Workers pried President Trump's name off the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts before a noon Saturday deadline, after two federal courts rejected a last-minute bid by the center's Trump-appointed board to keep the lettering up pending appeal.
The removal closes a six-month experiment that turned one of Washington's few largely nonpartisan stages into a Trump-branded venue, and marks one of the first concrete reversals of the president's effort to reshape the capital's physical landscape. The original Kennedy Center lettering remains hidden behind a tarp over the scaffolding, with no announced date for its removal.
How it came down
Matt Floca, the center's executive director and chief operating officer, told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in a Saturday filing that the institution had removed "all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump." A reporter who peered through a gap in the tarp confirmed the letters were no longer affixed to the wall.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, ruled in May that only Congress has the authority to rename the Kennedy Center and ordered the signage down by June 12. The same ruling blocked a planned two-year closure for renovations set to begin in July. The board's appeal to the D.C. Circuit was denied Friday after the court found the center had not shown it was likely to prevail on the merits.
The plaintiff
Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, an ex officio member of the board, was the named plaintiff. She sued in December after Trump's hand-picked trustees voted to rebrand the venue as the "Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts," arguing the change required congressional approval. Beatty appeared in the plaza Friday and Saturday and posted a video from one of the center's great halls.
"Today's victory is the beginning of returning the Kennedy Center to the American people," Beatty said. "The rule of law prevailed, and that is worth celebrating."
The counter-argument
The Justice Department, in an emergency appeal, argued the timing was wasteful and that donor money was at stake. "It does not make sense to alter the Center's name and signage now, only to potentially revert the name again," government attorneys wrote, telling the court that "without the name, 'Trump' on the Building, our fundraising will not only come to a halt." The board's filing, in language that mirrored the president's own speech patterns, warned that Judge Cooper's parallel order against the two-year closure was leaving the building exposed to "life threatening structural damage like beams and parking garage ceilings that are rusted, and in serious danger of falling onto people below." "Indeed, total collapse!" the filing added. Cooper and the D.C. Circuit found those arguments insufficient to stay the order; the underlying appeal on the renaming itself is still pending.
Trump, who has called Judge Cooper part of the "Radical Left" and said the court would "rather see it DIE" than let him remake the venue, has suggested he will hand the Kennedy Center to Congress or shutter it on public-safety grounds. The center's calendar is sparse beyond a June 28 Mark Twain Award ceremony for Bill Maher.