May 29, 2026
This has to come down.
A judge just ruled President Trump’s name cannot be on the Kennedy Center, it cannot be called the Trump-Kennedy Center, and the president and the Kennedy Center board cannot close the facility for two years.
And it seems President Trump is pissed.
Trump posted this very lengthy message on his social media page a short time ago, basically saying if he can’t do what he wants and he can’t have his name on the building, he’s going to abandon his plans to renovate the facility and he’s going to hand operations off to Congress. More on why that doesn’t really make sense in a second.
But first, you have to understand that the Kennedy Center was established in a law passed by Congress as a national center for performing arts and, specifically, as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy in 1964 after his assassination.
Congress said that trustees appointed by the president are responsible for maintaining the center and administering the programming for the center. The Kennedy Center is funded not only by ticket sales and donations but also with taxpayer money approved by Congress every single year.
In case you didn’t know, when President Trump came into office, he replaced several Kennedy Center trustees and appointed himself a trustee. Then his newly installed board of trustees named him the chairman.
And as chairman, Trump fired the Kennedy Center president. Then, in December, the Trump-appointed board voted to rename the facility the Trump Kennedy Center, and the lettering went up on the outside of the building the very next day.
Then, in February of this year, as ticket sales started to slump, Trump said that the Kennedy Center would be closing for two years because of a massive renovation he was now planning. Six weeks later, his board approved that closure.
But today, in this 94-page ruling, the judge used the existing law to determine that Trump can’t put his name on the building because:
“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.”
Obviously, Congress did not vote to change it.
But besides that, when it comes to the two-year closure of the Kennedy Center, the judge said Trump’s appointed board of trustees “violated its fiduciary duty” and “was derelict in discharging the full range of its responsibilities to the Center. More specifically, 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.”
It’s important to note that the judge said the renovations Trump wants to do at the Kennedy Center can absolutely continue — he just can’t close the facility to do it.
For the record, Republicans gave the Kennedy Center $256 million of taxpayer money in the Big Beautiful Bill to complete these renovations, and that’s on top of the center’s regular annual appropriations of $37 million of taxpayer money.
Trump posted these renderings of his proposed renovation for the Kennedy Center back in March. But today, based on his new post, it seems like none of that is going to happen anymore, even though Trump claims the facility is falling apart at the seams. He’s saying he’s going to wash his hands of it all.
“Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself! I cannot be involved with a situation where danger to the public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight. Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND.’”
Trump then said he’s going to instruct the Commerce Department to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to make a full and complete transfer of responsibility for operation, maintenance, and management of the Kennedy Center back to Congress.
Not quite sure how that would work, given that the law specifically says that the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the facility.
What we know for sure is that Kennedy Center officials laid off most of the staff in anticipation of the two-year closure, and today’s ruling could leave the center open with no performance calendar.
Read the judge’s order here.
Read Trump’s response here.
Read more about the Kennedy Center here.
Read more about the construction funding here.
