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The board of trustees for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., voted on Thursday to place President Donald Trump’s name on the outside of the building, testing a previous court order that blocked the renaming of the institution after the president.
The change is a loophole of sorts. While the vote doesn’t attempt to rename the building after Trump, it does place a new inscription on the building in an attempt to honor him.
During the first month of his return to office, Trump fired all of the board of trustees and replaced them with his own handpicked loyalists. The board eventually voted to rename the center by placing his name ahead of Kennedy’s, and for a time, the building was known as “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
But a federal judge ruled earlier this year that the move violated congressional dictates requiring that the center be named after former President John F. Kennedy and no one else.
By law, Congress had made “crystal clear that 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,” U.S. District Judge Casey Cooper determined.
Trump’s name was eventually removed from the center’s exterior. But on August 13, the board voted to continue renovations of the building and to place a new inscription on its exterior that reads “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”
The board also voted to rename the center’s grounds to the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
Cooper had stipulated in his ruling that the renaming of the building and other planned renovations had to be put on hold so the board could consider how the changes would affect the Kennedy Center’s performance schedule and its congressionally mandated programming. The board determined in its vote this week that renovations could move forward while a smaller stage remained open to performances, hoping to navigate around Cooper’s stipulations.
The board must submit its changes for approval to the federal court by August 18.
On Thursday night, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins noted that Trump’s obsession with remaking national fixtures in his image wasn’t limited to the Kennedy Center.
“The president’s focus has not just been on the Kennedy Center in terms of his broader push to remake Washington. It’s also his penchant for branding everything in his name,” Collins opined. “That includes the gold coins, the Trump passports, the National Park passes, the Palm Beach airport — I’m not done — the banner at the Justice Department, the new class of battleships. There are many things, not just in Washington, but all across the nation now bearing the Trump name.”
When Trump’s name was removed from the building earlier this summer, some artists celebrated the restoration of the venue’s intended name to honor Kennedy, not the current president.
Trump’s name being removed from the building in June “really does mean something,” said Mallory Miller, former assistant manager of dance at the center, who was fired last August. “This is just the first step in rebuilding the trust that has been lost.”
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