The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts approved a plan on Thursday to enshrine President Donald Trump’s name on the building, setting off a new battle in the war over what mark he should be able to leave on the institution.
We have been down this road before. The Kennedy Center’s board of trustees “overstepped its statutory bounds by unilaterally renaming the Kennedy Center after President Trump,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in May. “In 1964, Congress deliberately rechristened the ‘National Cultural Center’ the ‘John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.’ The text, structure, and evolution of the organic statute makes the institution’s name abundantly clear.”
The center, as a result, was forced to remove Trump’s name, which had been affixed to the facade as: THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS. That addition came after the president took control of the Kennedy Center last year—a grab, he maintained, that was necessary to combat alleged wokeness at the institution. “We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center,” he said in February 2025 aboard Air Force One. “Some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on. So I’ll be there until such time as it gets to be running right.”
The renewed effort to add Trump’s name seeks to creatively circumvent Cooper’s ruling by adding it a different way: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” it would read, under the main signage. The persistence here raises a few questions. The most glaring: Why?
For the sake of argument, let us take Trump’s word at face value when he said he wants to heal the Kennedy Center of wokeness. It is unclear how obsessively attempting to inscribe his name on the building achieves that end. If anything, it undermines it. This is not about making the center more accessible to a broader public but rather about tailoring it narrowly to one person.
But isn’t the board the one doing this? It is. The group is now chaired by Trump and filled with his allies, who unfortunately continue to chip away at their dignity by insisting on worshiping a politician in this way.
Trump is not the first politician to command adoration from his supporters. But the results of this vanity project have been unfortunate. As I wrote in June of the takeover:
Ticket sales plummeted, artists canceled en masse, donations reportedly declined. “It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center,” Washington National Opera artistic director Francesca Zambello, who said donor confidence had “shattered,” told The Guardian in an interview last year. “But if we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets in there, we have to consider other options. The two things that support a company financially, because of the takeover, have been severely compromised.” The company left the Kennedy Center soon after.
Whatever the outcome of this new bid at adulation, it will likely be short-lived. If the courts do not reject the plan, I cannot imagine a future Democratic president will be particularly interested in letting Trump’s name stay on the Kennedy Center. Audiences will hopefully trickle back eventually, as well. Its transience is, ironically, another reminder that flattering a politician is hardly worth the long-term loss of your self-respect.
