A pro-Trump executive at The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts said he was dismissed after CNN questioned his history of anti-LGBTQ+ remarks.

Floyd Brown posted on social media Thursday that he had been removed from his post at Washington’s premier theater and cultural center just months after joining.

The Kennedy Center has faced an overhaul under President Donald Trump. During his first month, Trump fired the Center’s leadership — including former president Deborah Rutter — and filled the board of trustees with his own supporters. He also announced he had been unanimously elected the board’s chair. Several artists have canceled appearances at the Center as a result.

Brown has previously called homosexuality a “punishment” upon America and said same-sex marriage is “godless” and a “hoax,” CNN reported. He also promoted conspiracies about former President Barack Obama’s birth and religion.

He said on X that he was asked to “recant your belief in traditional marriage” and refused to do so, and that he was let go before the article was published. He accused Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell — a close ally of Trump — of being “intimidated” by CNN and alleged that Grenell, who is gay and a practicing Christian, “preemptively fired me for my Christian beliefs on marriage.”

Brown said he has asked for an explanation regarding his dismissal, along with the chance to speak with Grenell. He claims both requests have gone unanswered.

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brown said he never meant to offend anyone with his previous comments.

“Comments rooted in my personal Christian views, which I have made in the past, have no impact upon my work here at the Kennedy Center nor do they impinge on my interactions with colleagues who do incredible work for the patrons of the Center. As a Christian I am called to work with others of different beliefs and worldviews,” he said.

Brown added that he was “honored” to work at the Kennedy Center and said he was united with the Center’s and Trump’s mission “to bring wholesome entertainment showcasing the best of performing arts and music to America.”

Brown has a long history of conservative activism. He helped found the conservative nonprofit Citizens United. He also served as an executive for Young America’s Foundation, which offers support to conservative college students, and founded The Western Journal.

MACKINAC ISLAND, Michigan — Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga has been preparing a run for Michigan’s open Senate seat and plans to make a final decision this summer.

If he does enter the primary, he would defy national Republicans, who have been aiming to clear the field for former Rep. Mike Rogers’ second attempt at the office.

“I want to make sure we win. I want to make sure we’ve got the right candidate to do that,” Huizenga said Thursday. “I personally think it should have been won last election. It didn’t. And the question is: Are we going to run the same play and expect a different result?”

Huizenga has been assembling a team, including fundraisers, for a potential bid. He recently traveled to West Point to discuss his candidacy with Donald Trump during the president’s visit last weekend. Last cycle, Trump endorsed Rogers, a former critic, in a crowded Senate primary; he has not endorsed in this race.

Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has been pressuring Huizenga to stay out of the contest, aiming to avert a potentially messy primary as they try to flip retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters’ seat.

National Republican Senatorial Committee political director Brendan Jaspers on Wednesday reposted a poll on X showing Rogers outperforming Huizenga against potential Democratic rivals with the message, “If Republicans want to flip Michigan’s Senate seat red in 2026, the numbers point to one candidate” — Rogers.

Democrat Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers in Michigan’s open Senate race last year even as Trump won the state.

With Republicans holding competitive, eat-their-own primaries in the midterms next year, Democrats in the South see an opening to court moderates who are souring on the GOP.

In Texas, state Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging the establishment-aligned Sen. John Cornyn, and the Georgia GOP primary field is quickly becoming crowded as Republicans attempt to oust Sen. Jon Ossoff. While holding Georgia will be tough and flipping Texas even harder, there’s still an opportunity for the left.

A new class of Democratic leaders in the South are pitching voters on their party’s proposals to lower costs and increase wages, while casting blame on Republicans for an unsettled economy under President Donald Trump. They say that strategy is key not just for the midterms, but part of solving an existential threat for Democrats if they want to stand a chance in coming years at regaining national power.

Longer-term population shifts in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas that went to Trump in November, mean those states are poised to gain congressional and Electoral College seats. Florida — which many Democrats concede is a solidly GOP state — could also expand its influence. Democrats in these states are now warning that failing to mount a comeback could mean that winning the White House after the 2030 Census would be far more difficult.

The fix, according to a dozen Democratic leaders in the South, is to refocus the Democratic Party on the economy and border security — two areas of strength historically for the GOP. Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old progressive who took over the Texas Democratic Party in March, said Democrats must “do everything we can to show that when we get out of bed in the morning, we eat glass to fight back and protect the working people of this state.”

In Georgia, Charlie Bailey, who was named Democratic Party chair this month, is also stressing that Democrats’ political survival depends on figuring out how to talk to working-class voters — and hammering Republicans on the economy.

“It is that kind of record of the Republicans that has voters with full cause to be angry,” Bailey said. “They know they're being screwed. My job as the chair is to make sure they know who to blame.”

Other Democrats say the national political climate could help turn the tide.

“What's happening on the federal level is unpredictable, but it may be a unique opportunity for a progressive agenda,” said Georgia Democratic strategist Amy Morton. “Republicans are claiming the far right, Democrats have an opportunity to claim everything else. Voters may be hungry for change by the time we get to the elections next year.”

The uphill climb for Democrats in the South is steep. Republicans raise far more money and hold far more seats in state legislatures than Democrats, meaning they control the redistricting process. And following a brutal November that saw many red regions grow redder, Democrats' national brand problem is even more pronounced in the South.

Texas Democrats are taking the fact that they lost ground in South Texas as a warning sign for a party that has counted on the surge of Latino residents in recent decades to help bring the party to dominance. Taking Latinos for granted is “a mistake we'll never make again,” said Texas State Rep. Erin Gamez, who represents a district in South Texas. “It's a mistake we can't afford to ever make again.”

Scudder’s plan to better position Texas Democrats involves creating a Spanish-language communications department and recruiting more local party leaders, citing the fact that half of precinct positions sit unfilled.

Scudder and other new chairs have not shied away from calling out the national party for failing to read the electorate correctly, and say the party needs to stay hyper focused on middle-class concerns like higher wages and more investment in public education. They echo longtime complaints from local Democrats that national party leaders have neglected to help build out a political operation in all corners of Texas that remains strong even in non-election years.

“We need help now,” Scudder said. “We're just simply out-resourced here. When real money starts coming to the state in a long term infrastructure way, that's when I think the state is going to start to really move in the right direction.”

But newcomers are encouraged by the recent election of Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin, who ran Minnesota's state party for years. Last month the DNC announced it is steering more investment to state parties, with an extra focus on red states intended to help organizers build long-term infrastructure. Under the new formula, red states would get $22,500 per month, a 50 percent bump, whereas their blue state counterparts will get $17,500, a 30 percent increase over current funding levels. That cash can help state parties hire more staff, open new field offices and conduct research that helps state parties hone the right message.

Martin, in an interview, recounted a conversation he had with Brandon Presley, the Mississippi Democrat who came within 3 percentage points of defeating incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves,. Presley said one reason he came up short was there was no infrastructure on the ground to help him.

“That, to me, was a real, real damning indictment, and one that I'll never forget,” Martin said. “The party's responsibility is to build infrastructure so that we meet the moment.”

After a blitzkrieg of a book rollout that saw Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” dominate the news cycle this week with its clinical autopsy of Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection, some in Biden world are hitting back, offering fresh complaints about the reporting process and their own fact checks.

When Biden’s reelection campaign needed video of him taking off-the-cuff questions from voters, they turned to a staged town hall in Delaware in April 2024 that they planned to use for a campaign commercial — an episode that went so poorly, people in the campaign determined the town hall yielded unusable material, according to Tapper and Thompson.

The pair write that at the closed-press event, even amid supporters and campaign staff that had the full list of questions, “Biden had trouble. The campaign ultimately decided that the footage wasn’t usable.”

But Biden team’s is pushing back. Three versions of test ads obtained exclusively by POLITICO tell a slightly more complicated story.

While all three are highly edited and feature jump cuts of Biden’s remarks, the footage also shows the candidate engaging with members of the audience. POLITICO viewed dated documents related to the town hall’s planning and a painting in the gym to confirm the date and location.

One is called “Greatest Nation” focusing on democracy; another is titled “They’ve Tried” on the Affordable Care Act; a third, directed at veterans, is called “Defend Us All.”

None ever aired.

Why was that? Though Tapper and Thompson report that it was because the footage “wasn’t usable,” Biden advisers argue that the footage didn’t make it on air simply because of timing.

A Biden spokesperson tells POLITICO that the campaign tested the ads with focus groups but did not deploy them before the president dropped out of the race following his disastrous June 2024 debate.

Asked about the Biden advisers’ claims, Tapper disputed the contention. In a quotation supplied to POLITICO by Tapper, an unnamed Biden adviser said: “While the campaign was able to selectively utilize portions of the footage to craft ads that were eventually tested on focus groups, the consensus from senior and mid level campaign staff present for the event and those privy to the editing process was that the footage was not up to par and would require crafty editorial support. The campaign’s leadership would not have needed to wait nearly four months to (not) release the ads created with the footage if it reflected the picture of confidence they suggest.”

POLITICO has been unable to independently verify the identity of the unnamed Biden adviser supplied by Tapper.

The dispute over the book’s reporting is the latest pushback from Biden aides and allies against what they are keen to depict as a slapdash fact-checking process by Tapper and Thompson.

Tapper and Thompson have made a point of publicly noting that they paid for their book to be fact-checked — a step that many nonfiction books skip — and that Fergus McIntosh, the head research editor at The New Yorker, led that process.

The New Yorker has a stringent and storied process for vetting materials before publication, and, indeed, McIntosh fact-checked both the book and the excerpt from the book that the magazine published last week. POLITICO has learned that McIntosh told at least one person that he was more limited in the facts he could check in the book versus the excerpt, which is common. McIntosh declined to speak on the record.

McIntosh’s role in fact-checking was raised as an issue in a statement Biden’s spokesperson gave The New Yorker, but which the magazine didn’t publish in its entirety. “[T]he New Yorker employee who reached out to fact-check this excerpt also apparently reviewed the book and offered suggestions to the authors as they wrote it,” the statement read. “It's remarkable that neither this fact checker, nor the authors, reached out to fact check the actual book with us, and only the New Yorker is holding them to the high editorial standards that readers of the book should get in the first place.”

In other words, the unnamed Biden spokesperson claims that the first time a Biden aide heard from the independently hired fact-checker was for the magazine excerpt, not for the book. The New Yorker did not respond to a request for comment.

Rufus Gifford, a Biden campaign official, shared video of Biden talking with George Clooney at a moment that the president allegedly did not recognize him — though the video doesn’t seem to definitively prove Gifford’s argument.

Like some of the book’s buzziest anecdotes — including that Biden didn’t recognize Clooney — the town hall anecdote is a matter of perception.

Thompson reports that some people say ads from the town hall weren’t used because the lighting was bad; the lighting looks serviceable in the ads. Others told Thompson that Biden’s performance at the event was poor; Biden, indeed, sounds raspy and old.

In a statement to POLITICO, a spokesperson for Tapper and Thompson said: “Jake and Alex stand by their reporting in ‘Original Sin.’ The Biden team is repeating the same obfuscatory tactics used during their time in the White House, and news outlets continuing to rely on the very same unattributed and unverified voices raises serious credibility questions.”

The spokesperson didn’t want to be named. Tapper declined to identify his source who appraised the Biden town hall.

This story first appeared in POLITICO Playbook.

Progressives are grappling with the killing of two people who worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington by a gunman who echoed a slogan that has become a rallying cry for many American liberals since the start of the war in Gaza.

After his arrest, the man suspected of killing the couple outside the Jewish Museum in Washington on Wednesday night exclaimed “free, free Palestine,” a phrase that has become ubiquitous at peaceful demonstrations and on social media over the past 18 months.

The attack brought renewed focus to a strain of violent radicalism on the left, even as progressives pointed out they share nothing with the gunman except his apparent support for Palestinian rights. What the attack did, they said, was hurt their cause.

“It betrays our values and hands more power to those already pushing authoritarian crackdowns,” said Layla Elabed, an organizer in Michigan and the leader of the Uncommitted National Movement, which arose in protest of U.S. support for Israel’s response to the Hamas attack launched on Oct. 7, 2023.

It’s also putting pressure on progressives to respond.

“Where’s our Martin Luther King today? I don't know where that individual is. Who is that individual?” said a progressive strategist granted anonymity to speak freely. “We just don’t have big moral leaders in our society, period, let alone on the political front.”

A fringe, more radical wing of the pro-Palestinian movement has blinked in and out of national attention since the onset of the war in Gaza. Thousands of protesters have been arrested, including dozens who forcibly entered and occupied university buildings. And last year, POLITICO reported that an online network of pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. included resources on how to “escalate” political actions beyond legal bounds, as well as pro-Hamas content.

Asked if members of the left are doing any soul searching, Kevin Rachlin — the Washington director of the Nexus Project, a left-leaning Jewish advocacy group — said, “I think they are.”

“This is more and more proof that we need to address antisemitism as a full society versus addressing [it] on the left or on the right,” Rachlin said.

Antisemitism historically and in recent years has more closely been associated with fringe groups on the alt-right, including most notably the 2017 “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia. President Donald Trump himself dined with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022.

Supporters of the pro-Palestinian movement, including liberal lawmakers, found themselves on the defensive after the shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in a way that conservatives have had to respond to far-right violence in recent years.

Now, some pro-Palestinian activists worry the shooting, which federal authorities called a targeted act of antisemitism, could set back any progress they’ve made in their policy goals amid an increasingly dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and an expansion of Israel’s military operation in the decimated territory.

"We hope and caution against this vigilante violence being used to undermine the movement to end the genocide, a movement of hundreds of thousands of Americans calling for ceasefire and arms embargo,” said Sandra Tamari, executive director of the pro-Palestinian Adalah Justice Project.

Alex Pascal, a former Biden administration official who helped craft its strategy to combat antisemitism, said, “We cannot allow this violence to be weaponized by those who might exploit it to further degrade our democratic rights and freedoms.”

Trump and Republicans for years have cast the pro-Palestinian movement as a group of radical terrorist sympathizers. As the Trump administration has taken increasingly severe steps to suppress the movement and punish its leaders, Democrats and advocates have pushed back on that characterization, framing Republicans’ actions as an attack on free speech.

Pro-Palestinian lawmakers rushed Thursday to condemn the murders and call them acts of antisemitism. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he was “appalled” by the “heinous act.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) emphasized, “Absolutely nothing justifies the murder of innocents.”

Republicans were quick to paint the attacks as just part of broader extremism in the movement.

“The Palestinian cause is an evil one,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said Thursday on “Fox & Friends.” “The only end of the conflict is total surrender by those who support Muslim terror.”

As details about the attack emerged late Wednesday night, the Trump administration jumped into offense. Attorney General Pam Bondi and D.C.’s newly tapped interim U.S. attorney, Jeanine Pirro, visited the scene. And on Truth Social just after midnight, Trump wrote: “These horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW! Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA.!”

The left has had to walk this line before. Earlier this year, when federal immigration agents detained and moved to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder and leader in last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, the Trump administration justified the arrest by claiming Khalil was a supporter of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

Democrats have largely united around detained pro-Palestinian activists as victims of the Trump administration whose constitutionally protected political speech is under attack — but also hedged their statements by emphasizing they didn’t endorse Khalil’s opinions on the subject.

“I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the time on X. But, he added: “If the administration cannot prove he has violated any criminal law to justify taking this severe action and is doing it for the opinions he has expressed, then that is wrong.”

Holly Otterbein contributed to this report.