Sen. Whitehouse Shares Inside Scoop on Kennedy Center Board Meeting, Crashed by Trump

Senator Whitehouse's senior position on the Environment and Public Works Committee makes him a member, by law, of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees.And that means that Senator Whitehouse was one of the votes against Donald Trump today in the board meeting in which a majority of the members chosen by Donald Trump voted to close the Kennedy Center for two years and to inscribe Donald Trump's name on the building after a federal judge ordered Donald Trump's name taken off the Kennedy Center, which Donald Trump illegally tried to change to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.Joining us now is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.He serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, in addition to the Environment and Public Works Committee.Senator, the, they, they, they figured out a way to get Donald Trump's name on the building?What is that going to be?

Well, they think they have, but there was no legal opinion providing any support for the notion that this resolution that they voted on would pass muster with the judge who already decided that nobody's name is allowed to go onto that building other than President John F. Kennedy by law.That's in the statute that created the Kennedy Center.So in these meetings, you sort of step into a bit of a odd fairy land in which a resolution comes forward.In this case, it was not on the agenda.No one was given prior notice.And suddenly there is a vote, as I said, no legal opinion to show that this we're not doing another illegal vote on the same issue.

So they kind of live in a fairyland of irresponsibility where things like complying with court orders don't matter.We voted also, we didn't vote, we had a meeting, a briefing on litigation, the litigation report, and the litigation report omitted that a judge has assessed a $250 ,000 attorneys fees award against the Kennedy Center that the trustees are going to have to pay for for an ill -conceived lawsuit that failed and the terrible job that the lawyers did of litigating it to the point where the judge awarded attorneys fees against the center.No mention of that until I brought it up.And to connect your two stories tonight, Donald Trump jumped on the call and went on about the ballroom, how it is under budget, ahead of schedule, going to be entirely paid for by big corporations with no mention of the federal court order out of the D .C.Circuit, saying that he has no right to build the ballroom, that the American people own the White House, that Congress is the landlord, and that he is the four -year tenant.

And like any four -year tenant, he doesn't get to go knock down a wing of the landlord's building.So it's a very, very strange atmosphere in these meetings.

So this is breaking news here.Donald Trump, who is a member of the Kennedy Center board, actually was in this meeting today where they, at some point, voted the Trump members, which include people like Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingram, they actually voted to put his name on there saying that he had somehow saved the Kennedy Center.

Yeah, that's part of the Fairyland narrative that he came swooping in, saved the Kennedy Center, that the congressional appropriation that was set aside for the improvements that are needed was only because of the magic of Donald Trump.and that, therefore, he should have his name on the building.And their scheme was it's going to be called the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that has been restored and rehabilitated by Donald Trump, and then called the whole plaza that it's on the Donald Trump Plaza.Well, the whole thing is the Kennedy Memorial.And if you look at the statute, it's pretty clear that that's illegal.I think that's a bit of a tell when they didn't bother to give the board members a legal opinion by council saying that, yeah, you should vote for this because it complies with the statute.

That, and then they voted to close the place for two years.On that, we got two days of 150 pages of technical specifications about the building itself to review for a two -year closure and no pro forma.of what the financials would look like during the two -year period.The most basic responsibility of a board is to understand what their decisions mean for the finances and the solvency of the institution for which they are trustees.And there's no pro forma.And I asked for one, and they just went ahead and voted.

Did you get a chance to ask Donald Trump any questions about this?

No.He came on.He said he had been listening.He gave the speech for several minutes and then hehung up his vote and his chief of staff Susie Wiles' vote were texted in on these things.He did not vote in person.

But Donald Trump did vote for his name to go on to the building and for the plaza around it to be called the Donald Trump Plaza.

Correct.And it was quite a long meeting.It was about two hours.He said he'd been on for most or all of it.Which is interesting, because you've got an economy in collapse.You have massive cost increases on Americans that are driving people crazy.

You've got a war in Iran where he's floundering, if not losing.And he's got two hours to spend on a vanity project about getting his name onto a building.It's a little odd that he wouldn't take the big problems more seriously and spend his time on them.

Yeah, it sounds like he wasn't trying to solve his aircraft carrier problems today.Senator Whitehouse, could you please stay with us?We're going to squeeze in a commercial break here.And when we come back, I want to get into more, since your position where you have jurisdiction over federal buildings, what Donald Trump's doing with that ballroom.We'll be right back with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.The breaking news of this hour is that we have just learned from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that Donald Trump was participated in the trustees meeting of the board of the Kennedy Center and that Donald Trump personally voted to rename the plaza, the area around the Kennedy Center as the Donald J. Trump Plaza, and he voted to have his own name inscribed on the building saying that he renovated the building.

And we know this because Senator Sheldon Whitehouse'salso a member of that board by law and he was in that meeting today and just reported this to us.Senator Whitehouse, thank you very much for this information that was not in any of the press accounts about what happened in this meeting today but you also told us that Donald Trump spent his time when he was in effect phoning into it, into the meeting, talking about the ballroom.Did he talk about the ballroom more than the Kennedy Center?

I would say it was about even.I mean, this is a Kennedy Center board meeting, and he spent a lot of his time, if not most of it, talking about the ballroom.And in the Fantasyland, Fairyland world of these board meetings, his pitch was that it's under budget, it's out of schedule, no taxpayer money.And of course, we know from a lot of reporting and from official papers, that in fact, a lot of taxpayer money is being diverted to pay for the ballroom.And not only is it not ahead of schedule, It stopped dead in the water by a federal court of appeals, which upheld a judge's decision saying, you don't get to do this.You're the occupant of the building.

Congress controls the building, and you can't tear down a wing of it and rebuild something new any more than you could a private landlord if you were the tenant of their home.He really is very kind of out of touch with what we know to be true about his signature.project between the Kennedy Center, the ballroom, the reflecting pool.He seems to live in a world in which these are all great successes for him.

And you're using your position on the Senate Committee with jurisdiction over federal buildings to demand from the Government Accountability Office everything they know about the ballroom, again, is something that would normally and legally have to go through your committee to be authorized before the Senate as a full body would even vote on it.They wouldn't consider something like this that hadn't passed through your committee.

You know, anybody listening who has a like a home renovation project, you would want to know what the budget for the project was.You'd want a schedule, a timeline.How long is the contractor going to be in?What kind of a check am I going to have to write at the end of the day?Where is the money going to come from?Those are all really obvious questions that we can't get answers to.

So we're asking the GAO, Leader Schumer, Budget Chairman Merkley, myself and others are asking the accountants to go and get these answers that should have been the first pitch from the Trump administration.Here's what we're going to do.We need your blessing because of the law, but we also want you to understand that we can manage this project.Here's what the budget is going to be.We'll stick to it.Here's what the schedule is going to be.

We'll stick to it.None of that has come to pass.The whole thing is just ramshackle and is now tangled up in litigation because they didn't do it right.

So on a day when we have credible reporting about a sailor on the USS Lincoln jumping overboard, being driven to that point, this is what Donald Trump is thinking.

Yeah, conditions on the Lincoln have been terrible.Before that, conditions on the Ford were very challenging, and they're running out these very lengthy deployments that are putting immense stress on the personnel.and they don't seem to have a single care about it.And here's the President of the United States spending all his time with ballrooms, botched reflecting pools, his own U .S.attorney's word, and the tangle about the Kennedy Center and getting his gilded name back up on it again.

It just seems that the priorities are very different from the concerns of the American people, and very different from what our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen have a right to expect.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, thank you very much for joining us tonight.

Thank you.