Trump Threatens To Demolish Kennedy Center Unless He Can Put His Name on It

This week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that if President Donald Trump is not allowed to add his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, then he may have no choice but to raze the entire structure and start from scratch.

It was the latest salvo in the increasingly ridiculous saga of Trump’s desperate attempts to add his name to a building, no matter what the law may say.

The Kennedy Center is structured as partly public and partly private: It receives federal money for maintenance and upkeep, but its programming is funded through ticket sales. Originally called the National Cultural Center, Congress passed a resolution renaming it after Kennedy in 1964.

Since retaking office, Trump has had the center in his sights. “We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center,” he said last year, complaining about its programming. During a visit, he said the facility was in “tremendous disrepair” and lamented that “the whole place needs work.”

Heeding Trump’s request, in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress apportioned more than $256 million “for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures” at the Kennedy Center.

In practice, that seems to have largely consisted of reshaping the center in Trump’s image. He replaced the 18 Democratic appointees on the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees with loyalists, who immediately appointed him chairman. Then in December, they voted to change the building’s full name to The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts; a crew added the new letters to the building’s facade the following day.

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D–Ohio), a dismissed board member, sued to stop the changes, arguing that they violated the original statute.

A federal judge agreed: The 1964 law “makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” wrote Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

The board begrudgingly complied with Cooper’s order, removing the extra letters even while keeping the building covered with a tarp. But then this month, the trustees voted again, this time to add the text “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”

Beatty filed an emergency motion seeking to prevent this action as well. In a reply filed this week, DOJ attorneys claimed that if not allowed to add the president’s name, the government may just tear down the entire structure.

Before Trump’s intervention, the Kennedy Center was “a financially insolvent facility, housed in a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, and continues to race toward physical and financial ruin,” claimed the filing. “To bring this sick and poorly run facility back to health will require time, energy, talent, and large amounts of money. Upon re-taking office in 2025, President Trump assumed that challenge.”

The filing noted the disbursement from last year’s spending bill and said Trump also “marshalled a new donor base,” which, taken together, “promise to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fund desperately needed structural improvements, thereby making the Center physically and financially secure for generations to come and, perhaps most importantly, to make the Center structurally safe from collapse or calamity.”

That’s all well and good, but what does it have to do with a vanity inscription? “Without the prominent recognition of The Trump Administration, and President Trump’s efforts, the donors will not contribute, and the Center will continue to be in a financial and structural death spiral,” the filing warns. “The Trump Administration, and President Donald J. Trump, should, therefore, be given the respect and dignity of acknowledgement.”

In fact, if it does not bear the president’s name, “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.”

This is ludicrous for many reasons. In fact, before Trump reentered office in January 2025, the Kennedy Center was doing rather well, even netting a $6 million surplus in 2023. Meanwhile, ticket sales and donations dried up after Trump took over with promises of slapping his name on the building and playing an active role in choosing what events are held there.

Indeed, while Trump pledged to rid the center of “woke” programming, “his remedy was to replace one alleged strain of ideological capture with another,” Reason‘s Billy Binion wrote in June.

The idea that without urgent action the building will crumble to dust also seems unfounded. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office found that while the Kennedy Center needed to get a better handle on some of its record keeping, it otherwise “met most selected practices for operations and maintenance.”

Further, the notion of replacing the building with an amphitheater is a total non sequitur, though it’s possible that it reveals Trump’s real preference: While addressing the board of trustees last year, he complained about the building’s design and noted, “I always thought they should have built a beautiful performing center, open air, facing out over the Potomac. They didn’t do that.”

Obviously, this would make a complete mockery of the constitutional separation of powers; if federal law doesn’t let him name the building after himself, it certainly doesn’t allow him to knock the whole thing down and build whatever he’d rather see in its place.

Then again, that’s exactly what he’s doing just over a mile away: Last year, Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House, with plans to build a giant ballroom in its place. When a judge ruled that federal law put such a project outside the president’s authority, the Department of Justice argued that Trump’s power went much further, and if he wanted, he could tear down the Statue of Liberty.

Given that argument, knocking down and replacing the Kennedy Center with an outdoor amphitheater seems downright restrained.