Kennedy Center Board Votes to Rename Institution “Trump-Kennedy Center”

“Kennedy Center – panoramio” by jiazi is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

On Thursday, Dec. 18, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ board of trustees voted to rename the cultural institution as the Trump-Kennedy Center. The long-looming rechristening arrives ten months after the President set his “flood the zone” legislative blitz on the world of the arts by overturning and stacking the board to install himself as chairman and enact his “Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

“The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees voted unanimously today to name the institution The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” spokeswoman Roma Daravi said in a statement. Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, one of several legally required bipartisan members of Congress on the board, suggested that consensus in the call may have been obtained by muting dissenting opinions.

Trump expressed surprise at the name change while greeting the press at the White House. “I was honored by it,” he said, per the New York Times. “The board is a very distinguished board, most distinguished people in the country, and I was surprised by it. I was honored by it.”

It’s not clear if the board of trustees – which now includes Pam Bondi and Lee Greenwood, the artist behind Trump’s unofficial 2024 campaign anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.” – possesses the authority to effect the change the name of the center, which was legally designated as the Kennedy Center in 1964 after the President’s assassination. Since that time, it has been traditionally understood that Congress holds the power to vote on a name change for the national theater. U.S. Code Title 20 dictates that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

“The Kennedy Center is a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law,” former congressman Joe Kennedy III wrote on Twitter. “It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial, no matter what anyone says.

In 2017, Trump became the only President to skip the Kennedy Center Honors since its debut in 1978 after several honorees threatened to boycott the following White House reception. In a press briefing from Air Force One on Sunday, the President revealed that he had never seen a show at the Kennedy Center: “I get reports they were so bad,” Trump detailed. “I didn’t want to go, there was nothing I wanted to see.”

Read more about Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center here. See the arts institution’s new branding here.