Janay Kingsberry

The Kennedy Center Honors was once one of the biggest nights in Washington, which may not be saying much in a city that’s more blue blazer than red carpet. Still, it was where D.C.’s buttoned-up power class got to mingle with Hollywood stars at an awards show that was broadcast to millions. Today the main building is closed and the organization has largely stopped presenting the arts. But once again this December, the Kennedy Center will put on a show.

Donald Trump has given the federal judiciary an ultimatum: Let him put his name on the Kennedy Center, or he won’t save it.
That threat came after a federal judge, Christopher Cooper, today blocked yet another effort to add the president’s name to the building.

Construction is notoriously slow-going work. But in Donald Trump’s Washington, cranes and bulldozers appear like DoorDash deliveries: fast, frictionless, and on demand.
To build the president’s White House ballroom, roughly 250 workers have been pouring concrete and installing steel framework, keeping the site humming for 20 hours a day, seven days a week.

To put the legal fight over the Kennedy Center in operatic terms, it has become more than a little Wagnerian. After another hearing this week about another attempt to add Donald Trump’s name to its marble facade, the fate of the national cultural center remains grim and unresolved, and no finale is in sight.

Donald Trump just won’t let go of his plans for the Kennedy Center.
Less than three months after a federal judge ordered the president’s name stripped from the national arts center, Trump’s handpicked trustees have found a new way to try to put him back on the building. During a board meeting today, they voted in favor of a resolution that would return the president’s name to the building’s facade. It would read:
The John F.

Building a new monument in Washington, D.C., is supposed to take time—a slow procedural grind of plans drafted, designs revised, studies conducted, and preservationists, historians, tribes, and architects consulted all before work crews ever break ground. The idea is to preserve the carefully choreographed symbolism of the federal city. That is not the approach favored by Donald Trump, who wants to leave his mark on the city’s symbolic core before he leaves office.

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For weeks, a tarp obscuring the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center has baffled observers, prompting speculation about the Washington, D.C., arts complex following the court-ordered removal of the president’s name. But recent court filings have raised a new mystery beyond the canvas.

The Kennedy Center was ready for a night of comedy yesterday. But before guests even reached the red carpet, the building presented a setup of its own. A large tarp was still hanging across the building’s facade, blocking any view of the spot where Donald Trump’s name had been added and then taken away following a court order. Inside, the punch lines practically wrote themselves.

For months, the dwindling ranks of staffers at the Kennedy Center have been bracing for July, when the Washington, D.C., arts complex had been slated to shut down. How the bruised institution would bounce back after a two-year closure ordered by the president of the United States—and what it would look like once it did—were major questions.