At The Kennedy Center, It's Curtains For Trump

It was a disastrous run

This weekend, two formerly-lauded public institutions humiliated themselves in spectacular fashion. By Sunday, one was shrouded in thousands of yards of tarpaulin — a translucent prophylactic, hiding an old man’s flaccid defeat. The other dangled limply in the breeze, its useless degradation on full display.

The occasion of this display of onanism was the courts’ refusal to let Trump rechristen the Kennedy Center in honor of himself. After booting the prior board, he filled out the roster with cronies and wives of cronies, led by “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” His henchmen, including sentient shitpost Ric Grenell, as executive director, set about alienating every artist to the left of Lee Greenwood. By happenstance, the patriotic pop singer is the only artist currently on the Kennedy Center’s Board.

In December the Board announced that it had agreed to rename the institution “The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” The decision was “unanimous,” thanks to the recently amended bylaws, which purported to strip voting rights from ex officio trustees. The steady trickle of artist cancellations increased to a tsunami. Faced with the evaporation of the 2026 season, the Board voted to shut the Center down entirely for two years, accelerating a planned renovation that had been scheduled to take place in stages to allow performances to continue.

Rep. Joyce Beatty, one of those disenfranchised ex officio board members, sued to block the changes, and on May 29, she won. Judge Christopher Cooper granted summary judgment on the name change and the voting issue, ruling that the Board’s actions violated the plain language of the Kennedy Center’s organic statute. He issued a preliminary injunction voiding the vote to shut the place down, finding that the Trump trustees violated their fiduciary duty consider the long-term health of the institution when they simply obeyed Trump’s demand to close up shop.

The judge ordered the Center to reverse the name change and remove all signage within 14 days, and initially it looked like the Board intended to comply. On June 4, management sent a memo to the remaining staff instructing them to immediately remove all references to the “Trump” Kennedy Center from the website and their email signatures. But then on June 11, just hours before the deadline, the Board noticed its appeal to the DC Circuit and requested that Judge Cooper stay his ruling.

That motion was pretty desultory, even by the low standards of the current DOJ — just five mumbled pages, rehashing rejected arguments and asserting without evidence that taking Trump’s name off the building would decimate fundraising. Judge Cooper rejected it in a cursory minute order citing “both the de minimis resources that would be required to restore the Center's current name in the event of a successful appeal and the lack of record evidence linking increased donations to the current name.”

As this was going on, workers began constructing scaffolding in front of the building, and a crowd gathered to watch Trump’s name come down — our own little toppling of the Saddam statue. Construction stopped mid-afternoon, putatively because of a brief rain shower, but more likely because the Justice Department had filed an emergency request for a stay from the DC Circuit.

The motion was packed with the usual Trumpian vulgarity, calling Rep. Beatty “a troublemaking appointment, from the beginning of her tenure!” and howling that “The District Court is not allowing us to close in order to properly fix up and repair the Building, including potentially life threatening structural damage like beams and parking garage ceilings that are rusted, and in serious danger of falling onto people below — Indeed, total collapse!” It also contained brand new arguments of fact and law never raised below, something which Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, the sole signatory, knows is totally impermissible.

Specifically, it alleged that the bylaws would force the Board to return all donations if Trump’s name was removed from the institution:

The Bylaws of The Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation state, unequivocally: “The Corporation may make donations to the Center in support of its educational, artistic, cultural, and performing arts functions; provided, however, that in so doing, the Board of Directors shall condition such donations to the Center upon the name of the Center remaining unchanged as the ‘Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.’ In the event the Center should at any time remove the name of President Donald J. Trump from its filings, marketing, branding, façade, or any other affiliated location, the Corporation shall recover from the Center the total of all gifts, donations, and contributions made to the Center by or on behalf of the Corporation.” The reason for this clause is that people and companies, who have given, or will be giving, millions of dollars to the Center were only willing to do so with the name “Trump” on the Building. Many did it because they loved the concept of two Great Presidents, one Republican, one Democrat, working together as one — In many ways, a bipartisan relationship! All of this money, hundreds of millions of dollars, will have to be immediately returned, or not received by the Center.

The Board previously briefed this issue at least four times, and it never mentioned any such bylaw, which strongly suggests that they only adopted it sometime after Judge Cooper issued his ruling two weeks ago. After getting reamed out for failing to live up to their fiduciary obligations, Trump’s cronies voted to defund the Center entirely if the courts refuse to allow them to break the law.

This concern for donor funds is a bit ironic (in the makes-you-bleed-from-your-ears sense), coming as it did just hours after the Washington National Opera sued the Kennedy Center for expropriating its $17 million endowment. The complaint alleges the Center quit processing WNO's donations, failed to run a donor's credit card and lost a $50,000 gift as a result, and then, when the affiliation terminated, cut WNO off from its own records entirely. The Board insisting that removing Trump's name will destroy donor confidence is the same Board that couldn't be bothered to cash donor checks.

In the event, the Board’s threat to shoot the hostage failed to sway the DC Circuit panel (Millet, Wilkins, Katsas), which denied the stay and set the case to be briefed by the end of the month. The workers resumed assembling the scaffolding.

But the president and his pals had one more bit of ratfuckery up their sleeves — a dirty trick which seems obvious in retrospect when you compare the handful of guys who manned boom and scissor lifts to slap Trump’s name on the building with the elaborate structure erected to remove it. At 1:30am, with the plaza full of cheering DC residents and close to 100,000 people tuning in via livestream, workers began unfurling the tarps that would hide Trump’s surrender.

Deprived of the spectacle, the city nonetheless rejoiced at the reminder that this nightmare will one be over. We may not get to topple the Saddam statue just yet, but we do have a date certain for our demagogue’s departure.

As of this writing, the tarps remain. Modesty, please! The dictator is unclenching.