Trump Called Into the Kennedy Center Board Meeting and Berated Joyce Beatty. An Hour After a Judge Said His Name Can't Go on the Building, the Board Voted to Shut It Down 'Immediately.'

The Kennedy Center's board voted Tuesday afternoon to close the performing arts center's main building immediately for a two-year renovation, roughly an hour after a federal judge ruled that the board cannot put President Donald Trump's name on the building or anywhere else on the grounds. The vote came during a tense meeting in which Trump, who chairs the board he stacked with his own appointees last year, called in and berated Rep. Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat whose lawsuit has kept his name off the facade. Beatty told CNN afterward that the president "threw a tantrum," made the dispute "personal," and at one point threatened to hold her "personally responsible" if the ceiling fell in and hurt someone.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper's ruling, issued shortly before the meeting, rejected the board's latest attempt to work around a prior court order that forced the removal of Trump's name from the building in June. The board had argued it could add a tribute to the president elsewhere on the site. Cooper called that "linguistic gymnastics" and found the plan violated both his earlier order and the statute Congress wrote when it created the center as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy, which confines memorials to discrete areas. "Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress's blessing," he wrote, adding that "Congress had other ideas for the Kennedy Center." He also found no evidence that "current or future donations hinge on President Trump's name being on the building."

The board's closure resolution declared the main building "unsafe for continued occupancy" and said continued operations posed "further risk to the public and employees." It cited the building's "dire" financial and structural condition, including the partial collapse of a section of the Grand Foyer ceiling during a rainstorm earlier this month, footage of which Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted online with the assertion that people could no longer safely occupy the building. The center had originally been scheduled to close for the renovation on July 5. On Monday, the board had said the institution faced "certain fiscal collapse within weeks" without Trump's intervention, and it has claimed the president would raise an additional $100 million on top of the roughly $250 million Congress appropriated for capital improvements. Trump has said he personally raised $17 million for the center.

Trump made the linkage explicit after the vote. In a post on Truth Social, he said the project cannot start until the courts settle the naming question, and that if the appeals court ruling "is a negative one" and is not overturned by the Supreme Court, "the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place." The statement leaves the nation's flagship arts venue closed with no construction timeline, contingent on a legal fight over whether the president's name can be attached to it.

The institution has been shedding people and programming for months. The Washington National Opera ended its 50-year residency, a string of artists cancelled performances, ticket sales have fallen, and viewership of the Kennedy Center Honors dropped sharply. On Tuesday, Chief Financial Officer Donna Kauranen resigned after 18 months in the job; she had previously held budget posts under Republican governors. Beatty, who sits on the board ex officio as a member of Congress, has said she will keep challenging the board in court.

The fight now moves to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where the administration is expected to appeal Cooper's ruling, and potentially to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the building is dark. What was scheduled as a summer closure for repairs has become an open-ended shutdown tied to a single question: whether Congress, or the president, gets to decide whose name is on the Kennedy Center.