A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from closing the Kennedy Center for repairs and ordered US President Donald Trump’s name removed from both the building and its website, ruling that the facility cannot be formally renamed without congressional approval.
The order, issued by US District Judge Christopher Cooper on Friday, requires the administration to eliminate references to Trump from the center and its online presence within 14 days. In a 94-page opinion released on US President John F. Kennedy’s birthday, Cooper concluded that the authority to change the institution’s name rests with Congress, not the center’s board.
“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” Cooper wrote.
Branding the facility as the “Trump Kennedy Center” was, Cooper said, more than a simple alternative title. He pointed to signage identifying the venue as “The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” and argued that the change altered the institution’s formal identity.
“The ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ label adds an entirely new name to the Center’s formal title and relegates President Kennedy’s name to second place. If that is not a renaming, what is?” Cooper wrote.
The judge also dismissed the administration’s argument that no actual renaming had taken place.
“They instead submit that everything is not what it seems,” Cooper wrote.
“The rechristening is not, as Defendants suggest, like calling the ‘Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’ the ‘Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,’ which is merely a clerical rearrangement,” he added.
Trump responded by defending plans to overhaul the facility, describing the proposed work as necessary to address serious structural and safety concerns. He also criticized Cooper, accusing him of political bias and conflicts of interest.
“I cannot be involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight. 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.
The president said he would seek congressional involvement in the center’s future, adding that he would work with lawmakers “to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.”
