Weekend Report: What’s going on?

Trump defiles the Kennedy Center with his name. Elise Stefanik, loyal MAGA warrior, calls it quits. Only 10% of Epstein files released by DOJ.

Donald Trump illegally defaced a living memorial of another president, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. That Trump would attempt to name something after himself isn’t shocking, though presidents are commemorated with memorials and monuments by others years after they’re dead. But Trump putting his name onto a memorial of another president is downright desecrating. And it highlights how Trump, deep down, knows how despised he is, and sees little value in his name alone. He needs to glom on to the name of someone truly revered, trying to steal some of that.

This week a new poll showed New York House member Elise Stefanik with a 22% approval rating in New York State after she announced she’d be running against Governor Kathy Hochul in next year’s governor’s race. Within days, she dropped out of the race, and gave up running for re-election to Congress as well. But it wasn’t just the bad polls. Stefanik is the latest diehard MAGA woman in politics to be kicked to the curb by Trump, and she realized that it was only going to get worse.

The Justice Department on Friday released a batch of the Epstein files. After Attorney General Pam Bondi ludicrously told us earlier in the year that there was nothing to release—or that it couldn’t be released in order to protect the victims—they somehow came up with over 100,000 page of heavily redacted material. And according to one member of Congress, that’s only 10% of what they have. What’s been released is also protecting Trump, who appears in little, while many photos of Bill Clinton are among the pages.