Trump name goes up on Kennedy Center building | Political News

Crews rapidly bought to work altering the Kennedy Center’s signage Friday morning after President Donald Trump’s handpicked committee voted to rebrand it.

Workers in lifts raised large blue tarps to obscure the middle’s indicators. Before midday, Trump’s name was added to the building’s facade, according to The New York Times.

The Kennedy Center’s board members on Thursday voted to change the humanities middle to a new name: The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

The adjustments are happening even as some Democratic lawmakers and Kennedy relations say only Congress can authorize them to the venue, which bought its name after Kennedy’s assassination.

Board members said the vote was unanimous, including that Trump, the middle’s chairman, “saved the establishment from financial spoil and bodily destruction.”

“The new Trump Kennedy Center reflects the unequivocal bipartisan support for America’s cultural center for generations to come,” Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations, said in a statement.

Former congressman Joseph Kennedy III, a JFK grandnephew, said the Kennedy Center “is a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law. It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial, no matter what anyone says.”

Trump claimed to reporters on Thursday that the vote came as a “surprise.”

“This was introduced up by one of the very distinguished board members, and they voted on it, and there’s a lot of board members, and they voted unanimously. So I used to be very honored,” he said.

Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio disputes that the vote was unanimous. In a post on X, said she was muted.

“I said, ‘I’ve one thing to say,’ and I used to be muted, and as I continued to attempt to unmute to ask questions and voiced my opposition to this, I obtained a be aware saying that I might not be unmuted,” she said. “I used to be cut off.”

In February, Trump announced he appointed a brand new slate of members to the center’s board after purging their predecessors. They included administration insiders like Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, Usha Vance, wife of his vice president, and Dan Scavino, his deputy chief of staff.

Shortly after the new board voted to make Trump its chairman.

Earlier this month, Trump’s state department planted his name on the Institute of Peace headquarters in D.C. after Trump spent months of lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize and firing the impartial entity’s board along with its employees this spring.

“A federal judge has already ruled that the government’s armed takeover was illegal. That judgment is stayed while the government appeals, which is the only reason the government continues to control the building,” George Foote, a lawyer for the institute’s former management, said.