Kennedy Center gets new signage with Trump’s name before JFK’s after board vote
Move by Trump-picked trustees raises legal questions, as federal law bars adding names to the Kennedy Center, which some scholars say only US Congress can rename
by AP · The Times of IsraelWASHINGTON — The Kennedy Center on Friday quickly added Donald Trump’s name to the performing arts center Congress designated as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy, a day after the center’s board of trustees voted to make the change.
Blue tarps were hung in front of the building to obscure workers on scaffolding as they executed the transformation.
Hours later, it had a new name: The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
The board of trustees, handpicked by Trump, voted unanimously Thursday to add his name to what was enshrined as a living memorial to the Democratic president.
Trump, a Republican, also is the board’s chairman. The Kennedy Center said the vote recognized Trump’s work to revitalize the institution.
Critics of the vote, including Democratic members of Congress who are ex-officio board members, as well as some historians, insist that only Congress can change the name.
“The Kennedy Center was named by law. To change the name would require a revision of that 1964 law,” Ray Smock, a former House historian, said in an email. “The Kennedy Center board is not a lawmaking entity. Congress makes laws.”
Congress named the performing arts center as a living memorial to Kennedy in 1964, the year after he was assassinated.
The law explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior.
Some Kennedy family members oppose the renaming. Kerry Kennedy, a niece of John F. Kennedy, said in a social post on X that she will remove Trump’s name herself when his term ends.
“Three years and one month from today, I’m going to grab a pickax and pull those letters off that building, but I’m going to need help holding the ladder. Are you in?” she wrote on a photo of the center’s new name. “Applying for my carpenter’s card today, so it’ll be a union job!!!”
The Kennedy Center is the latest building in Washington to have Trump’s name added to it. The US Institute of Peace was recently renamed after him.
The Kennedy Center did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday.