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Washington’s hottest club has everything Cabinet secretaries, a new stone patio, food from the White House kitchen, and even a playlist curated by President Donald Trump. But good luck getting a spot on the guest list. So far, only some of the president’s political allies, business executives, and administration officials have been invited. In Trump’s remake of the White House, the Rose Garden is now the Rose Garden Club, with the iconic lawn outside the Oval Office transformed into a taxpayer-supported imitation of the patio at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private Florida resort. Trump debuted the name during his first formal dinner there this month and has included it on his official public schedule, too. He’s set to host another event on Wednesday evening with members of his Cabinet and senior staff, according to an official who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Presidents have always used invitations to the White House as a prestigious reward for friends and supporters, but Trumps rebranding of an iconic area of the Peoples House is unprecedented. Its a fresh example of how the billionaire Republican is replicating the gilded and cloistered bubble of his private life inside the confines of the most famous government housing in the country. Trump has long understood the allure of exclusive spaces In his first term, Trump had an eponymous hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks away from the White House and would go there often for dinner. But the Trump family sold the property during President Joe Biden’s administration, leaving him without a uniquely Trump establishment in the city in his second term. Now he doesnt need to go anywhere to enter his comfort zone and, in fact, has been spending less time at his home on his golf course in central New Jersey than he did in the first year of his first term. To make the Rose Garden his own, Trump paved over the grass and set out tables and chairs, complete with yellow-and-white striped umbrellas that resemble the ones at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida. He also installed a speaker system to play his favorite tunes as he does in Florida. The project cost about $2 million and was paid for by the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that works with the National Park Service. The events on the new White House patio so far have been official in nature and are part of the long tradition of presidential entertaining at the Executive Mansion, with military social aides on hand to escort guests and the kitchen staff tasked to whip up the sustenance. Trump, who rose to fame as a New York real estate executive, also ran casinos and hotels, and he still loves playing host. He frequently flatters his guests as brilliant and beautiful and relishes the ability to gather the countrys most powerful people. So who pays for them? All presidents invite family members and friends, lawmakers and political allies, donors and business leaders, and others to the White House for reasons that range from bill signings and policy announcements to picnics and lavish state dinners. Trump is expected to entertain on the white marble patio, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, as often as he can, the White House said. Taxpayers pick up the tab for some of the social events hosted by a president, like the gathering for Republican lawmakers. Congress gives the White House money to pay for events like these since the Executive Mansion is also the presidents home. Events of a more personal nature, like a birthday party or the funeral service Trump held at the White House in 2020 for his younger brother, Robert, would have to be paid for by the president since it is not considered government or the peoples business. Tech titans lose out to GOP lawmakers for club’s opening The official debut of the Rose Garden Club was supposed to be with tech titans such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. However, rain forced Trump to move the Sept. 4 event indoors to the ornate State Dining Room. The honor of being first instead went to Republican lawmakers, who gathered around two dozen tables under a clear night sky on Sept. 5. Holding a microphone, Trump welcomed his guests by saying you are the first ones in this great place. He described it as a club for people that can bring peace and success to our country. Table settings featured white tablecloths and yellow roses, plus a place card that said, The Rose Garden Club at the White House. Dinner started with a Rose Garden Salad that included tomatoes and iceberg lettuce, followed by steak or chicken, or pasta primavera for vegetarians. Chocolate cake was the dessert. Trump sat at a corner table with House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas, and Sen. Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania. Other lawmakers circulated by Trumps table for photos with the president. Some were posted online. “It was a honor to be there, wrote Rep. John McGuire of Virginia. Chris Megerian and Darlene Superville, Associated Press
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A lifelong fan of Tomb Raider, French gamer Romain Bos was on tenterhooks when an update of the popular video game went online in August. But his excitement quickly turned to anger. The gamer’s ears and those of other Tomb Raider” fans picked up something amiss with the French-language voice of Lara Croft, the games protagonist. It sounded robotic, lifeless even shorn of the warmth, grace, and believability that French voice actor Françoise Cadol has given to Croft since she started playing the character in 1996. Gamers and Cadol herself came to the same conclusion: A machine had cloned her voice and replaced her. It’s pathetic,” says Cadol, who straight away called her lawyer. My voice belongs to me. You have no right to do that. It was absolutely scandalous, says Bos. It was artificial intelligence. AI encroaching everywhere Aspyr, the game developer based in Austin, Texas, didnt respond to e-mailed questions from The Associated Press. But it acknowledged in a post last week on its website that what it described as unauthorized AI generated content had been incorporated into its Aug. 14 update of Tomb Raider IVVI Remastered” that angered fans. Weve addressed this issue by removing all AI voiceover content, Aspyr’s post said. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Still, the affair has triggered alarms in the voiceover community, with campaigners saying it’s a sobering example of the dangers that AI poses to human workers and their jobs. If we can replace actors, well be able to replace accountants, and a whole range of other professions that could also be automated,” says Patrick Kuban, a French-language voice actor who is also a co-president of United Voice Artists, an international federation of voiceover artists. “So we need to ask ourselves the right questions: How far should we go, and how do we regulate these machines?” Hollywood has seen similar concerns, with video game performers striking for 11 months for a new contract this year that included AI guardrails. This is happening pretty much everywhere. Were getting alerts from all over the world from Brazil to Taiwan, Kuban said in an Associated Press interview. Actors voices are being captured, either to create voice clones not perfect ones but for illicit use on social media by individuals, since there are now many apps for making audio deepfakes,” Kuban said. These voices are also being used by content producers who arent necessarily in the same country,” he said. So its very difficult for actors to reclaim control over their voices, to block these uses. Cadol’s Voice Guardians Cadol says that within minutes of the release of the Tomb Raider update, her phone began erupting with messages, emails and social media notifications from upset fans. I took a look and I saw all this emotion anger, sadness, confusion. And that’s how I found out that my voice had been cloned, she said in an AP interview. Cadol says 12 years of recording French-language voiceovers for Lara Croft from 1996 to 2008 built an intimate bond with her fans. She calls them the guardians of her work. Once the initial shock subsided, she resolved to fight back. Her Paris lawyer, Jonathan Elkaim, is seeking an apology from Aspyr and financial redress. Grammar error In the update, new chunks of voiceover appear to have been added to genuine recordings that Cadol says she made years ago. Most notably, fans picked up on one particularly awkward segment. In it, a voice instructs players how to use their game controllers to make Lara Croft climb onto an obstacle, intoning in French: Place toi devant et appuyez sur avancer Stand in front and press advance.’ Not only does it sound clunky but it also rings as grammatically incorrect to French speakers mixing up the polite and less polite forms of language that they use, depending on who they’re addressing. Gamers were up in arms. Bos posted a video on his YouTube channel that same evening, lamenting: “Its half Françoise Cadol, half AI. Its horrible ! Why have they done that? I was really disgusted, the 34-year-old said in an AP interview. I grew up with Françoise Cadol’s voice. I’ve been a Tomb Raider fan since I was young kid.” Lara Croft is a bit how should I say a bit sarcastic at times in some of her lines. And I think Françoise played that very, very well, he said. Thats exactly why now is the time to set boundaries,” he added. Its so that future generations also have the chance to experience talented actors.” John Leicester and Nicolas Garriga, Associated Press
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Historically, one of the best ways to generate interest in what someone has to say is to not allow them to say it. Trump and his handpicked chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) may not have set out to create a built-in, eager audience for Jimmy Kimmel content when they allegedly pressured ABC to yank his show off the air last week, but thats just what they did. Kimmel knew hed be speaking to far more viewers than usual during last nights comeback episode, and he did not squander the opportunity. Instead, he delivered a bold yet measured once-in-a-lifetime monologue that reached across the aisle while punching up at those in power. At one point during his remarkable monologue, the host directly commented on the size of his new audience. He played a clip of Trump gloating over ABCs decision to pull him off the air, claiming Kimmel would be easy to replace because he had no ratings. Well, tonight I do, Kimmel retorted. Indeed, he did. Although the linear TV ratings are not in yetand will likely be skewed by the fact that local broadcasting companies Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair refused to carry the show in several major markets, including Washington, D.C.the YouTube clip for Kimmels opening monologue earned seven million views in a matter of hours and was up to 10 million as of this writing. He tried his best to cancel meinstead, he forced millions of people to watch the show, Kimmel continued. He might have to release the Epstein files to distract from this. Kimmel and his writers understood the assignment More important than the size of the audience for last nights episode was its breadth. Kimmel and his writers understood that this first monologue back from the brink of cancellation would reel in not only the usual fans and a huge batch of lapsed supporters, but also a hate-watching MAGA contingent, and curious viewers of all ideological stripes. Everyone wanted to know: Would it be a chastened Kimmel playing nice? An undeterred Kimmel talking righteous trash? Would he feature a star-studded circle of supporters like Stephen Colbert recently did in his first show after CBS announced his cancellation? Much like the general state of affairs in 2025, no outcome seemed off the table. What viewers might not have expected, though, is what they ended up getting: a deeply nuanced and heartfelt plea for unity, beneath the more-expected surface layer of scathing, hilarious jokes at this administrations expense. The ostensible reason that FCC chair Brendan Carr appeared to urge broadcasters to dump Kimmel last week was a single sentence the host uttered, which many interpreted as suggesting that Charlie Kirks murderer was aligned with MAGA. Kimmel had reportedly meant to address this misconception last week, before his show was pulled. Last night, he finally did. It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man, he said, tearing up. I don’t think there’s anything funny about it . . . Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what was obviously a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make. But I understand that, to some, it felt either ill-timed or unclear or maybe both. And for those who think I did point a finger. I get why you’re upset. If the situation was reversed, there’s a good chance I’d have felt the same way. Kimmel may not have apologized for his previous words, but he did something rarer and arguably more powerful: He validated the people genuinely outraged by them. He cut right through the film of polarization that envelops every current event but especially those in the weeks since Kirks murder, and emphasized both sides shared humanity. No wonder he teared up again nearly 10 minutes later, while recalling Erika Kirks magnanimous forgiveness of her husbands killer during Kirks memorial service over the weekend. Speaking truth to powerwith a smile Though surrounded by savage clowning on Carr and Trump, Kimmels comments about Kirk were so considered and seemingly genuine, they made the campaign to silence him look even more cynical and malicious in contrast. Even if Kimmel were only pretending to be so affected by the murder of a young father with whom he vehemently disagreed, well, at least hes incredible at pretending. Trump, meanwhile, gives away the game every time he speaks about Kimmels suspension. Around the time the show aired last night, the president sent out a furious Truth Social post, threatening to test ABC on whether keeping Kimmel on the air amounts to a major illegal Campaign Contribution to Democrats. He seemingly forgot to mention that the push to get rid of Kimmel, which he hinted at as far back as July, was supposed to be on behalf of Charlie Kirk. Some of the most scathing material in Kimmels monologue was about the apparent efforts to use Kirks murder as a means to censor dissenting voicesbe they journalists, professors, or talk show hostsand the host deftly manages to flip those efforts into a further call for unity. The government push to remove a comedian from television seemed to be so blatant, after all, that it attracted support from unlikely allies such as Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Candace Owens. Kimmel wisely paints his suspension with patriotism, calling the effort anti-American, and grounds it in the lineage of previously censored comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Maybe the silver lining from this is we found one thing we can agree on and maybe we’ll even find another one, he says near the end of his monologue. Maybe we can get a little bit closer together. We do agree on a lot of things. We agree on keeping our children safe from guns, on reproductive rights for women, social security, affordable health care, pediatric cancer research. These are all things that most Americans support. Let’s stop letting these politicians tell us what they want and tell them what we want. Though not every vew Kimmel nodded toward is shared by all Americans, his plea for finding common ground capped off an incisive, inclusive monologue that will likely earn him grudging kudos from people who disagree with him. After the monologue, Kimmel switched gears and went back to doing what he normally does: flexing his First Amendment-protected freedom to make fun of some other things the president recently did.
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