TRUMP’S NAME TO BE RESTORED TO KENNEDY CENTER
The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, which is almost entirely made up of Trump appointees, voted today to restore his name to the facade of the Kennedy Center. This despite a federal judge’s ruling from May 2026 that ordered his name to be removed. But that’s not all the board did. This video explains all the other things the trustees voted on today and how they are attempting to get around the judge’s order.
Read more from Kennedy Center Board Member Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) here.
Read the DC Federal judge’s ruling from May here.
DOJ AGREES WITH TRUMP AND APPEALS CONTROVERSIAL SETTLEMENT
In a remarkable filing, the Department of Justice has joined President Trump, his family and his businesses in a full-throated rebuke of a lower court judge’s order that restricts all parties’ ability to implement the controversial anti-weaponization fund and Trump’s IRS immunity. This video explains the arguments the DOJ uses to justify the necessity for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to immediately pause the lower court judge’s order and ultimately throw it out.
Read the DOJ’s filing to the 11th Circuit here.
Read the original order from the Florida federal judge here.
CARRIER HEADED TO RELIEVE USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN MIDDLE EAST
USS George Washington has begun heading toward the Middle East. It is believed that the carrier will relieve the 5,000 sailors and Marines who have been serving on board the USS Abraham Lincoln since last November. The ship set a record this year for the longest time at sea without a port call. The sailors and Marines had been at sea for 241 consecutive days. They’ve been in the Middle East since January. I reported in last night’s FactsHQ email about the alarming reporting that conditions aboard the Lincoln have become extremely concerning with sailors attempting to go overboard in suicide attempts, shortages of food and basic necessities and many aboard suffering serious mental health issues.
The USS George Washington left port in Vietnam last week, according to the Navy. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Washington was deployed to replace the Lincoln as one of the carriers in the Middle East to support President Trump’s military blockade and the Iran War.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded to these reports while in Panama today saying the reports are “completely misrepresented.” He said "We make sure every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment. Some deployments are longer than others, and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody. What they do in those high seas in those austere conditions with less port calls — it's incredible."
But Democrats in Congress aren’t buying it. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote a letter to Hegseth and Acting Secretary of the Navy demanding answers about what’s happening onboard the Lincoln and what the Pentagon’s plan are to get those sailors and Marines back home. Blumenthal says the extended deployment of the Lincoln is not an isolated incident. He wrote, “Recent carrier deployments have repeatedly stretched beyond their originally anticipated durations, suggesting that extended deployments may be becoming a feature rather than an exception of the Navy's force-generation model. The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) spent 326 days at sea before returning home in May – nearly twice the length of a traditional six-month carrier deployment and the longest modern U.S. carrier deployment since the Vietnam era.”
Blumenthal is asking for a response by August 27.
Read the letter here.
WHITE HOUSE SAYS 40 COUNTRIES WORKING AROUND TARIFFS
The White House released a report today claiming that an estimated 40 countries are routing their exports through other countries to avoid President Trump’s tariffs. The report says that practice is called transshipping. The Commerce Department’s analysis says $67 billion worth of goods were illegally transshipped from China through Mexico, India and Vietnam in 2025, resulting in an estimated $28 billion in lost tariff revenue.
The report points to China as the most egregious example of transshipping, claiming that in 2018 China transshipped its exports to countries like Mexico for “limited assembly, finishing, repackaging, relabeling, or documentation changes [that] could create the appearance of a different national origin.”
For some context, don’t forget China’s President Xi Jinping will be in the United States on a state visit next month. It’s likely Trump will bring up trade but it’s unclear if he will sanction China for transshipping. He has, so far, refused to sanction China for other infractions reported from US intelligence agencies like helping Iran by giving away locations of US service members in the Middle East for targeting. Trump has previously said he doesn’t believe China would do that.
Read the White House report here.
CRITICAL LUIGI MANGIONE HEARING TOMORROW
The man accused of gunning down the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York City will be back in court tomorrow for a hastily scheduled hearing. There are multiple credible reports that Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty to the federal charges just one month before he is scheduled to go to trial in New York state court on murder and other charges.
The legal theory is that if he pleads guilty to the federal charges, his lawyers could attempt to argue that facing similar state charges amounts to double jeopardy. That litigation could potentially delay the trial.
It’s not certain that Mangione will plead guilty tomorrow. I’ll let you know tomorrow night.
TRUMP’S HARVARD LAWSUIT DISMISSED
A federal judge in Massachusetts just dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Harvard alleging the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for allegedly not taking sufficient steps to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment.
The judge today said that the Trump administration is cherry-picking examples from 2023 and 2024. He wrote, “Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day.” The judge wrote that the government’s complaint is “devoid of any factual allegations” that the university has failed to comply with the law since the administration formally notified Harvard that it needed to comply with the law in June 2025.
The Department of Justice says it disagrees with this ruling. It’s unclear if it will appeal. But based on the history of the Trump DOJ, it’s likely an appeal is coming.
Read the judge’s order here.
EL NIÑO THIS YEAR COULD GIVE US A GLIMPSE OF 2030
It’s going to be really hot and really rainy in the second half of 2026 and 2027. Forecasters say the combination of El Niño and rising climate change could spike global temperatures to more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial averages. Some say 2027 may be the hottest year on record and may eventually hold the global moisture record. Experts are predicting that global temperatures in 2027 would jump at least 10 years ahead of the recent warming trend, reaching levels that might otherwise become typical around 2040. At the low end, the 2027 temperatures could resemble what we could see in 2034.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), El Niño refers to the large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate phenomenon linked to a periodic warming in sea-surface temperatures across the central and east-central equatorial Pacific. El Niño and La Niña episodes typically occur every 3-5 years.
Read more from the Climate Prediction Center here.
DID THEY FIND AMELIA EARHART’S MISSING PLANE?
An expedition is now scheduled for October for researchers to observe what’s become known as the Taraia Object. The obscure object was discovered in 2020 using satellite imagery over the Nikumaroro, a remote Pacific island between Australia and Hawaii. Many believe the object submerged in the water solves the 90 year mystery: What happened to Amelia Earhart? Researchers believe the Taraia Object is actually the plane Earhart was flying with her navigator, Fred Noonan, when they vanished in 1937. The theory is they landed or crashed near this tiny island. The researchers say besides the satellite image of the obscure object, other evidence points to Earhart’s whereabouts. They say radio bearings recorded from transmissions at the time of the disappearance by the US Navy, the US Coast Guard and Pan American World Airways, converge on Nikumaroro. A 2018 analysis of human bones discovered on the island in 1940, strongly suggest they belong to a woman of Earhart’s stature. And artifacts were discovered on Nikumaroro including a woman’s shoe, a compact case, a freckle cream jar and a medicine vial — all dating to the 1930s.
Read more from the Archaeology Channel about the Taraia Object here.
Watch more from Purdue University about their mission in the video below.
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