A federal judge is holding a hearing on Thursday on another challenge to the Kennedy Center‘s plans to add Donald Trump‘s name to the complex.
On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) reacted to the most recent filing by the center, in which they suggested that the complex may have to be torn down if Trump’s name was not restored.
Beatty’s attorney wrote, “In plain English, Defendants have not-so-subtly said: ‘What a nice Kennedy Center you have here. What a shame should something happen to it.’ This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop.”
The board of the Kennedy Center voted earlier this month to add “Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump” to the front facade below the inscription, “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Once a $100 million threshold is met for an endowment, another inscription would be placed below that one to read, “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”
The board also voted to rename “the physical site and grounds upon which the center sits” as the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
Beatty claims that the addition of Trump’s name in those locations violates a judge’s order prohibiting a previous effort by the board to add POTUS’s to the name of the center.
From December until June, the center was rebranded as the “Trump Kennedy Center.” On the front facade, the words, “The Donald J. Trump and” were placed above “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” But a judge ruled that only Congress could approve such changes, not the Trump-controlled board. The POTUS designation was removed in June, and part of the front facade is now covered by a tarp.
In a filing earlier this week, center attorneys wrote that “undisputed evidence demonstrates, that 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.”
They added that Trump has “marshalled a new donor base to finance an endowment for the Center. These efforts 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.”
They added, “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. Such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.”
Beatty’s legal team also wrote that the center was “actively misleading” the judge and the public in claiming that “‘undisputed evidence demonstrates’ that ‘the Center will continue to be in a financial and structural death spiral’ unless President Trump’s name is added to the building, and that ‘President Trump’s efforts promise to stem the Center’s tremendous financial losses.'” They pointed to a report in The Washington Post that, after the board’s vote to add Trump’s name to the center, ticket sales and donations collapsed.
“This doublespeak is unconscionable,” Beatty’s legal team wrote. “Moreover, to the extent Defendants cannot fundraise, the solution is to ask Congress to appropriate needed funds and hire professional management with expertise in the performing arts to supplement appropriations as needed—not to violate the law on the ridiculous conceit that putting ‘Trump’ all over the place will open a spigot of contributions.”
The center has not yet commented on the new filing. But in a statement earlier this week, the spokesperson said, “Center leadership remains committed to demonstrating, by all legal means, the soundness of the Board’s decision to recognize Chairman President Donald Trump’s unprecedented support for restoring and revitalizing America’s Cultural Center.”
Beatty, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, also denied that she gave her approval to the proposal to rename the grounds of the center for Trump. In its filing earlier this week, the center’s attorneys wrote that at the board meeting earlier this month, Beatty “explicitly stated that she had ‘no objection’ to one component of it—re-naming the Center’s grounds after President Trump to honor the work he is doing to save the Kennedy Center.”
In a declaration to the court, Beatty wrote that at the board meeting, she “tried to explain that I was not categorically opposed to recognizing Trump in some very limited way, for example, inside the building or with a modest bench or plaza.”
She wrote, “My stated willingness, in that moment, to consider a more limited alternative was a good-faith effort to steer the Board away from actions I strongly suspected to be unlawful. And as I made clear at the time, any willingness on my part was conditioned on the lawfulness of the final action.”
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