A federal judge told Donald Trump to take his name off the Kennedy Center. The board he installed replied: what if we just put it back in smaller letters?
That is not a joke. On Thursday, Trump’s handpicked board voted to inscribe “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” beneath the building’s principal signage, according to The New York Times. The same resolution suggests naming the grounds the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza” and directs center officials to honor Trump through “all legal means.” The phrase “all legal means” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a board that was just told, in a written court order, that it broke the law.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in May that the board “overstepped its statutory bounds” by unilaterally adding Trump’s name to the institution. Congress designated the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as a living memorial to an assassinated president. Federal law bars additional memorials on its public spaces. Cooper’s language was direct: “May the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts be renamed absent Congressional authorization? The answer, plain from the face of the statute, is no. Nor can any other individual be memorialized on the front portico of the building.”
Workers removed Trump’s lettering overnight on June 12. Then scaffolding and tarps went up, blocking the public from seeing the restored facade. Rep. Joyce Beatty’s attorneys accused Trump’s allies of “willfully sabotaging” the building’s appearance after losing in court. Cooper ordered the parties to explain the covering. This is what contempt looks like when it wears a tuxedo.
Trump responded to the ruling by posting that the judge “should be ashamed of himself” and announcing he would transfer control of the center to Congress. He also said he was backing away from his proposed renovation, framing his retreat as magnanimity: “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.'” The capitalization is his. The petulance is also his.
OhanaSurf (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsBut the board he installed is still voting. Still scheming. Still finding new angles. Trump took control of the Kennedy Center in February 2025, fired trustees, installed political allies, named himself chairman, and put Richard Grenell in charge. The institution then purged LGBTQ+ programming, including a WorldPride concert with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C. Artists withdrew. Productions relocated. Audiences stayed away. Ticket sales plunged. The board voted in December to rename the whole place the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex officio trustee whose voting rights the board had stripped, sued. She won.
And now the board is back with a plaque. The same board Cooper called “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” when it voted to close the facility for a $250 million, two-year renovation. The same board that voted again Thursday to close the main building, presenting a 163-page plan that must be submitted to Cooper next week.
The pattern is unmistakable. Lose in court. Denounce the judge. Announce a retreat. Quietly try again through a side door. This is not governance. It is a man who cannot tolerate a building in Washington that does not bear his name, and a board that treats a federal court order as a suggestion to be creatively reinterpreted.
The Kennedy Center belongs to the public. Congress gave it its name. A judge has said so, in writing, with statutory citation. Every member of that board who voted Thursday to defy that order should be named, held to account, and removed. The courts have spoken. The question now is whether anyone in a position to enforce the ruling will actually do it, or whether we will watch another institution get swallowed by a man who already has his name on enough buildings.