Justice Department Tells a Judge the Kennedy Center May Have to Be 'Taken Down' if Trump's Renovation Is Blocked

The Justice Department told a federal court this week that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts could end up demolished if a judge permanently blocks President Trump's renovation plan for the building — a plan whose central feature is the addition of his name to it.

The filing was submitted by Brantley Mayers, a senior official in the department's Civil Division. It argues that the Kennedy Center is already a "decrepit" structure facing an imminent "death spiral," that private donor money is what will pay for the repairs, and that the donor money is contingent on the recognition the president is seeking. "Without those efforts," Mayers wrote, "the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down."

Attorneys for Rep. Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and Kennedy Center board member who brought the suit, called that reasoning "unconscionable" and described it as "a not-so-subtle threat to demolish the Kennedy Center if the President doesn't get his way." Beatty's underlying claim is narrow and statutory: the center was created by an act of Congress as a national memorial to President Kennedy, and she argues that only Congress can change what it is called.

This is the second round of the same fight. A federal judge ordered the president's name removed from the building earlier this year, and it came off the facade in June after a court-ordered deadline. The board has since voted on a different formulation designed to survive that order — an inscription reading "Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump," plus the renaming of the building's plaza as the "President Donald J. Trump Plaza." The administration's position is that a credit line for a renovation is not the same thing as renaming a national memorial.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper set a hearing on Beatty's emergency motion, and pressed Justice Department lawyers on how the new inscription differs in substance from the language a court has already struck. The Kennedy Center board subsequently told the court it would not attempt to add the president's name to the building or the grounds before October 8 at the earliest — a one-month delay from its prior timetable, and enough breathing room for the judge to rule before anything is bolted to a wall.

The building itself is a 1971 Edward Durell Stone design on the Potomac, and its physical condition is not entirely a litigating position: the center has documented deferred maintenance for years, and previous boards have sought federal appropriations for structural work. What is new is the argument that the repairs are legally inseparable from the naming — that a court order about a name is, in effect, an order about whether the building stands.

The dispute is one of several running simultaneously over what federal property is called. This week the administration signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America," and the Navy is weighing whether to strip a Pearl Harbor hero's name from an aircraft carrier and substitute the president's. The Kennedy Center case is the one that has reached a courtroom, and the one where the government has now put demolition on the record as a consequence.