WASHINGTON — A Democratic member of Congress filed an emergency motion Thursday night to keep President Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, kicking off the latest court fight over the DC venue.
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the center’s board of trustees, filed the motion after her colleagues voted last week to rename the area around the center the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza” and to add the commander in chief’s name back onto the building’s facade — after a federal judge ordered its removal in May.
Trump’s name would only appear next to the main entrance if the renovation fund reaches $100 million in donations. Then the building’s moniker would be: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump.”
The center had been dubbed the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” since shortly after the president’s inauguration in Janury 2025, when he moved to oust the institution’s leadership and replace it with a board of trustees that named him chairman.
Trump’s name came off the facade this past June in response to DC US District Judge Christopher Cooper’s order, which also blocked a planned two-year closure for renovation.
The board revealed its plan to add Trump’s name back to the complex as soon as Sept. 8 in a status report filed earlier this week.
That prompted Thursday’s filing from Beatty, which seeks to temporarily block the name change while Cooper considers whether the actions violate his May ruling.
The congresswoman’s motion argues that Cooper’s order to keep Trump’s name off the building can only be circumvented by an act of Congress and not by changing the nature of the president’s recognition.
In 1964, Congress passed legislation renaming a planned National Cultural Center on the banks of the Potomac River after Kennedy, who had been assassinated the year before. The center opened in 1971.
That law explicitly prohibits the board from making the center into a memorial to anyone else or putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior.
