Friday night I was glued to the CSPAN livestream of the work to remove the name of Donald J. Trump from the Kennedy Center. It never belonged there.
I began to fantasize Trump inserting himself into the Lincoln Memorial, with a sculpture of him seated next to Lincoln, in the newly renamed Trump Lincoln Memorial. Why not slap his name on the Washington Monument? Who would stop him? What else can he name for himself?
So to see his name removed, letter by letter, was a historic event, as well as a profound humiliation for Trump. But I didn’t get to see it because it didn’t happen until 3 am, which I thought happened not only because of a rain delay but because of purposeful, deliberate slow-walking to make sure few people saw it.
Since the Kennedy Center opened, it has had a bipartisan board. It was not political. It attracted leading artists. It was, as intended, a great cultural institution for artists. It was an honor to perform there. Until Trump.
Until Trump dismissed the members of the board appointed by Biden and replaced them with Trump toadies. Trump named himself to the board, and the new board elected Trump as its president, a position never before held by the President. Trump is petty, wracked by envy, a hunger for respect, and a passion for retribution.
As the Kennedy Center turned political, wholly owned by Trump, artists began canceling their performances. The biggest blow was the cancellation of Hamilton, which was sure to be sold out.
He fired the professional arts administrator who led the Kennedy Center and replaced her with a Trump loyalist, Richard Grennell, Ambassador to Germany in Trump’s first term, lacking any relevant experience.
In short order, other nonpolitical administrators left or were fired.
Ticket sales plummeted.
The Washington National Opera left the Kennedy Center and continues to perform at different venues around D.C.
The National Symphony Orchestra decided to stay.
Faced with a financial and artistic backlash, the board decided that the building needed major renovations and announced that the Center would close for two years. Grennell laid off staff in anticipation of the long closure. The National Symphony Orchestra was looking for alternate venues to stay alive during the two-year hiatus.
Meanwhile the Washington National Opera–which left in January 2026–was deadlocked with the Center, because the Center refused to give the Opera the $17 million that was its endowment, made up of gifts given specifically to the Opera. The Center said the Opera ran a deficit, so the Center claimed the Opera’s endowment as payment. The Opera sued the Center on June 11.
So…I wanted to see Trump’s name come down. It was history. The removal crew started before noon. They began erecting an elaborate scaffold, laboriously. This was odd because when Trump’s name went up, the workers were elevated by scissor lifts and quickly attached his name. The rise of the scaffolding was delayed by a heavy rain. When the rain ended, the erection of the scaffold was sluggish, at best. It went on for hours. The workers kept piecing the scaffolding together. Occasionally they would all climb down and nothing was happening.
At midnight, I gave up and went to bed. The next morning, I googled to see the renewed facade, the one without Trump’s name. I couldn’t find it anywhere, in any format.
I read that the workers began removing his name at 3 am, but their work was hidden by white tarps. No one could photograph them doing it. Presumably, Trump couldn’t bear the humiliation. The front of the building remained covered the next day.
What a baby! What a self-centered, narcissistic baby!
The hero of this saga is Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio. She was an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center by virtue of her role in Congress. Trump couldn’t fire her. The board tried to exclude her. At the meeting where they voted to approve the name change, they muted her mic so she could not participate.
It was Representative Beatty who sued to have Trump’s name stripped from the Center. The federal judge who decided the case ruled that Congress named the Center, and only Congress could change the name.
Here is Representative Beatty, inside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, dancing and celebrating her victory the way Trump dances.
Thank you, Congresswoman Beatty!
The crisis of the Kennedy Center is far from over. The board is still packed with allies of Trump. Its staff, what’s left of it, is led by Trump partisans. Because the board wanted to close it for two years, there has been no programming for next year.
Trump has proved once again that he is the master of chaos. As the adage goes, whatever Trump touches, dies.
The Kennedy Center must not die. Congress must intervene to restore the nonpartisan nature of the Kennedy Center.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Watching the Kennedy Center Board/Trump Administration drape the facade of the Kennedy Center Friday afternoon, to shroud in secrecy Trump’s humiliation at having his name forcibly removed from a building he’s claimed as his own, caused me more than a moment of déjà vu.
For one of the real estate development and finance courses I have taught for more than a decade, I adopted Vicky Ward’s excellent 2014 book, “The Liar’s Ball,” recounting the history of the development and ownership of the General Motors Building in New York City over a fifty-year period. I recalled from reading Ward’s book, and then teaching from it, several sections involving then-real estate developer Donald Trump.
Trump at one point in time owned the GM Building in partnership with his co-investor, insurance giant Conseco. As part of that deal, he became the Property Manager of the building, and immediately made it “a Trump building,” which included the installation of his name in giant (four-foot tall) gold letters above the building’s entrance at 767 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Through operating and financial mismanagement of the GM Building, by June 2003 Trump had lost the ownership stake he’d created with Conseco just five (5) years earlier, when they jointly purchased the GM Building from mall developer David Simon.
Conseco needed to auction the building to recoup its investment and determined that doing so required the removal of Trump’s name, in four-foot-tall gold letters, from the entrance to the GM Building. Many very well-known players in New York City real estate were overjoyed when they learned that the T-R-U-M-P gold letters had been removed from the building in the dead of night; several of them subsequently secured one letter each as a memorial to Donald Trump’s mismanagement and epic financial failure in losing his holy grail investment in the GM Building.
The removal, in the wee hours of Saturday, June 13th, of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center behind a shroud–literally–of secrecy proves that, if history doesn’t always repeat itself, it does often rhyme.
Professor Peter Smirniotopoulos
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Peter,
That’s a great story.
A complete review of Trump’s business dealings is likely to demonstrate what a colossal failure he was, as well as a shyster who cheated others.
A friend in NYC lives in a building that was branded TRUMP when it was built. When she learned that he didn’t own or build the building, just rented his name, she started a petition drive to remove it. She gathered a majority, and his name was stripped off the facade, the canopies, and the uniforms of the staff.
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Thanks, Diane! When Trump first announced his run for POTUS, I thought perhaps I could spark my students’ interest in learning about real estate development and finance, which I was teaching at the time at both the upper class and graduate levels in the D.C. area. This was the beginning of my effort to adopt at least one popular non-fiction work into my curricula, so I bought a used copy of “The Art of the Deal” to review. What a waste of money and my time reading the first chapter. The book would have been of ZERO pedagogical value for my students; it offered absolutely NO learning value. I instead adopted books like Vicky Ward’s “The Liars Ball,” Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short,” and Professor William Poorvu’s “The Real Estate Game,” for different courses over the years, in both undergraduate and master’s degree programs. It’s easy to understand, from this brief encounter with Donald Trump the “real estate maven,” how his Trump University was such a phenomenal scam.
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If only the public understood that every one of his business ventures was a failure or a fraud or both. But he was a master at self-promotion, and when he played the role of a business titan on “The Apprentice,” he cemented his image as a successful businessman who was tough and very rich. What he does best is branding and marketing.
But he never ran a successful business. My former husband was a real estate developer in NYC, and he told me that in that world Trump was a pariah and was known as a con man. After his multiple failures, no bank would deal with him. Except Deutsche Bank.
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Trump feels, that if there are statues of him, his name on everything everywhere in the U.S., then, he will be remembered after he steps down, that’s why he’s doing all that he possibly can, to mark his territory, like how dogs would do, blemishing every place that represented greatness in America, and he will keep on, trying to, put his hands on things that aren’t even his to, begin with, and there’s nothing the people in the U.S. can do about it right now, beause he made himself a KING, but eventually, he will, be ousted from office, and people will forget what he was to the U.S. one day in the future, or when the history books told of him, they’ll only keep records of the EVIL he did in his time of office.
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Agreed, Taurus. He’s marking his territory. And also he knows that at heart he is an evil man, and he’s trying to whitewash his deeds and life. Which is all the more reason that his attempts to stamp his name on the nation’s sacred places must be removed in the future.
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Marks his territory. I love this image.
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The Conservile Six of the Supreme Court Created this Monster and May They All Go Down With Him
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Too much to hope for. The two oldest members of the Court, Thomas and Alito, are also the most extreme in their views. It’s crucial that Dems control the Senate after January so that Trump doesn’t have a chance to replace them in the next two years.
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It was like watching Theater of the Absurd. The more I watched, the less I saw. In retrospect, it’s pathetically funny. Trump no doubt wanted to prevent people from watching, but the scaffolding, the workers climbing up and down for no reason, the delays, the tarp…it all prolonged the event bringing even more attention to his public shaming. Thank you for sharing Rep. Beatty’s dance. That made my day!
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Susan,
Like you, I couldn’t understand why the workers were so sluggish. Sometimes they built out the scaffold. Then everyone would descend and do nothing. Bathroom break? They seemed to stretching this out until 3 am, when most people had given up watching.
Rep Beatty’s dance made my day too!
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