Judge Orders Removal of Trump’s Name from Kennedy Center

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

A federal judge ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s name must be removed from the Kennedy Center, arguing that the institution’s board acted unlawfully when it voted to add the president’s name to the venue and ordering a halt to plans to temporarily close the center for renovations.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sided with Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), a member of the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees, who challenged both the name change and a proposed two-year closure beginning this summer. Her lawsuit, filed last December, argued that “[b]ecause Congress named the center by statute, changing the Kennedy Center’s name requires an act of Congress.”

“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,” Cooper agreed in the 94-page decision.

Cooper argued that the inclusion of the president’s name “reflects far more than an innocuous nicknaming” as he trashed the administration’s framing of the rebrand thus as “too cute by half.”

“The administration’s efforts to alter the names of other institutions – calling the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” for example – are beside the point. Most fundamentally, none of these examples implicate a presidential memorial that was legislatively intended to honor a specific public figure. The ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ label adds an entirely new name to the Center’s formal title and relegates President Kennedy’s name to second place,” he wrote. “If that is not a renaming, what is?”

He followed: “In sum, the Board clearly violated the Kennedy Center’s organic statute—and the terms of the trust—when it formally renamed the Center after President Trump and memorialized him on the face of the building. There is no genuine dispute of material fact on this point, just a lackluster attempt to recast the renaming as something it was not: a casual nicknaming.”

Last December, the board voted to rename the venue “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” — a change that was implemented on the venue website within hours before work began adding Trump’s name to the facade of the building.

Cooper also sharply criticized the board’s approval of a planned closure following this summer’s July 4 celebrations and found that the board improperly stripped Beatty of voting rights during a March meeting where the closure plan was approved.

While Cooper blocked the shutdown for now, he acknowledged that repair work is “sorely needed” and left open the possibility that the board could revisit a closure after conducting a more thorough review.

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