Hostage Situation

A judge reiterated on Tuesday that Congress must approve transforming the center into a memorial to the president

Donald Trump can’t have his name on another president’s memorial, and his cronies have voted shut it down. The president’s fixation on making himself the titular name on Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy — has reached the depths of pettiness.

The Trump-appointed board of the theater voted on Tuesday to close the cultural landmark this week, claiming the center is bankrupt and won’t be able to pay staff … unless Trump marshals the resources necessary to save it, which the board argues won’t happen unless he gets his name on the facade. A federal judge has ruled that can’t happen, so the center will shut its doors.

The Kennedy Center has, for some time now, been in need of repairs. Built in the late Sixties, the structure on the banks of the Potomac River is in need of renovations typical for many buildings crossing half a century of operations. Trump has chosen to turn the issue into a hostage crisis over his attempts to graft his own floundering public image onto the legacy of one of the most beloved presidents in American history. An informational packet given to trustees and obtained by The Washington Post suggested that Trump would be unlikely to cooperate with fundraising efforts and the supposedly urgent renovations without “appropriate recognition” of his role in the project. 

On Monday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted a video on social media supposedly showing a portion of the ceiling in the building’s main lobby spontaneously falling onto the red carpeting below. “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,” Lutnick wrote.

Trump also posted about the center’s condition on Monday, writing on Truth Social that it is in “a virtual state of collapse, and that if it were open “innocent people would have been killed.”

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The funds to renovate the structure were already approved by Congress last year, but in May a federal judge ruled that the theater — the board of which is now packed with Trump cronies — violated the law when it slapped Trump’s name on the building, trying to rebrand it as the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” U.S. District Judge Casey Cooper wrote in forcing the name to come down. “The Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so.” 

On Tuesday, the board voted to close the center. The administration was first forced to appear in court to answer for a lawsuit challenging any closure, and the board’s efforts to usurp congressional authority over the theater. On Tuesday morning, Judge Cooper held another hearing in which he reminded the administration that there were already $257 million available to them for the proposed projects, and said he would require further details to support their claim that the Kennedy Center is on the verge of bankruptcy. Cooper ruled that the board could not re-add Trump’s name to the facade, even in noting that Trump renovated it, as the board had floated as a potential way to get Trump’s name on the building without renaming it outright.

“Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” the judge wrote.

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The move to close the center will likely be subjected to additional judicial scrutiny — especially given the administration’s past efforts to circumvent Congress.

What’s in a name? In this case a succinct distillation of the manner in which Trump, struggling to build a true legacy of adoration with the American public, is once again prepared to cheat, and steal, and force his way into the cultural record.