and Roana as it relates to this Epstein potential disclosure, he would not be focused on this. And you know this and I know this. CNN, MSNBC, Politico, you're not allowed in the press room anymore. And I think it was Aaron Burnett because I was in London watching it late night and Aaron said, 'Well, we didn't even write a bad article about him this week. What triggered that?' And the answer is, Caddyy, he's got to distract you from all the things that are going wrong right now. So that's another string he can pull to get the press off of the stuff that is really going bad for the guy.
Yeah, I think you're right. There's a whole load that's going wrong. He does like buildings. This is his comfort zone. He would rather honestly be talking about the marble armrests and door knobs and the gold faucets in the Kennedy Center and the gold statues on top of the Ark of Triumph and the drapes in the new ballroom. Then he would be talking about what is the long-term strategy for the United States in the Middle East vis-a-vis China. What are we going to do for the long term to reduce America's deficit? What are we going to do for the long term to rebalance our industrial policy? Those things bore him.
So, while you and I are speaking, one of the worst possible things just happened to Donald Trump. But let me tell you what that is. The White House press pool has just announced while you and I are speaking that they are not going to cover Donald Trump in New York after the CNN ban. So, they're pulling out the TV pool reporting and they're pulling out all the other reporting. And so, the White House Correspondents Association probably got together and said, 'Okay, guys, that's enough. Let's go home.' And very bad for Donald Trump because, you know, I need your eyeballs. I need your attention. And even though I'm berating you, please come back. Please come back. And that's what he's going to, that's what's going on right now. So, he'll be furious this morning that the rest of the press is pulling out and he won't be able to garner the attention that he's looking for when he's at the UN.
Yep. Well, CNN was meant to be the press pool today and CNN isn't allowed to do it. So, the others have stood by him, which is exactly what they should have done. Maybe they should be rethinking their annual schmooze fest as well with the president of the White House correspondents dinner.
This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. I am a big believer, Anthony, in saving time where I can.
