KVIG Informative

A federal judge already ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center once. Now the same judge has to decide whether the center’s Trump-appointed board can put it back up in three places at once.

Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, filed an emergency motion Thursday night asking U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to block the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees from restoring President Trump’s name to the arts complex, this time in three locations rather than one.

The board’s plan would rename the physical grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza” and add Trump’s name to the entryway sign twice, meaning his name would appear on the building’s facade in two places and on the surrounding site in a third, according to Beatty’s filing.

Cooper previously ordered the board to remove Trump’s name from the center’s exterior, ruling that the law establishing the Kennedy Center as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy bars additional memorials or plaques in its public areas absent narrow exceptions that Beatty argues do not apply here.

The building’s entryway has remained covered by a tarp and scaffolding since that removal order, which Beatty’s legal team told the court in a joint status report this month amounts to a deliberate act of defiance meant to delay compliance rather than an engineering necessity.

The Kennedy Center told the court in earlier filings that it would not attempt to add Trump’s name back to the building before September 8. Beatty’s new filing argues that date is arbitrary and asks Cooper to intervene immediately rather than wait for it to pass.

Beatty, an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board by virtue of her congressional seat, first sued the board and Trump as its chairman last December, arguing that only Congress has the authority to rename the federally chartered institution.

The Kennedy Center has been a flashpoint since Trump reshaped its board and took over as chairman early in his second term, drawing National Guard patrols outside the building and a wave of canceled performances by artists objecting to the change. Whatever Cooper decides now will determine whether that fight ends at the courthouse or escalates into another test of how far a president can go in attaching his name to a federally protected institution.