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The Trump-aligned board at the Kennedy Center voted earlier this
month to inscribe the president's name on the venue’s facade so
it would read “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump.” If
the Trump Kennedy Center Fund reached $100 million, another
inscription would be added reading “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy
Center Fund.”
The plaza in front of the Kennedy Center would also be renamed
to recognize Trump.
The Kennedy Center has said it wouldn’t attempt to engrave
Trump’s name on the building before Sept. 8 to allow for legal
arguments to unfold.
Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex officio member of the Kennedy
Center, has led the effort to prevent Trump from memorializing
himself there. In asking for the court’s intervention, her
lawyers, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, wrote that the
board's actions amounted to “clear violations” of an earlier
court order.
A representative for the Kennedy Center didn’t immediately
respond to a request for comment. The resolution approved by
Trump’s allies on the board said the Kennedy Center “would be in
financial ruin without President Trump’s unique stature as both
an unparalleled fundraiser and world-class developer.”
Congress named the performing arts center as a living memorial
to Kennedy in 1964, the year after he was assassinated. The law
explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the
center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another
person’s name on the building’s exterior.
U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in May that
the Kennedy Center illegally added Trump’s name to the building,
ordering it removed. The institution’s leaders complied in June
but left a tarp and scaffolding in place where Trump’s name once
stood.
Lawyers for the Kennedy Center wouldn’t commit this week to
taking down the scaffolding, saying it’s needed as part of a
broader system for “water testing and structural repairs to the
roof overhang.”
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