Judge temporarily halts Kennedy Center closure and orders Trump’s name be removed from the building

A federal judge in Washington has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from closing the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for repairs and found the board’s decision to add President Donald Trump’s name to the center was unlawful and ordered that it be removed from the building and its website.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper found the board did not have the authority to rename the facility on its own.

“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute 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. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” the judge wrote in his 94-page decision.

The judge said the administration did not deny the center is legally required to be named after Kennedy, but had tried to claim the center had not really been renamed.

“They instead submit that everything is not what it seems,” Cooper wrote, adding that the administration insisted that calling it the “Trump Kennedy Center” is “merely a secondary name” rather than a name change.

“The rechristening is not, as Defendants suggest, like calling the ‘Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’ the ‘Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,’ which is merely a clerical rearrangement,” he wrote.

“The ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ label adds an entirely new name to the Center’s formal title and relegates President Kennedy’s name to second place. If that is not a renaming, what is?” Cooper found, noting that the lettering on the building “literally reads: ‘The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.’”

The changes,” Cooper wrote, “reflect far more than an innocuous nicknaming.”

He issued an order giving the administration 14 days to remove Trump’s name from the building and the center’s website.

A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center, Roma Daravi, said in a statement that “We are confident that on appeal the court will uphold the Board’s will to recognize President Trump’s historic contributions to our nation’s cultural center.”

Cooper also found the center’s board vote to shutter the facility for two years while repairs are carried out was the result of an “ill-informed and seemingly preordained decision.”

The board “based its decision on an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information and neglected to consider the full range of its statutory obligations and potential adverse consequences of closure on programming and memorial functions,” the judge wrote.

“The trustees might have assessed the propriety of closure in a number of prudent ways. This was not one,” the judge wrote, signing off on a preliminary injunction blocking the center from closing.

During a March vote, the board voted to close the center after July 4 for renovations over two-year period. The decision came after Trump — who had named himself board chairman last year — had called for the temporary closure, saying it was the most effective way to carry out the repairs.

The judge said repair work can still be carried out and added that the closure could still happen if the board follows proper procedures.

The “preliminary injunction will not prevent the Center from moving forward with the capital repair work it has planned, which the record demonstrates is sorely needed. Nor will it categorically prohibit the Board from closing the Center should it come to this decision anew after independently balancing its multiple obligations to the Center in a prudent fashion,” the judge wrote.

Cooper added that the “Court does not purport to dictate how the Center should be run, nor does it prescribe any particular plan for the institution—construction, closure, or otherwise—moving forward. It simply holds the Kennedy Center Board to certain minimum requirements imposed by law. Beyond that, the Court will let the parties play on.”

Daravi suggested the center would challenge the injunction on the closure as well. “We will review the decision carefully though the reality remains — the Center requires an urgent and significant restoration — a truth that even the plaintiff acknowledges,” she said.

The lawsuit challenging the name change and closure had been brought by Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, who serves as an ex-officio member of the center’s board.

In a statement, Beatty said the “ruling rightly affirms that this administration’s efforts to rename and close the Center have no basis in law.”

“The Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump. He has desecrated this sacred memorial for his own vanity,” Beatty said.

Her attorneys, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said the “ruling sends an important message: the rule of law matters. This is a powerful blow against the Trump administration’s corruption.”