Booted From Kennedy Center, Trump Stomps Off In A Rage
Cancel culture claims another victim.
On Friday, a federal judge in DC ordered Donald Trump to take John F. Kennedy’s name out of his filthy mouth. More or less.
In a meticulous, 94-page order, Judge Christopher Cooper found that the toadies Trump installed on the Kennedy Center Board might have the legal right to rubber stamp a plan to shut down the storied arts center for two years and convert into a Vegas-style emporium, but they didn’t have the smarts to do it properly. And they certainly never had the power to rename the place after Trump himself.
Along the way, the court ruled that the president lied about the proposed renovation, as did his cronies.
Naturally Trump has responded with his normal gravitas, dramatically washing his hands of the entire project and personally attacking Judge Cooper and his wife — all of which will be Exhibit A should the government make good on its threat to appeal.
Come back, Camelot!
In 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Cultural Center Act to create a center for the arts in the nation’s capital. At first, fundraising was sluggish. But after President Kennedy’s assassination, Congress re-designated the project in 1964 as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The “living memorial” to the slain president drew private donations and public funds, and in 1971 it opened with a performance of the Mass by Leonard Bernstein, the quintessentially American composer.
Trump, who prefers “Cats” to Callas, has a testy relationship with the performing arts. And vice versa! During his campaigns, popular musicians routinely sued to block him playing their songs at his MAGA rallies. But during his first term, Trump largely left the nation’s important cultural institutions alone. This time around, the culture warriors at Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute were ready to wreak havoc on these “liberal” bastions on day one.
Echoing Nazi claims about degenerate art, Trump announced that he was firing the board of the Kennedy Center and appointing “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!”
The new board included Pam Bondi, Florida lobbyist Bryan Ballard, Lee Greenwood, Laura Ingraham, and Dan Scavino, the guy who writes Trump’s tweets. Ric Grenell, a figure from the first Trump administration who was too toxic to be let back into the White House(!), was installed as executive director.
The fallout from this MAGA-fication was immediate.
Everyone from Renée Fleming to Issa Rae canceled scheduled performances.
“You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties,” Grenell sneered at banjo player Béla Fleck.
This charm offensive failed to stanch the bleeding, although Grenell put on a game face. In September of 2025, he bragged about sellout crowds and high demand for Kennedy Center Honors tickets, promising that America250, the nation’s 250th birthday celebration, would be a show like none other. (Wait for it …)
Then in December, the board voted to rename the institution the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Signage went up the very next day, suggesting that the outcome was essentially a foregone conclusion.
After which the bottom fell out. Ticket sales collapsed, immediately dropping 70 percent as compared to the prior three years, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Washington National Opera, the Center’s resident company since 1971, announced it was severing the relationship. In fact, so many artists canceled that there was functionally no 2026 season left.
Rather than face the humiliation of throwing a party and having no one show up, Trump announced on February 1 that the Kennedy Center would close for two years, “totally subject to Board approval,” for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.” The facility was already slated to undergo major renovations, but in phases so as not to interrupt programming. But citing “a one year review that has taken place with Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants,” Trump claimed that the project would be more efficient if they could do it all at once.
Six weeks later, after Trump publicly described the board’s approval as a “minor detail” because “we’ve already announced it,” the trustees voted to ratify the changes announced in the February 1 post.
Fiduciary Representative
Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat from Ohio and an ex officio trustee of the Kennedy Center, sued to block the name change and the cancellation of the 2026 season. She argued that only Congress could alter the name of the institution, and that the March vote was so procedurally improper as to be illegal. She complained that she was locked out, thanks to a May 2025 bylaw amendment purporting to strip ex officio trustees of their right to vote. She says that the board went so far as to mute her mic at the Zoom meeting so that she couldn’t comment on the changes. And she alleged that the board abdicated its fiduciary duty to consider the ramifications of abandoning the plan to renovate in stages.
In the main, Judge Christopher Cooper agreed.
“Representative Beatty is entitled to summary judgment on the renaming issue,” he wrote. “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes 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. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
After a detailed disquisition on the law of trusts — common and DC — as well as the language of the “organic statute,” the court concluded that the board could not simply vote to disenfranchise ex officio trustees.
The issue of closing the Center required a fact-based inquiry. As for Trump’s claim of a year-long, expert study, Judge Cooper determined that “the evidence of any such review is nil.” To the extent that any review took place, it was a mere paperwork perusal by Matthew Floca, the vice president in charge of facilities who took over as executive director in March after Grenell was eased out. After multiple conversations with Trump, Floca consulted competing proposals developed between 2020 and 2024 and decided that they really needed to shut down the Kennedy Center after all.
“There are no reports or other evidence in the record apart from Floca’s own testimony to confirm the details of his ‘extensive analysis,’” Judge Cooper noted dryly, adding that “no evidence in the record substantiates” Floca’s claim that he came to this conclusion months before Trump posted it.
Floca provided the board with a few pages of cursory analysis, focused solely on the practicalities of construction. He admitted that he never considered the “programmatic” aspects, such as the impact on donors, loss of ticket revenue, diminished goodwill in the community, and damage to relationships with artists like the Washington Opera. And because Floca never took into account any of these intangibles, neither did the board.
Judge Cooper wrote:
As stewards of property held in trust for the American people, Board members must go about fulfilling these duties consistent with common-law standards of prudence. The preliminary factual record before the Court reveals that, in ratifying President Trump’s closure announcement, the Board was derelict in discharging the full range of its responsibilities to the Center. More specifically, the Board based its decision on an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information and neglected to consider the full range of its statutory obligations and potential adverse consequences of closure on programming and memorial functions.
He also made time to mock the piss-poor lawyering by the DOJ. The government actually argued that, if Rep. Beatty had an affirmative duty to sue her fellow trustees, the mere fact of filing a complaint fulfilled it, and that should be the end of the matter. Judge Cooper was clearly offended by this ridiculous suggestion, scoffing that “Playing courthouse ‘ding dong ditch’ can hardly be said to satisfy these legal obligations.”
The court issued a preliminary injunction on canceling the season, since the board — which has a supermajority of Trump appointees, even counting the ex officio members — could theoretically go back and fulfill their fiduciary obligations by conducting a prudent inquiry, and then decide to do the same thing. But he granted summary judgment on the issue of the name and Beatty’s right to vote on the board.
Endless screaming
As his habit, Trump responded by throwing a multi-day tantrum. He raged at “a Barack Hussein Obama Judge named Christopher Cooper” and his wife, Amy Jeffress, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at Hecker, Fink, which represents Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Joe Biden and previously represented E. Jean Carroll.
“People shouldn’t be allowed to go into that Building until this is fixed, and yet the Trump Hating Judge wants to keep it open because his wife probably told him to do so!” he screeched, falsely insisting that the Kennedy Center is “in a potential state of collapse, rusted, rotted, and rat and bug infested.”
Somehow this all goes back to the Supreme Court where “our Country lost the TARIFF Case, and is forced to pay back 149 Billion Dollars in money received from people who hate everything we stand for … and that is probably why our Country will lose the Birthright Citizenship Case (No other Country in the World has this — It is totally unaffordable!), because our Court System is RIGGED, no different than our Political System is RIGGED, and the people of our Country know it, and that is why I got overwhelmingly elected President, in Record Numbers, and will FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!”
The president concluded by announcing that he’s taking his ball and going home.
“I cannot be involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight. Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into “NEVER NEVER LAND.” There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I but, that’s OK, I will continue to do, what is considered to be, a great job for the wonderful people of our Country. I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
What does the Department of Commerce have to do with the Kennedy Center?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On CNN, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — who actually does deal with the Kennedy Center, through the National Park Service — suggested that the case might be appealed to the DC Circuit.
And meanwhile, Trump is running the same play on America250. With virtually every artist but Vanilla Ice pulling out, Trump first mused about “bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists.’”
When slapping his name on the wall failed to do the trick, he once again threatened to cancel the whole shebang. Somehow this, too, is all Judge Cooper’s fault.
Happy Anniversary, America. Or something.
Ok but he says he aced his fourth dementia test in a row so I’m sure he’s got a plan.
I am constantly gobsmacked by the so-called “legal professionals”, who have a duty to…you know…the law and ethics (I know, charming, huh) that CONSTANTLY ENABLE the worst impulses of Trump and CONSTANTLY ENABLE his criminal actions. The time can’t come soon enuff when this guy shuffles off this mortal coil.