The Weekly Wrap | The Kennedy Center, YouTubers Attacking Daycares, & Democrat Positioning for 2026

Happy New Year, and welcome back to Weekly Wrap. We’re kicking off 2026 with a full slate of shows to recap – from live interviews to our regular weekly programming – bringing you a sharp, efficient rundown on what you might’ve missed and what’s worth your time.

The Kennedy Center is America | The Weekly Assignment

2025 ended with one of the most ridiculous moves we’ve seen from our federal government, the addition of Donald Trump’s name to The Kennedy Center. What amounted to vandalism in order to protect one man’s ego shows just how stupid things have become. Lincoln Square’s executive editor Susan J. Demas and Sam Osterhout took the time to discuss this and more on The Weekly Assignment.

Susan J. Demas: You brought up the Kennedy Center, and we’ve talked about the fact that Trump has muscled his way into putting his name on the Kennedy Center. It’s now the “Trump Kennedy Center,” one of the many dumb name changes, like the Department of War.

This has caused many artists, like Chuck Redd, who cancelled his Christmas Eve performance, who don’t want to be associated with this. If there’s one thing that we know about the history of fascists, it’s that they love trying to control the culture and inject themselves into it. Making themselves the center of attention and deciding what is art and what isn’t.

Trump is just the latest in a long line of people – Stalin, Mao, Hitler – they love this sort of thing. He thinks this makes him strong, but for people who actually care about art, they don’t want to be associated with that, by and large. This is just one of many people who are probably looking to cancel. But, in true Trump fashion, with his little lapdog Rick Grennell, who has been with him since the first administration, is now head of the Kennedy Center. He’s saying, “No, if you cancel, we’re going to sue you.”

I mean, what in the name of the free market is this shit?

Sam Osterhout: And look, if it’s a breach of contract, fine. Do whatever you need to do to make yourself feel whole. But also, I think that’s a move that makes them look so weak. That you don’t want to be a part of my party, so I’m going to sue you.

Susan J. Demas: “I need to compel people to perform at my shitty center, and if you don’t do it, I’m going to try and sue you into poverty.”

Sam Osterhout: I think I saw a tweet that was like, “You know, to all the girls who said no to my prom invitation in high school, I’m going to sue you.” Again, it is dumb. And I think going back to the cultural piece – when you have policies that fail and you’re flooding money into the upper echelons of our caste system, when income inequality and wealth inequality is so stark that you can’t just look away from it – then the thing that you have is Kid Rock. You have to control the story that’s being told about our culture. And that’s Bad Bunny.

That’s the Kennedy Center to all of these people. They need to go along because culture is the thing that tells the story, and if the narrative can be, “we’re actually doing quite well,” or, “we’re doing bad because we’re building toward something else,” where this is shared sacrifice – it allows him to at least feel empowered. Not be fully empowered. It’s not going to work.

Susan J. Demas: I think that’s the key thing. Trump has enormous power as POTUS, and he has his own personal goon squad with ICE to enforce that power. Increasingly, the military, as he has purged career generals and officers to install loyalists.

However, he can’t control the culture. We’re Americans. By definition, we do what we want. We are used to listening to what we want, wearing what we want, deciding what’s cool and what’s not. That’s not up to the government. Joe Biden couldn’t tell us what music to listen to anymore than Donald Trump can.

For him to try and turn us into a country like Russia or China, where the state can exert that kind of extreme control over people’s everyday lives and their choices – that runs a front to everything we’ve built in 250 years. That’s for good and bad, because let’s face it, there’s a real asshole streak in us in America. That’s part of what makes us unique.

The fact that we decide and all of these right-wing financiers in Hollywood are trying to shove this right-wing propaganda down your throat – none of those movies are doing well because people have decided with their wallets. People would rather go see things that are fun to see rather than go see things that are fun to be preached to by a bunch of Silicon Valley jerks that are trying to sell us some weird dystopian vision of America.

This is where I feel like Donald Trump’s power starts to really break down because I can tell you that’s a big reason why he’s lost Gen Z. They don’t think he’s cool anymore and they don’t like what he’s doing. Plus, it’s harder and harder for them to get jobs.

See more of the discussion here.

Are the Dems Ready For ‘26? | Jason Berlin Joins Susan J. Demas

Jason Berlin of Field Team 6, a pro-democracy organization that treats voter registration as a serious level of political power, joined Lincoln Square’s executive editor Susan J. Demas to discuss how Democrats have prepared themselves to meet the moment of 2026.

Susan J. Demas: I’ve read that you kind of take a writer’s room approach to the work that you’re doing now. You’ve got to find that hook, you’ve got to know your audience – talk to us about how that’s been helpful to you in this process of getting people to register to vote. Especially young people who aren’t really into politics. How do you get them to care?

Jason Berlin: Good question. So, TV and film is a collaborative art that’s another great training for organizing. It’s all about collaboration and that’s what we do at Field Team 6. There’s only three of us on payroll, including me, we have almost 38,000 volunteers. Every state of the country. I’m so proud of that. Every day I swell with pride that all these people who have come to the cause.

It is collaborative. The writing of our outreach scripts is collaborative. Whether it’s text, email, postcard – we pitch in, we listen to the latest focus groups as far as getting young people interested. We have to be creative, for sure. That creativity helps. We encourage people to use their own words and experiments and our best ideas come from our most genius volunteers.

Because there’s communication from the top to the bottom of the organization, we put that into play immediately. For example, “Can you help me save the world from Trump,” is a conversation opener that has worked. Unfortunately, for years, he’s still relevant – but that gets a lot of people’s attention and you find out a lot of information in a very short time.

A lot of people are worried when they think about in-person voter drives. They’re going to encounter anger or even yelling. I want people to know that that is incredibly rare and it’s hard to dehumanize a human being who’s standing right in front of you. It’s much easier to do it if you’re phone banking or texting – there’s that layer of anonymity and people can say some truly bizarre stuff. In person, that almost never happens.

We need as many people as possible to join us and lead voter drives all across the country. They’re a super effective way to get young people registered. Another way to start a conversation that we’ve found, we have stickers that are issues based – Black Lives Matter stickers, Save the Environment stickers, My Body, My Choice – all different issues and we offer people a free sticker. If you’ve never offered adults, young kids on college campuses, you will be shocked at how nuts, absolutely bonkers, grown people go for stickers.

See more of the discussion here.

The World Is Getting More Dangerous And the President Is an Idiot | Edwin Eisendrath & Susan J. Demas

Do we really need to elaborate? 2025 showed the American people that the President really is an idiot. From unpopular policies to the enacting of fascism, Trump is attempting to torch our country. Susan J. Demas and Edwin Eisendrath went live to discuss.

Susan J. Demas: Donald Trump has embarked on his “Affordability Tour’” although he hates the word affordability. He claims it’s a Democrat hoax, which nothing makes him sound more out of touch than that. He didn’t present any solutions. All he did was basically go up there in a couple cities that he toured and say, “the dog ate my homework. This is all Joe Biden’s fault. You’ve got to give me more time, but everything’s going to be great. Just wait!” Which is ridiculous.

Edwin Eisendrath: This is the tour where he got up there and talked about Melania’s underwear. I mean that’s real, right? He’s going up there … American’s are concerned about our ability to make ends meet, and he goes up there ostensibly to address our concerns and to talk about the visibility of her underwear line in her tight dresses…

I mean, you’ve got to be kidding me. There is not a world where this man is competent by temperament, by moral character, by actual interest in Americans, by willingness to do the work that a president is supposed to do to have this job. If he didn’t have a cabinet of toadies, they would have said he’s mentally unfit and gotten rid of him. And if you didn’t have a Congress full of fools, he would have been impeached and thrown out in the last four, eight years. They should do it again.

Susan J. Demas: Absolutely. Forget all this talk, “Oh, what’s it gonna do?” If you don’t impeach him for crimes that meet the textbook definition of why you should be impeached, you’re sending the message that everything he did is okay. “He didn’t break any laws.” “It’s okay for a president to behave this way.”

You can’t do it. To tear down the White House, to send his armies into our cities. I’m going to do something that I haven’t done in years – and that is to be grateful to the Supreme Court – because they did recently say, “No, Mr. Trump, you cannot send National Guard troops into Chicago.”

See more of the discussion here.

The Media Still Gets Project 2025 Wrong. That Should Worry You | Sam Osterhout & Andra Watkins LIVE

Mainstream media is still having a tough time grasping exactly what Project 2025 is. Columnists and reporters have stated that Christianity is a red herring, window dressing even, for the policy they are trying to enact. Sam Osterhout and Andra Watkins got together to discuss how there is no window dressing, these are true fundamentalists with extreme policy being the result of extremist beliefs.

Sam Osterhout: The core tenet of the piece from Douthat is saying that, “oh, these people aren’t true believers of Christian nationalism, they just want policy changes.”

Let’s talk about that a little bit, because if it was just about policy changes, you would just see policy changes that had nothing to do with Christianity or nothing to do with white Christian nationalism or anything like that. But we have things like the White House Faith Office, which is headed by Paula White Cain.

Can you tell us about her?

Andra Watkins: Well, Paula White Cain is married to the former keyboardist from Journey. They had a fight in the band about him letting certain people use Journey’s music for these purposes.

She is a prosperity gospel dominionist, which is new apostolic reformation. Charismatic protestant christian nationalist extremism – she has been based in Florida for a long time and somehow got into the president’s orbit. Now she is heading the White House Faith Office and in that strain of Christian nationalism, women can be pastors. Women can be apostles. She would consider herself to be an apostle even though she may not say that.

[...]

Again, if that is how faith speaks to you and how you want to worship, I don’t have any judgement about it. I don’t think it should be happening in the White House or in any other government building, or any other government property.

The branch I grew up in, Baptist, extreme Baptist protestant, we thought all those people were crazy. So, in Christian nationalism, they talk about each other like that as well. But, you know, I don’t want to offend anyone here who is charismatic or if that’s the way faith speaks to you – that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. My problem with it is, that it’s being put in the government and it’s in the White House.

See more of the discussion here.

A Citizen’s Guide to Saving Democracy in 2026 | David Pepper & Susan Demas LIVE

There were a few bright spots for the pro-democracy movement in 2025: the progress of independent media, the pro-democracy movement of the American people, and the fight back against Trump through special election wins in heavy Republican areas. David Pepper joined Susan J. Demas to discuss the guide to saving our democracy in the new year.

Susan J. Demas: States like Florida, which have a huge senior population, they were at the forefront of mail-in voting for years. That used to be a real priority for Republicans because they wanted to make sure that seniors (which are a huge voting block for Republicans) would be able to vote.

I lived in Iowa for a decade and we had early voting groups. That was by design to make it easy for rural voters because so much of the state is rural. Getting to your polling place, especially when snow can hit on election day, can be a real problem. They wanted to make it as convenient as possible and I’ve watched with great interest how under Trump, that’s come under assault in heavily Republican states like Iowa and in Ohio where you are.

David Pepper: The whole point of Dropbox was that. It went right to the Board of Elections. Even if there was a delay in the delivery of mail, or a worry about that, which people obviously worry about when they see stories like this. The Dropbox was a secure way that you could vote and you knew the person picking up from that box is the Board of Elections worker.

So the idea that they’re curbing this and that, again, it’s just clearly a broader assault on early voting, which had more people voting. In some cases, like you said, it meant more Republicans were voting early. I think they’re obsessed. They think it’s all Democrats. I think they’re just making voting more inconvenient for everybody. And I think that in the end, it’s bad for everybody. But to the extent that in some areas, it’s going to hit certain groups harder and we should be aware of that and fight back against it.

See more of the discussion here.

Susan J. Demas on C-SPAN: Analyzing the 2026 Midterms and Trump’s Influence

You read that right, Lincoln Square is making moves in the media space and the latest was our executive editor Susan J. Demas appearing on C-SPAN to discuss the 2026 midterms. Are Democrats prepared? What is going to be Trump’s influence? Susan joined C-SPAN host John McArdle to discuss that and more.

John McArdle: On Democrats themselves, who do you think the leader is of the Democratic Party right now? Is there one person that you could point to?

Susan J. Demas: That’s an excellent question. We asked our readers who the winner of the year was, and the overwhelming favorite was California Governor Gavin Newsom.

I’m not sure you could say he’s the leader of the party – he’s a governor. He’s not in Washington. He doesn’t head up the DNC. But, he certainly is running for president in 2028 and has been more prominent than most of the Democratic voices in Congress – including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

John McArdle: What about the name Zohran Mamdani? How much do you think it’s going to come up in 435 House races around the country and outside of the state of New York, outside the city of New York? How much do you think it’s going to come up in Senate elections this cycle as the Senate is very much up for grabs as well?

Susan J. Demas: There’s no doubt that Mamdani had a very impressive victory in the way he’s been able to rally voters, especially younger voters. Even some voters who decided that they were going to go with Trump in 2024. I think those are lessons in terms of persuasion that Democrats can learn from.

If the lesson Democrats learned from his election is that everyone needs to run as a Democratic socialist from Wyoming to West Virginia? I think that would be a damaging one because when Democrats win, it’s when they care about the issues that their constituents care about. Those are very different across the country.

I think Republicans see a very good opportunity in trying to tie him to the Democratic Party, make him the face of it, and say, “See, they’re a bunch of socialists and this is why you need to stick with the Republican Party. They’re consistent and you can count on them.”

However, when the president mainly campaigned on fixing the economy – and we have seen, as one of your callers from Las Vegas was talking about – that prices are still high, people are still struggling, and that’s a hard message to sell. Certainly that’s going to be a tactic that Republicans will deploy.

See more of the discussion here.

Christian Nationalism at TPUSA: Faith, Trump, & the Border | The Tim & April Show

Everyone’s favorite members of The New Evangelicals, Tim Whitaker & April Ajoy are back with another episode of The Tim & April Show. Nick Shirley is a YouTube prankster who made his way into the political world by making Trump supporting videos. His latest stunt is harassing daycares across Minnesota in order to paint them as fraudulent. Tim & April discussed Shirley on this week’s show.

Tim Whitaker: I’m sure everyone watching this, by now, is aware of this name Nick Shirley. This apparent expose he did, “exposing the narrative” and this “massive” exposure of fraud in daycares in Minnesota that just so happened to be run by Somali immigrants or Somali United States citizens.

And we want to dive into that today because there’s kind of two angles. One which I think is important to talk about on the factual level – there’s a deeper level worth unpacking and we’ll get to that later on.

April Ajoy: I’m going to give you a quick, ‘who Nick Shirley is’ before we dive into this. So, I did not know who this guy was before this. I kind of recognized him like I had seen clips before, but I didn’t know who he was.

He’s 23. He’s very young. He started out making YouTube prank videos. He’s from Utah. And just last year, during the 2024 election, he started making videos aimed at boosting Donald Trump. In February of 2024, he recorded himself asking migrants if they supported Joe Biden and then posted a video on X saying “Confirmed! Immigrants for Biden 2024!”

A few months later, he hired day laborers from a Home Depot parking lot and paid them twenty dollars each to appear in a video holding signs that said ‘I Love Biden’ and ‘I Need Work Permits For My Family.’

He also has videos where he went into Portland (Oregon) – this was recently – he had a video that he posted, and I’m not kidding you, the title from this video is, “Portland Has Fallen, ANTIFA Takes Hold of City.”

Tim Whitaker: When I think of independent journalism, I think of titles like that.

See more of the discussion here.

Is MAGA Collapsing? | It’s the Democracy, Stupid | Edwin Eisendrath & Joan Esposito

We are approaching the anniversary of one of the most fraught days in American history, January 6th. That day we saw police officers beaten, democracy under attack, and our country pushed to the brink. Joan Esposito joined Edwin Eisendrath on It’s the Democracy, Stupid to discuss how we should handle the remembrance of that day.

Edwin Eisendrath: What do you think about this anniversary, and what is the right way to commemorate it?

Joan Esposito: I think it should be a very solemn day. I mean, it’s maybe not on the scale of a 9/11, but it was horrible. It was something we never thought we’d see in this country. And recently, Rudy Giuliani was deposed for some legal proceedings he’s a part of and under oath he was asked whether the election in 2020 was stolen, and he said no it was not. He also said, “and Donald Trump also knows it wasn’t stolen and the election results were correct.”

Donald Trump is capable of believing his own lies – so to know that there was that level of deceit and malevolence in him that continues to this day – I think it’s honestly a day we should remember like we remember 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. Because it’s a day we never thought we’d see and frankly a day which I think we are still recovering from.

Edwin Eisendrath: 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are interesting examples. The one in my head is Gettysburg because we fought back that day. They didn’t break through with the event that they stopped the election. Even Mitch McConnell, who was the reason why Trump isn’t in jail, demanded that the votes be counted and certified that day. We managed to save our democracy that day from its most concerted attack since the Battle of Little Roundtop in the Civil War.

So, I think we should read the Gettysburg Address and remind ourselves what kind of government we saved that day.

See more of the discussion here.