By Jeffrey Blehar
Saturday, December 20, 2025
On Wednesday Donald Trump unveiled his newest addition to
the White House, a series of presidential plaques featuring Trump’s own highly
ungrammatical (and wildly undignified) opinions on his predecessors, engraved
for posterity’s sake and put on public display. I wrote about it on Thursday morning, thinking I’d said
enough about Trump’s attention-seeking and glory-thirsting outbursts for one
week.
Two hours after that piece was published, Trump announced
he was renaming the Kennedy Center after himself. It felt like getting slapped
with a backhand after having already taken the forehand.
To be technically accurate, it was the Trump-appointed board
of the Kennedy Center Foundation that voted “unanimously” to rename what was
once Washington’s fanciest concert venue, but something tells me they may have
acted at their dear leader’s behest. Karoline Leavitt’s announcement
reads as if it was written by Trump for her — and given how distinctive Trump’s
writing style is, that’s not a bad bet:
I have just been
informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the
most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously
to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the
unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the
building. Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also
financially, and its reputation. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump,
and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a
truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new
levels of success and grandeur.
Understand that the Kennedy Center was named by statute.
It is patently illegal for it to be renamed by a “board of directors,” by
presidential diktat, or by anything except legislation. But that doesn’t matter
to Donald Trump! What does the law mean to our Dear Executive Leader? Trump has contempt for the very idea that he might restrained by
either Congress or the law, as is abundantly clear by the way he has conducted
his second term to date.
So the Kennedy Center website was altered on Friday
morning; by Friday afternoon the lettering “The Donald J. Trump and” had been
awkwardly added atop the facade of “The John F. Kennedy Center for
the Performing Arts.” It looks tacky and feels temporary. (If you believe
otherwise, you have a right to your opinion, even though you are wrong.) The
ungrammatical surplus “the” in the title makes the addition look cheap and
thrown-together, as if Trump is admitting that he really doesn’t think it will
last and lacks the temerity to alter the original lettering. Instead, he merely
wants to add his own name as graffiti. What’s next, “The Donald J. Trump and
The Lincoln Memorial”?
Far more to the point, it exudes unmanly desperation.
Trump’s defenders will say “he’s trolling the libs!” No, he’s not. He’s doing
this because he wants to see his name associated next to his hero John F.
Kennedy. Coming at this political moment — with Trump descending back into
widespread unpopularity — it feels like a pathetic act of self-pity. I imagine
Trump sitting at the Resolute Desk, mopily googling on his iPhone for D.C.
landmarks he can affix his name to.
Why the Kennedy Center, though? There is something very
curious about this particular choice of buildings. Leavitt no doubt knows that
Trump has done the exact opposite of “saving” the Kennedy Center over
the past year: As Reason writer (and confirmed theater maven) Billy
Binion points out, it has been, beyond a doubt, their
worst-attended non-Covid season in modern history. This should surprise exactly
nobody, given the political inclinations and aesthetic tastes of those most
likely to attend the theater or a classical recital.
The symbolism is probably intended. Trump is convinced
that aged liberals are horrified to see him associate his name so publicly with
JFK, and there was an undeniable glee and gloating on social media as the new
signage went up — we can do this and nobody can stop us. Expect more of
this, for I suspect that is the real point of the entire exercise; as
the administration sinks ever more into the bog of a bad economy and
disappearing majority, Trump’s determination to act alone is growing: His
speech this week, the plaque affair, and now this — all can be interpreted through
the lens of a president whose persuasive and legislative power is disappearing,
leaving him only with executive branch acts to gratify his vanity. “I’m still
here and my power is vast!”, he seemingly insists to the nation with these
executive actions.
It will never work. Many of Donald Trump’s policies may
remain in place in the next Democratic administration, but all of this —
perhaps even the ballroom, depending on how the next three years go — will be
removed and renamed the instant a Democrat returns to office. (What was done
without legal authorization can be just as easily undone without consulting
Congress, after all.)
And it won’t be partisan politics that defeats him. On a
pre-political level, people inherently resent it when politicians or developers
rename old things. Ask any Chicagoan for directions to the “Willis Tower” and,
unless they’re being paid not to laugh in your face, they will find a way to
remind you that it’s called the Sears Tower. (No joke: At my son’s school last
week I overheard an eight-year-old ask in a plaintive voice “Ms. [Teacher],
what is Sears?”) That feels doubly pointless when the change is inspired by
ephemeral politics — ask a Gulf Coaster the name of the body of water they live
on, or a New Yorker whether they cross the Hudson River on the “Governor Mario
Cuomo Bridge” or the Tappan Zee.
So the biggest takeaway from this affair is the
pointlessness of it all. Exactly nobody in Washington — including Trump
administration officials — is about to start calling the city’s
government-owned performance venue the “Trump-Kennedy Center” unless they’re
being quoted on the record in a place Trump is likely to see it. And yet I
can’t help but notice how revealing of Trump’s insecurities this specific folly
is: His vain desire to rename American landmarks, if only for the three years
he remains president, is tied deeply to his own unspoken realization that he
has no substantive achievements he can point to. Because of the executive style
he preaches, he has passed no legislation of note, and indeed done nothing that
cannot be instantly undone by his successor.
He has to know that all of these new names will be washed
away, on some level — he just wants to enjoy the thrill of seeing his attached
to the dissipated prestige of the Kennedy Center, even if the institution
itself suffers from the association. He is obsessed with marking his territory, obsessed with forcing his detractors
to acknowledge him as a visible, undeniable fact of presidential history in
Washington. “I’m still here,” indeed. But not for long.
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