The Name He Can't Have, the Building He'll Wreck

A president who couldn't get his name on a memorial has started taking the building apart instead.

"I saw a forklift carrying what appeared to be a more permanent form of fencing drive over to the north side of the building. I saw the forklift run into and hit the pillars on the building several times."

— Bridget Kennedy-Bailey, sworn affidavit, Beatty v. Trump

The woman who saw it is a lawyer, and she sits, by virtue of her position, on the board of the very building she was describing. She also happens to be a Kennedy, the great-niece of the man the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was built to honor. Her affidavit, filed under penalty of perjury on Wednesday, reads like the opening of a scene nobody wanted to write.

The first time she arrived, she was turned away. The center was "closed," a "Security Operations Specialist" told her, and he could not say for how long. She left and came back an hour later, at 11:47 in the morning. By then, black metal gates had appeared, roughly forty feet from the facade, lined up with the fountains on the east side. Forklifts were hauling in more gates. Workers were setting out cones. And then came the pillars.

Not once. Not by accident. Several times.

To understand the forklift, you have to understand the name.

Congress created the Kennedy Center in 1964 as a "living memorial" to an assassinated president, and for decades it ran as a bipartisan institution with an independent board of trustees. That ended in February 2025, when Donald Trump fired the entire board, named himself chairman, and installed loyalists, including MAGA acolyte Ric Grenell, to run the place. Within a year, he had put his own name on the building.

That, it turns out, was the whole war.

In May 2026, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered Trump's name removed from the center. In June, crews prepared scaffolding to take the letters off the facade. On August 27, Cooper made the legal logic explicit: "Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center" without Congress's approval. Trump's answer was to call the judge "very hostile and conflicted," to declare the center a "virtual state of collapse" and "destined to doom," and, during a virtual board meeting, to tell Rep. Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and ex officio trustee who brought the lawsuit, "I think you're incompetent." Beatty, her lawyers say, did not miss a beat: "I KNOW you're incompetent."

What the judge had not done was order the center closed. The board did that itself, on Tuesday, September 15.

The board is stacked: White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, country singer Lee Greenwood, special envoy Paolo Zampolli, Fox host Laura Ingraham, and former Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo. They voted to shutter the center for renovations. Less than twenty-four hours later, the public was locked out.

Trump posted on Truth Social that the closure was "immediate" and for "Safety reasons," with a rider that turned out to be the whole point: "Renovation and Reconstruction cannot begin until the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board's approved name. If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place."

Translation: the money for the repairs already exists. Congress appropriated $257 million for them. The work just can't start until a court hands the president his name.

On Wednesday, while the fences went up, photographers at Joint Base Andrews caught the president returning from a North Carolina rally, studying a large printout aboard Air Force One. The visible portion showed the Kennedy Center alongside the word "DEMOLIS...". The White House did not comment on what was on the board.

Thursday's court filing shows what happens when the story needs a new alibi.

The government now says the closure is "temporary," "seven days, unless extended," justified by "acute risks to public safety resulting from continued structural deterioration at the Center." The Justice Department cited overhead panels it described as "an active falling hazard," and ceiling plaster that fell after major storms in the District earlier this month. "There is no emergency caused by Defendants' temporary closure of the Center," the filing says. "The only emergency is the risk to the public."

The trouble with that version is that it arrived after two others. The board's vote was described as a two-year closure for renovations. Trump's post described a closure that would last unless he won the naming case. The government's filing describes a seven-day safety measure.

Greg Werkheiser, the attorney for a coalition of preservation groups including the D.C. Preservation League, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Society of Architectural Historians, summarized the pattern: "Every time the government goes into court, they appear to say one thing and then if they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they quickly affirm something else."

The excuse has changed three times in four days. The building has not changed at all.

Judge Cooper, to his credit, did not let the new excuse stand unexamined.

He denied Beatty's motion for an emergency hearing, but he imposed two conditions that read like a warning. The administration must file a detailed status report, including a sworn declaration about the closure and the "emergency repairs." And the president and the board must give thirty days' written notice before any change to the renovation plan, "including but not limited to any 'demolition' of the Center's main building."

Note the quotation marks. The judge put them around the word the government was already using, and attached a deadline to it.

The preservation coalition is now threatening a third route, a motion for an independent monitor over the institution. "The objective here isn't to have a federal judge run a performing arts center," Werkheiser said. "It is to make sure that there is still a Kennedy Center worth governing when this litigation is over."

That last clause does a lot of work. The center's troubles are real, but they are not the ones the administration describes. A 57-page assessment presented to the board depicts an institution facing bankruptcy, unable to pay its bills, in need of hundreds of millions in repairs. The Washington National Opera announced it is leaving. Artists have canceled. Donors have retreated.

But the money dried up after the name went up, not before.

The timing is not hard to read. CNN reported Wednesday that the week was one of those in which a president's priorities "seem to unravel all at once": the Supreme Court blocked his mail-in voting rules, the House voted that his war with Iran requires congressional approval, the Federal Reserve hiked rates under his hand-picked chair, and Canada announced a partnership with the European Union. A president who has just lost everything he could lose tends to reach for whatever is still within his hands. A memorial is a very tangible thing. It has pillars.

On Friday, the people who still show up plan to gather around the fence line. A center usher suggested in a neighborhood group that if there are enough of them, they will "hug" the Kennedy Center.

The question is no longer whether Trump wanted his name on the building. The question is what happens when a president can close a memorial, fence it off, and have its pillars struck while the case is still pending, and the only thing that slows him down is a thirty-day notice period. The forklift has already been driven to the north side of the building. The only thing standing between it and the pillars is a court order, and a president who has shown, repeatedly, that he treats court orders as suggestions with an appeals process.