From The New York Times:
Kennedy Center Covers Trump’s Name After Asking Court for Extension
A federal judge had ordered the center to remove the president’s name from the building by Friday. After that midnight deadline, workers used tarp to obscure the view.
Elizabeth Williamson and Julia Jacobs
Reporting from Washington
It may have been the most closely watched construction of scaffolding in history.
Just after midnight on Saturday, a few hundred people were gathered around the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, looking up as a crew of workers in neon vests built a metal structure in front of the letters spelling President Trump’s name on the white marble facade. Tens of thousands more were watching online through livestreams.
A federal judge had set a Friday deadline for the center to remove Mr. Trump’s name, but shortly before midnight Kennedy Center officials filed a motion asking for a 12-hour extension. In a declaration, Matt Floca, the center’s executive director, said that evening thunderstorms had delayed progress.
As the hours crept into Saturday, the letters remained on the building. Crew members idled on the scaffolding as members of the crowd chanted “take it down!” Around 2 a.m., the workers began pulling a large tarp across the scaffolding that shielded Trump’s name from view.
Mr. Floca said in his declaration that he expected the work to finish in the early hours of the morning.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and the center spent the day seeking legal intervention to keep the president’s name on the marble as they pursue an appeal of the judge’s ruling that the rebranding of the arts institution was unlawful.
After both the district court and a federal appeals court denied their requests for a stay on the ruling, the crew began its work in earnest, constructing scaffolding that reached up past the letters.
The judge had ordered that by Friday, an official with the Kennedy Center must file a sworn declaration “certifying compliance” with the order. Mr. Floca asked for an extension until noon on Saturday.
The center’s Trump-allied board voted to add the president’s name to the institution nearly six months ago, causing an uproar in Washington and a crisis within the city’s pre-eminent art center. At an institution that had already been rocked by the president’s takeover, the 18 new letters affixed to the building — less than a day after the board vote — increased the temperature even further.
Democratic legislators condemned the move as an act of a “narcissism”; a series of artists canceled engagements at the center; and Representative Joyce Beatty, an ex officio member of the center’s board, filed a lawsuit calling the move a “flagrant violation of the rule of law.”
The ensuing debate over the appropriateness of the renaming has led to a bizarre scene in Washington where, for two days, the arts center on the Potomac River has seen a flurry of visitors, not there for a symphony or ballet, but to see if the president’s name would be detached from the marble. While journalists and onlookers kept watch, a steady drumbeat of legal developments drove a sense of uncertainty over whether the removal would happen at all.
On Thursday, one of the first signs of movement came when security guards erected black bike racks to close off the main drive and walkway near the front of the building. Passers-by quizzed volunteers and guards inside the center about when the letters would come off, with little success.
A short walk from the Kennedy Center, residents of the Watergate were planning impromptu house parties at the sprawling condominium complex. Two volunteer organizations, Hands Off the Arts and Free the Kennedy Center, coordinated to livestream the signage on the building from a webcam situated on a balcony at the Watergate.
Christine Lienert and Debra Wilfong kept their celebratory champagne on ice until 10:30 p.m. on Thursday. As news emerged that Mr. Trump’s name would not be coming off the building that night, they slipped the bubbly back into the fridge.
On Friday, Ms. Lienert reloaded the cooler and set up with a folding chair on the grass. But after news spread that Mr. Trump’s name may not be removed for hours, she packed up her champagne, the ice in her cooler melted.
Not everyone who milled around the Kennedy Center was opposed to keeping Mr. Trump’s name on the building. Jeanette Mercado and her husband, Bert, had traveled to Washington from Wasco, in California’s Central Valley, to see the capital’s monuments and came upon the scaffolding and the gathering crowd.
“I like Trump, I like what he’s doing for our country, I think he’s a blessing for our country and I don’t see anything wrong with his name being added,” Ms. Mercado said, her voice almost drowned out by chants of “take it down.”
Mr. Mercado, who said he was a Trump supporter as well, took a different view. “There should be a sense of continuity here — why are you going to interject your name?” he said.
In December, the Kennedy Center board voted to put Mr. Trump’s name on the building in recognition of what officials have described as his dedication to the institution and his help in securing $257 million to finance what officials said was a much needed renovation.
When Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington ruled on Ms. Beatty’s suit late last month, he found that the board did not have the power to unilaterally rename the institution. That power lies only with Congress, he wrote in his order, citing legislation enacted in 1964 that dedicated the institution to Kennedy, a supporter of the arts who had advocated its establishment.
“The ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ label adds an entirely new name to the center’s formal title,” Judge Cooper wrote, “and relegates President Kennedy’s name to second place.”
The judge gave the center until Friday, a two-week deadline, to restore the original name to the building and all official materials.
In declining to suspend his own deadline on Friday, Judge Cooper noted that the Kennedy Center had already taken steps to comply with the ruling. Last week, employees were told to “immediately” change forms, social media accounts and email signatures. Mr. Trump’s name was soon scrubbed from the top of the center’s official website.
“These efforts undermine the notion that defendants face irreparable harm in complying with the order in full,” the judge wrote.
When the Kennedy Center asked the appeals court to grant a stay, it argued in part that removing the president’s name now, only to restore it later, would be “incredibly confusing for the public.”
The motion filed with the appeals court discussed legal technicalities and precedent, but it also contained an opening salvo written in a style that called to mind the president’s own cadence, punctuation choices and penchant for self-promotion.
Signed by Brett A. Shumate, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, the motion warned that removing the name would seriously threaten fund-raising at the center because many donors who have given millions of dollars “were only willing to do so with the name ‘Trump’ on the building.”
“Many did it,” the filing added, “because they loved the concept of two Great Presidents, one Republican, one Democrat, working together as one — In many ways, a bipartisan relationship!”
Lawyers for Ms. Beatty countered that the appeal was filed “at the eleventh hour, in a transparent effort to jam the court and game the judicial system.”
Judge Cooper’s rulings have threatened to undermine Mr. Trump’s effort to transform Washington’s cultural landscape. At the start of his second term, he made the Kennedy Center a centerpiece of that vision.
He commandeered the institution from the inside, purging the board of Biden appointees and installing loyalists who quickly voted him in as chairman. And he began to remake it from the outside, ordering aesthetic changes to the building — such as painting the gold columns white — to fit his tastes. For the center’s marquee event, the Kennedy Center Honors, he stepped in as emcee.
In February, Mr. Trump announced his intention to close the institution for two years, a decision he described as intended to address serious maintenance problems at the building.
The lawsuit filed by Ms. Beatty, a Democrat of Ohio, also objected to the planned closure. Her suit questioned whether it was actually “designed to obfuscate the plummeting ticket sales and the flight of artists.”
After months of legal sparring, Judge Cooper agreed to temporarily block the closure. He found that the board had made an “ill-informed and seemingly preordained decision” in voting to approve the president’s plan. But he said that if the board members were to give serious consideration to the issue, he would not continue to block them.
Trump-allied officials at the Kennedy Center immediately announced that they would fight the ruling over the name change, saying they were confident that the court would uphold the “board’s will to recognize President Trump’s historic contributions to our nation’s cultural center.”
The plans for an appeal had grown less certain after Mr. Trump responded to the judge’s ruling with a tirade on social media. Unless he had control over the center’s affairs, Mr. Trump wrote, he had “no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND.’”
The president’s name appeared not only on the front of the building, but on letterhead, posters and directional signs. This week, a parking lot sign had white tape pasted over the word “Trump,” while one of the center’s shuttle buses had it scribbled over in black marker.
But then, the center’s board voted to pursue an appeal.
On Friday, Allerton Kilborn, 79, brought a book to occupy him while he waited for what he hoped would be the removal of Mr. Trump’s name. He had traveled to the Kennedy Center from his home in Chevy Chase, Md.
“For the adventure of it — this is history,” he said.
“I’m so old that I once met John Kennedy and have been an enormous fan of his,” he said. He said he thought the addition of Mr. Trump’s name had been a desecration of the memorial to Kennedy.
“I’m not religious,” he said, “but I see it in religious terms.”
Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for The Times, based in Washington. She has been a journalist for three decades, on three continents.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
