By Sam Gauntt | D.C. Bureau | Gov & Politics
Days after President Donald Trump’s name was removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a large tarp and scaffolding was still blocking the building’s facade from public view Monday afternoon.
Construction crews took Trump’s name off the center early Saturday morning after a federal appeals court upheld a Friday deadline for its removal.
But at the start of the work week, the portion of the building’s facade where Trump’s name was located was almost entirely obstructed.
According to a Kennedy Center spokesperson, the scaffolding and tarp will remain up while crews perform maintenance on the marble and soffit panels on the building’s facade.
The center did not provide any indication about how long the maintenance work will take or when the tarps will be taken down.
The removal of Trump’s name came as a blow to his efforts over the course of his second term to take direct control of the center’s governance and get rid of what he described as “woke” programming.
Early last year, he appointed a new, hand-selected board of trustees for the center. They subsequently named him chair. Last December, he even personally hosted the Kennedy Centers Honors, the annual tribute show celebrating significant contributions to performing arts.
In February, Trump announced that he planned to close the Kennedy Center for two years while working on significant renovations.
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In the midst of these changes to the center, Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in late December, challenging the legality of the president renaming the center after himself. She amended the suit in February, seeking to block the closure as well.
U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled in favor of Beatty on May 29, ordering that Trump’s name come down, and that the center similarly remove references to Trump from its website and online branding.
After Cooper ruled, Trump took to Truth Social and blasted the judge, whom he described as an “anti-Trump Hater,” for stopping the “magnificent structural and aesthetic rebuilding of The Trump Kennedy Center.”
Cooper’s order also halted the planned two-year closure of the center. The Trump administration appealed the ruling, but a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld Cooper’s decision Friday evening.
Beatty, one of seven U.S. House members on the center’s board, said in a statement last week that the Kennedy Center’s newly appointed trustees are “more focused on elevating the president than advancing the arts.”
“The court was clear in its order because the statute is clear: only Congress can change the name of the Kennedy Center,” Beatty said. “My hope moving forward is that the board restores the integrity of the Kennedy Center, rebuilds programming and respects the rule of law. This beloved national treasure deserves nothing less.”
Beatty did not immediately return States Newsroom’s request for comment Monday afternoon.
But even though Trump’s name is gone, the center is still shrouded in legal uncertainty.
In his May order, Cooper wrote that his ruling was not an effort to control how the center should be run or set a plan for it going forward. Rather, he said it was to hold the Kennedy Center’s Board to the requirements set by the law.
Beyond that, he wrote, the court will “let the parties play on.”
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