The Kennedy Center board voted Thursday to add Donald Trump’s name back to the building and to rename the physical location President Donald J. Trump Plaza, setting up a new confrontation with a federal judge who had already ordered the center preserved as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. The 20-3 vote also cleared the way for the arts center’s main building to close for up to two years during renovations.
The move came after Howard Lutnick proposed the name change and Donald Trump joined the virtual board call for several minutes. The board’s wording was explicit: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump. The site itself would become President Donald J. Trump Plaza. Joyce Beatty, Sheldon Whitehouse and Rick Larsen voted no.
The vote matters now because the center’s Concert Hall will not be available while work proceeds, and the National Symphony Orchestra’s future is suddenly less certain. Giancarlo Noseda leads that orchestra, which has long performed at the Kennedy Center, and the board said some events would move to the Reach while the main building is closed. That leaves the center operating in pieces, with one of its best-known spaces out of commission and one of its chief tenants left waiting for a calendar that is no longer stable.
The renovation plan is broad enough to justify the closure. A full shutdown of the main building for up to two years would normally cover work that is hard to do around an operating arts campus: structural repairs, mechanical systems, interior work and the kind of buildingwide updates that make public spaces unusable while crews are inside. The board had already voted unanimously in March to close the center for two years for renovations, but Christopher Cooper later issued a May order requiring the board to keep the center as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy and temporarily blocked the planned closure. In June, he ordered Trump’s name removed.
That is the friction in the story. The board went ahead anyway, choosing a new inscription and a new plaza name even after a judge had already said the center must remain a memorial and had stripped Trump’s name once before. Joyce Beatty called the move “a transparent effort to circumvent the Court’s ruling, and flies in the face of the statutes that Congress passed,” and said she would keep fighting for what she called a treasured national monument. Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky said the board was showing blatant disrespect to the courts.
The Kennedy Center was conceived by Jaqueline Kennedy as a memorial to her slain husband, and it opened in the early 1970s. Trump has reshaped the board since naming himself chairman and filling it with allies, which is why Thursday’s vote landed as more than a title change. It was a direct test of whether the board’s political control can outrun the court orders already on the books. For now, the answer is no one knows whether Cooper will let the new naming plan or the closure schedule stand, but the center has now put both before him at once.
