By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
You don’t have to care about the Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. But the president clearly cares a great
deal about it, and now the Trump administration is arguing in court that unless
the president’s name remains on the building, the Kennedy Center will need to be demolished:
The Justice Department suggested
in a court filing Tuesday that the Kennedy Center could face demolition in the event a federal
judge issues an order permanently blocking President Donald Trump’s push to
renovate the facility with additions intended to recognize Trump personally.
In an extraordinary filing that
at times reads like a post from Trump’s social media platform, Brantley Mayers
— a top official in DOJ’s Civil Division — argues the “decrepit” Kennedy Center
faces an imminent “death spiral” without Trump’s intervention.
“Without those efforts, the
Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be
required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on
the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River
that has been proposed, by some, for many years,” the filing said. “Such a
replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would
be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.”
Yesterday the Washington Post reported about how the moment
Trump’s appointees decided to add the current president’s name to the building,
ticket sales and fundraising dropped like a stone:
Ticket sales and fundraising
collapsed after President Donald Trump’s name was added to the John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts, even as the center’s leaders publicly touted a
financial turnaround, according to confidential documents obtained by The
Washington Post.
Ticket sales had already dropped
in the 10 months following Trump’s takeover, but both ticket sales and
donations plunged after the Trump-led board of trustees voted in December to
rename the center after him and put his name on the front of the building,
according to the records.
Trump’s name was removed from the building in early June,
but since then, in a first-ballot hall of fame demonstration of pettiness,
tarp-covered scaffolding has remained in place to block where Trump’s name had
been. The Kennedy Center’s board has stated that the tarp will remain up indefinitely.
Whether or not President Trump wants to recognize it, he
is an intensely controversial figure, and a figure who is disliked, and in many
cases loathed, by the sorts of Washington-area residents who attend
performances at the Kennedy Center. If his name is on the building, lots of
people will refuse to buy tickets or make any donations to support the
facility’s operations.
You might detect a recurring pattern: The president
notices something where the status quo is suboptimal but manageable, charges in
without much of a plan, ignores warnings, things go awry, and he leaves a much
worse, much more complicated mess than before he started. This pattern has
occurred in the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. trade with Canada, the Lincoln Memorial
Reflecting Pool, measles vaccinations . . .
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