A federal judge has ordered Donald Trump to remove his name from the front of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, handing the president a setback in his effort to stamp his own mark on one of the capital’s best-known cultural landmarks. Judge Christopher Cooper said the centre’s board went too far when it renamed the institution after Trump, and that only Congress has the power to make that kind of change.
The ruling landed Friday afternoon Washington time, and Trump responded almost immediately on Truth Social. He accused Cooper of ignoring warnings about rotting beams, collapsing parking areas and other dangers at the building, which he called a failing institution and a safety hazard. “Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself!” Trump wrote, adding that he could not be involved where “danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight.”
Cooper’s 94-page opinion turned on the Kennedy Centre’s own founding. Congress christened the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1964 to honor the assassinated president, and the judge said the text, structure and evolution of the law made the institution’s name “abundantly clear.” He wrote that Congress “took pains to ensure that no other memorial-like dedication would grace the centre’s public spaces,” and concluded that the board’s move to attach Trump’s name to the façade violated Congress’s “unequivocal mandate.”
The centre has been a major home for opera, musical theatre, ballet and other performing arts in the US capital for decades, sitting on the banks of the Potomac River near the historic Watergate building. Trump had named himself chairman of the board and filled it with loyalists, and earlier this year the board also voted to shutter the performing arts centre for a multi-year renovation, a move the judge had already rejected. Cooper said in that earlier ruling, and again in this one, that Congress gave the institution its name and only Congress can change it.
That leaves the Kennedy Centre, and Trump’s effort to make it his own, in an unsettled place. The judge has now blocked the name change, but the ruling does not say whether Trump will comply or how the board will answer a decision that strips his name from the front of the building and leaves the institution’s public identity where Congress put it nearly 60 years ago.
