They’re calling it a “MAGA blood feud.”
That’s a phrase being used to describe the fight that has broken out between Alina Habba and Ric Grenell, according to explosive reporting by Axios.
According to the reporting, Habba claimed that her new husband, Turkish billionaire Turhan Mildon, tried to donate nearly $6 million dollars to the Kennedy Center through Grenell, who was then the president of the organization. But Grenell allegedly never deposited the money. Grenell denies this, calling the allegations “absurd.”
On the second day of the controversy, The Daily Mail poured more fuel on the fire, reporting that Donald Trump placed a furious phone call to Grenell from the White House about the missing millions and Mildon’s lawyers delivered evidence to White House lawyers to support her claims.
The story of geopolitical intrigue and wheeling-dealing could bubble up in the litigation to protect the Kennedy Center, as a congresswoman pursued information about the institution’s finances.
The romance behind the feud
Like many blood feuds, this one begins with a love story: the whirlwind romance between Habba and Turhan Mildon, a Turkish construction billionaire who has been described as a “close friend” of dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
(Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton once described Erdogan as one of the “dictators he liked.”)
Notwithstanding their ties to their countries’ strongman leaders, Habba and Mildon come from different backgrounds, different countries, and even different generations. She’s 41. He’s 29. They’re both divorcées, and they met at the Kennedy Center.
Within less than a year, Habba and Mildon married at a multimillion dollar reception at the Waldorf Astoria hotel attended by prominent MAGA figures like Sebastian Gorka who published photographs of the newlyweds on social media. According to public reporting, Mildon has a history of dating or marrying politically connected women, but he says that his marriage to Habba is for love.
At the Kennedy Center, Mildon also found a business opportunity — which is where Grenell comes into the story. The men shared geopolitical interests. Grenell had been urging the Trump administration at the time to take a softer approach to Venezuela’s strongman ruler Nicolas Maduro, and Mildon had business in Venezuela.
According to Axios, Habba gave the White House this account of Grenell’s proposal: In the spring of 2025, Grenell tried to urge Mildon to include a donation to the Kennedy Center in a business deal involving a U.S. company.
The report doesn’t include any details about the nature of the deal or the identity of the company. Habba originally told the White House that her husband was asked to pay $17.6 million, but she said that she later learned from her husband that it was actually $5.6 million.
If Grenell and Mildon hoped to normalize relations with Maduro, their vision hit reality with the snatch-and-grab operation that toppled the Venezuelan leader and whisked him to the United States for criminal prosecution.
The New York Times reported earlier this week that Maduro’s successor Delcy Rodriguez initiated an audit and cut Mildon’s cement plant contracts.
Following the money
The development could spill into court through a lawsuit filed by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who has been challenging Trump’s plan to close the Kennedy Center for two years for a $250 million taxpayer-paid renovation.
The Trump-installed Kennedy Center board claims that the project will need to be supplemented by additional fundraising.
The missing millions could undermine their arguments.
For example, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have repeatedly argued that the Kennedy Center was on the brink of financial ruin and structural collapse.
“It’s had decades of financial neglect,” Lutnick said of the Kennedy Center outside of federal court during an August hearing. “And the reason that happened is because Congress is good at a lot of things, but what they’re not good at is putting out a little bit of money every year to renovate and restore a building.”
Despite depicting himself as the Kennedy Center’s financial savior, Trump’s plan to remake the institution in his own image has been ruinous. The Washington Post reported that ticket sales plummeted by half the week after Trump became chairman of the board, as audience members and artists fled in droves. The Board has claimed that fundraising for repairs hinges upon honoring Trump on the building, but Rep. Beatty defeated those plans twice as illegal.
Congress, the judge made clear, demanded that the building only honor Kennedy.
Beatty’s lawyers have called Trump’s two-year closure plan a “smokescreen” to mask the board’s financial mismanagement, and the missing millions could help them advance that argument.
The congresswoman’s attorney Nathaniel Zelinsky said at a recent hearing that the Board’s thinking may have been: “We’re shutting this thing down to hide our own embarrassment.”
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper has allowed the congresswoman to seek discovery into the Kennedy Center’s finances, and the discovery deadline is set for Oct. 23.
Below the Paywall:
* The Trump DOJ just sued to invalidate 20,000 California ballots.
* Trump cancels plans for a live-streamed execution.
* Nine FBI agents who worked on Trump’s classified documents case fight for their jobs.
