The Fiduciary

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

 

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is falling apart. I think.

 

A chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling during a storm earlier this month and crashed into the lobby. See for yourself, as the moment was caught on surveillance video and posted online by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Afterward, “inspectors found at least seven other locations with visible water-related deterioration,” per materials prepared for the center’s trustees that were reviewed by the Washington Post.

 

“People cannot be allowed to go into this building any longer,” Lutnick warned in his tweet on Monday, a day before the trustees voted to shutter the building immediately for a two-year renovation. “It must be closed and reconstructed, and a major fundraising effort must take place to cover the Kennedy Center’s operating expenses. Like many other Centers, it operates at a huge loss.”

 

“Only President Trump can deliver the renovation on time and on budget, and only President Trump can raise the money to keep the Center out of bankruptcy,” he concluded.

 

Only Donald Trump can solve this problem? I doubt that.

 

The rap on pundits is that we’re quick to criticize and slow to offer solutions, so let me defy expectations for once. The Kennedy Center could raise a boatload of money to cover its expenses, I’ll bet, if the president set a fundraising target for it and promised to relinquish control over the institution once it’s reached.

 

“If the center takes in $500 million by the end of the year, I’ll pull my people off the board and replace them with the top 10 most generous donors,” he might say. How do you suppose an offer like that would be received by America’s wealthy, left-leaning, Trump-hating patrons of the arts?

 

A few million bucks apiece to stick it to the president and save JFK’s legacy would be a pittance, less than some will donate to Democratic super PACs this year, I’m sure. Surely Trump and the stooges on the center’s board would be willing to graciously cede power if doing so would rescue a venue about which they care so deeply, no?

 

But if you don’t like that solution, here’s another: Why doesn’t Lutnick pick up the tab?

 

The Lutnick family fortune has nearly doubled to $7.3 billion since he joined the Trump administration, as it happens, thanks in part to the secretary’s apparent influence peddling. Congress has already appropriated $250 million for the Kennedy Center’s renovations; if Lutnick matched that amount to cover its operating expenses for a few years, it would hit the ground running when it reopens in 2028.

 

It’s simply not true, in other words, that only President Trump can raise the money needed to avert bankruptcy. And given the fiscal state of his other passion projects around D.C., lord knows it isn’t true that only President Trump can keep the project on budget.

 

But it is true that only President Trump can save the Kennedy Center—in the same way that the only person who can “save” you from a man holding a gun to your head is that same man, by choosing not to shoot.

 

Duty.

 

On Tuesday the president threatened to murder the center unless his name, which briefly adorned the building before a court ordered it removed, is restored to its facade.

 

“The Renovation and Reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

 

Only President Trump can save the center—by opting not to spitefully destroy it, provided that the courts agree to let him repurpose it as a monument to himself. And when I say “destroy,” I mean destroy: Last month the administration’s lawyers told a federal judge that, without repairs, the building will become unsalvageable and need to be demolished. In the same way that Americans woke up one morning to find the East Wing of the White House being bulldozed, a wrecking ball might be taken to the Kennedy Center without notice, at any time.

 

Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, one of the few trustees on the board not appointed by the president, reportedly ended up in a shouting match with him during a conference call yesterday. (“Trump screamed, blaming Beatty for getting the courts involved and leading to the downfall of the performing arts center,” according to CNN’s sources.) “Donald Trump only cares about the Kennedy Center for his vanity,” she said in a statement afterward. “That is wrong and it is a breach of his fiduciary duty as a trustee.”

 

She wasn’t trying to be funny, but I laughed.

 

There may be no concept in law more foreign to postliberalism and to Trump personally than the concept of fiduciary duty—or any duty, really. A duty is a legal or moral obligation to act in the best interest of another rather than for one’s own gain. Parents have a duty to their children; lawyers have a duty to their clients; government officials have a duty to their constituents; trustees have a duty to their institution. Duty is an altruistic notion, a mandate not to exploit a person in your charge.

 

Fiduciary duties arise in relationships in which a vulnerable party is required to trust another with extraordinary power, financial or otherwise, over its own welfare. To encourage that trust and prevent abuses of it, the law binds fiduciaries to act responsibly. Broadly speaking, that typically means they’re subject to a duty of loyalty (acting in the client’s interest), a duty of care (acting diligently and competently), and a duty of obedience (acting within prescribed rules).

 

That’s the antithesis of Trumpist government and the opposite in every particular of how the president and his toadies have behaved toward the Kennedy Center.

 

They’ve acted in Trump’s best interest, not the public’s, by threatening to cancel renovations unless his name is added to the building. They behaved recklessly, not competently, by insisting on smearing his soiled “brand” all over the institution, which helped push it toward bankruptcy. (“Confidential financial records obtained by The Post showed ticket sales and fundraising plunging after trustees added Trump’s name to the building in December.”) And they broke the law, more than once, by trying—really, really trying—to add his name to the structure without Congress’ approval.

 

As trivial as this episode might seem in the grand hierarchy of Trump corruption, it demonstrates why he’s unfit for office more succinctly than many other scandals do. The presidency is the ultimate fiduciary office, and Americans chose to fill it with a person who’s so selfishly incapable, morally and ideologically, of behaving like a fiduciary that he’s willing to wreck a national arts center to gratify his ego. We put a blind man at the controls of an airplane carrying the entire U.S. population—and did so knowing he was blind based on how he reacted to losing the 2020 election.

 

In this case, he’s not even pretending that he can see. The remarkable thing about the Kennedy Center saga is that Trump and his flunkies haven’t tried to rationalize why keeping his name off the building should interfere with renovations. The president didn’t explain in his Truth Social post, and the trustees were reportedly told that “Trump is unlikely to provide ‘fundamental oversight’ of [renovations] or lead a financial rescue without ‘appropriate recognition’ of his role.”

 

He could raise funds for the institution out of a sense of civic duty to save a national landmark, or to preserve an entertainment venue for locals, irrespective of whether his name is on it. He simply chooses not to.

 

His attitude toward power, here and always, is “what’s in it for me?”—to the point that he’s willing to punish the people who trusted him with the presidency by demolishing something they enjoy because there’s nothing for him in saving it. You couldn’t design a man less suited for fiduciary responsibility in a lab.

 

Looking out for No. 1.

 

When I said earlier that “I think” the Kennedy Center is falling apart, that’s why. I’m anticonspiratorial by nature, but I understand why so many of the replies to Lutnick’s post found it suspicious that a camera was rolling when part of the building’s ceiling collapsed.

 

Do I think Trump and his stooges deliberately damaged the structure themselves, to create leverage for their “name it after me or no renovations!” ransom demand? I do not.

 

Do I think they’re capable of it? They dragged an innocent man (briefly) into federal court to support their lie about “vandals” damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, didn’t they? A government that prioritizes its own interests over its duties to its constituents is capable of all sorts of things.

 

It’s hard to measure, but my sense is that Trump has grown more willing lately to hurt Americans if he believes doing so will redound to his own benefit as his anxiety about losing control of Congress deepens. The Kennedy Center fiasco is, again, an unusually vivid example, but there are others.

 

A somewhat counterintuitive one is his moronic proposal of a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to be paid if, and only if, Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in November. Free money doesn’t hurt Americans, stupid, you might say—but in this case it would, which helps explain why 63 percent find the plan “inappropriate.” It’s inflationary, it’s insanely fiscally reckless with the national debt exploding and interest rates rising, and it would normalize extravagant bread-and-circus bribes by the ruling party in future election cycles.

 

It hurts America, objectively. But it serves Trump’s personal interests by potentially enticing some lowbrow undecided voters to vote for his party this year, and that’s all that matters.

 

The president’s hostility to interest rate hikes is another example. Slashing rates when diesel prices are skyrocketing would be indefensible economically, as doing so would goose inflation and compound the cost-of-living crisis that Americans have been begging Trump to solve. But who cares? He wants a sugar high of economic growth that he can point to before the midterms and very much does not want a slowdown, which would hurt Republicans’ chances. Naturally, that takes precedence over the public welfare.

 

In fact, and not coincidentally, his approach to getting his way on interest rates mirrors his approach to getting his name on the Kennedy Center. “LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT,” he warned the Federal Reserve earlier this month as it mulled how to respond to rising oil prices. Whether it’s the Fed or a judge who’s considering whether to let him rename a building after himself, he’s willing to extort them into putting his interests first by threatening to hurt the public if they don’t.

 

The most glaring recent example of Trump aiming to harm Americans for his own benefit, though, is his now-defunct scheme to set new rules for the Postal Service that would have complicated voting by mail. Implementing the system before the midterms would have made processing ballots so chaotic that the chief election officials in seven Republican states petitioned the Supreme Court not to let the rules take effect during this election cycle.

 

The court agreed and blocked the plan this week, triggering one of the whinier presidential tantrums in American history. (“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves.”) For once, a shoddy Trump rush job would not go forward.

 

He and his apologists are grumbling about vote-rigging in the aftermath, but the prospect of legitimate ballots cast by legitimate voters going uncounted due to procedural snafus under the new mail-ballot rules was plainly a feature of the scheme for Republicans, not a bug. The left is more comfortable with voting by mail than the right after many years of Trump demagoguery about the practice; Democrats likely would have been hurt disproportionately by the new system, and the president knew it.

 

If he believes that he and his party will benefit on balance from disenfranchising some untold number of Americans, no sense of fiduciary duty or public good will stop him from trying—and more evidence on that point will surely accrue as November approaches. Your right to vote versus his right to go on ruling unaccountably, without any check from a Republican-run Congress: For Trump, it’s no contest.

 

Out of the lab.

 

“We now occupy an interesting space on the democracy-totalitarianism continuum,” The Bulwark observed this morning of the Kennedy Center saga, “in which Trump doesn’t have the power to rename an institution but does have the power to close it.”

 

I’ve also written about modern America’s uneasy, halting transition from a first-world to a third-world government. Sometimes rival institutions manage to stop the president from wrecking things, like the voting system; sometimes, as with the Kennedy Center, they don’t. Whether he’ll succeed or fail at any particular destabilizing gambit has become hard to predict.

 

But we’re far enough along toward third-worldism that this can safely be said: Americans now have more to fear from a government that doesn’t share their interests and increasingly doesn’t pretend to do so than they do from any external threat. If the Kennedy Center ends up leveled or something dramatic happens later this year to disrupt the election, it won’t be China that did it. It’ll be Trump.

 

Because I have artificial intelligence on the brain, it occurred to me yesterday that the tech industry’s approach to AI resembles Americans’ approach to postliberal populism in 2016. In both cases, the relevant parties chose to experiment with something radically new that, they had reason to believe, might do a great deal of good. It could be dangerous, potentially even monstrous as it developed a will of its own—but, they believed, the “guardrails” in place to restrain it would mitigate the risk.

 

And so they continued with the experiment.

 

Misplaced hubris about one’s ability to control a monster one has created is the story of Frankenstein, of course, and Americans are familiar enough with it to have begun applying its lessons to AI. But they didn’t apply those lessons to Trumpism—even after watching the monster get loose and try to wreck the lab on January 6—and now they’re helpless as it goes about smashing up the Kennedy Center. Monsters aren’t good at much, but they’re great at destroying things. Small things like buildings, and big things too.