Kennedy Center misses deadline, wants more time to remove Trump’s name

In a court filing just before midnight, the board said its work was delayed by thunderstorms in Washington, D.C., but that it expected to complete its work removing Trump’s name in the early hours of Saturday.

The board had tried a last-ditch effort to appeal the court’s decision to take down Trump’s name, but Judge Christopher Cooper rejected that request on Friday, saying the board hadn’t shown its appeal was likely to succeed.

Workers in white hard hats spent much of Friday night building scaffolding that reached Trump’s name as crowds below yelled, “Take it down!” Hundreds of people gathered at the center to watch the removal of Trump’s name. Many more were watching livestreams online.

Trump took a personal interest in overhauling the center at the start of his second term. The Kennedy Center’s board, chaired by Trump and stacked with his allies, voted to add his name above that of President John F. Kennedy last year, and swiftly installed the new signage. They also approved a plan to close the center for two years to allow for extensive renovations.

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D., Ohio), an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board of trustees, filed a lawsuit challenging those moves.

Cooper’s ruling said that only Congress can change the center’s name under the federal law that stood up the cultural institution after Kennedy’s assassination. The board said the “Trump Kennedy Center” was merely a nickname, but Cooper didn’t agree. “That convenient reframing is too cute by half,” the judge wrote. Cooper said Trump’s name must be taken off the cultural center’s building by Friday, as well as its website and any official physical or digital signage.

The center’s staff was directed to begin changing email signatures, letterhead and other Kennedy Center documents to remove Trump’s name, according to a June 4 memo. Trump’s name has already been removed from the center’s website.

But a day before the deadline to remove Trump’s name, the board decided to proceed with an appeal and asked Cooper to pause his ruling while it did so. In addition to the costs of removing the name, the board argued that it would hurt fundraising efforts and confuse the public, especially if the appeals court ultimately reversed Cooper’s decision.

Lawyers for Beatty told the judge the center had plenty of time to comply with the order or file an appeal and described the request to pause Cooper’s ruling as a frivolous, last-minute gambit.

“Defendants suggest that they will lose ‘time and money’ from restoring the name,” Beatty’s lawyers said. “This grasps at straws.”

Beatty joined the crowd of spectators outside the center on Friday afternoon as workers were setting up scaffolding around the sign. “Of course they’re going to fight us every bit of the way,” she told them. “There’s going to be a legal fight, so it means a lot to have you and others coming out and standing here.”

In his ruling last month, Cooper also blocked the board from closing the center for two years to allow for a planned multimillion-dollar renovation beginning July 4.

After Cooper’s ruling, Trump signaled he was backing away from plans to renovate the building, even though the order said capital repair work could continue. “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,’” Trump wrote in a social-media post.

Trump has been on a remodeling spree to leave his mark on the nation’s capital during his second term in office. He ordered the East Wing of the White House be ripped down to build a ballroom, directed the bottom of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall be painted blue and proposed building a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery. Like the Kennedy Center’s renaming and planned closure, those projects were met with legal challenges.

Write to Joseph Pisani at [email protected] and Lydia Wheeler at [email protected]