Hours before a court-ordered deadline to remove Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center’s facade, workers started to build scaffolding tall enough to cover the large metal letters, then draped the whole thing with a white tarp.
Workers eventually removed Trump’s name from the building in the dead of night. But the scaffolding and tarp are still in place, covering up where the president’s name used to be.
A judge wants to know why.
On Wednesday, the federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against the president’s attempts to rename the iconic performing arts venue after himself ordered the Kennedy Center to “indicate the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding” by July 31.
Trump and the Kennedy Center are fighting a legal battle to close the building for renovations and to keep his name above the 55-year-old memorial to the assassinated 35th president. Last month, Washington, D.C., District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that Congress made it “crystal clear” that the building is only to be named after President John F. Kennedy, “and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial” based on a “unilateral say-so.”
The Kennedy Center had until June 12 at midnight to strip the president’s name from the building, but construction crews in hard hats and neon green high-vis vests only started to assemble scaffolding to reach the letters that afternoon.
That midnight deadline came and went without any letters removed from the building.
Judge Cooper and a panel of appeals court judges denied the administration’s 11th-hour attempts to keep Trump’s name on the facade, and workers began adding a tarp to the towering scaffolding shortly after 1 a.m..
Workers eventually began removing letters at 3 a.m. June 13.
But the scaffolding and tarp are still in place.
In a court-ordered status update last week, lawyers questioned why the tarp “inexplicably remains” and asked Judge Cooper to force the Kennedy Center to answer.
“Indeed, it appears that the tarp will be there for the long term,” wrote lawyers for Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, who filed a lawsuit against the administration’s efforts.
The Kennedy Center is “actively undermining” the restoration of the venue’s name “in a petty act of defiance” that is “willfully sabotaging” the facade to “assuage” Trump’s “vanity or massage broken egos,” they wrote.
Lawyers also suggested that the tarp is designed to “shield the work from public scrutiny.”
After last month’s ruling against his efforts to keep his name on the building, Trump raged at the judge and the decision on his Truth Social, where he appeared to announce that he was abandoning the Kennedy Center’s renovations altogether.
He said it would be “impossible” to keep the institution open while construction is ongoing, and that he now has “no interest” in renovations and will instead be “working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.”
“I took great pride in taking over a losing Institution, and looked forward to making it into a Great and Prestigious WINNER for Washington, D.C., and indeed, the United States of America,” Trump wrote.
In their court-ordered status update last week, Kennedy Center officials said they are delaying closures for renovations — but they’re not booking any new shows.
Lawyers said the venue will “maintain an operational model” beyond July 5, when the center initially planned to close for two years of renovations.
Those projects will “take place between roughly July and December 2026,” but “the exact timeline of these repairs is subject to change following the Board’s continued consideration of the most responsible path forward for the Center to conduct capital repair and construction,” according to Friday’s court filing.
Decisions on “future programming” and “staffing” will also be determined by the center’s board, the filings say.
Lawyers for the congresswoman said those measures mean there will be “no meaningful operations” after July 5, effectively shutting down the center in defiance of the court’s order.
“Defendants are thus following through with, and continuing to implement, their existing plans to close the Center, contrary to the Court’s preliminary injunction order,” they wrote.
The Independent has requested comment from the Kennedy Center.
