A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from closing the Kennedy Center for repairs and ordered the removal of President Donald Trump’s name from the building and its website.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled Friday that Trump’s handpicked board did not have the authority to rename the facility on its own.
“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” the judge wrote in his 94-page decision, issued on Kennedy’s birthday. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
Trump blasted the ruling in a lengthy post on Truth Social and suggested that for now he was washing his hands of the institution he named himself chair of last year.
“I cannot be involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight. Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND,’” Trump wrote.
“We are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it,” he wrote, adding that he had instructed the Commerce Department to take steps that would give lawmakers “the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Trump, who is named as one of the defendants in the case, would formally appeal Friday’s ruling.
In his ruling, the judge said the administration did not deny the center is legally required to be named after Kennedy but had tried to claim the center had not really been renamed.
“They instead submit that everything is not what it seems,” Cooper wrote, adding that the administration insisted that calling it the “Trump Kennedy Center” is “merely a secondary name” rather than a name change.
“The rechristening is not, as Defendants suggest, like calling the ‘Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’ the ‘Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,’ which is merely a clerical rearrangement,” he wrote.
“The ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ label adds an entirely new name to the Center’s formal title and relegates President Kennedy’s name to second place. If that is not a renaming, what is?” Cooper said, noting that the lettering on the building “literally reads: ‘The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.’”
The changes, Cooper wrote, “reflect far more than an innocuous nicknaming.”
He issued an order giving the administration 14 days to remove Trump’s name from the building and the center’s website.
A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center, Roma Daravi, said in a statement before Trump’s Truth Social post: “We are confident that on appeal the court will uphold the Board’s will to recognize President Trump’s historic contributions to our nation’s cultural center.”
Cooper also found the board’s vote to shutter the facility for two years for repairs was the result of an “ill-informed and seemingly preordained decision.”
The board “based its decision on an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information and neglected to consider the full range of its statutory obligations and potential adverse consequences of closure on programming and memorial functions,” the judge wrote.
“The trustees might have assessed the propriety of closure in a number of prudent ways. This was not one,” the judge wrote, issuing a preliminary injunction blocking the center from closing.
During a March vote, the board voted to close the center after July 4 for renovations over a two-year period. The decision came after Trump — who had named himself board chairman last year — had called for the temporary closure, saying it was the most effective way to carry out the repairs.
The judge said repair work can still be carried out and added that the closure could still happen if the board follows proper procedures.
The “preliminary injunction will not prevent the Center from moving forward with the capital repair work it has planned, which the record demonstrates is sorely needed. Nor will it categorically prohibit the Board from closing the Center should it come to this decision anew after independently balancing its multiple obligations to the Center in a prudent fashion,” the judge wrote.
Cooper added that the “Court does not purport to dictate how the Center should be run, nor does it prescribe any particular plan for the institution — construction, closure, or otherwise — moving forward. It simply holds the Kennedy Center Board to certain minimum requirements imposed by law. Beyond that, the Court will let the parties play on.”
Daravi suggested in her statement the center would challenge the injunction on the closure as well. “We will review the decision carefully though the reality remains — the Center requires an urgent and significant restoration — a truth that even the plaintiff acknowledges,” she said.
The lawsuit challenging the name change and closure had been brought by Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, who serves as an ex officio member of the center’s board, a position separate from the members selected by Trump.
In a statement, Beatty said the “ruling rightly affirms that this administration’s efforts to rename and close the Center have no basis in law.”
“The Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump. He has desecrated this sacred memorial for his own vanity,” Beatty said.
Her attorneys, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said the “ruling sends an important message: the rule of law matters. This is a powerful blow against the Trump administration’s corruption.”
Several members of the Kennedy family last year criticized the board’s vote to include Trump’s name on the center, where it was later affixed.
Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, Kerry Kennedy, on Friday praised the judge’s ruling and Beatty’s efforts.
“Perhaps I won’t need that pickaxe after all. Thank you, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, for your courage and dedication to ensuring proper procedures are followed,” she wrote on Facebook. “What a great way to celebrate you on your birthday, Uncle Jack!”
The addition of Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center is part of an unprecedented wave of presidential branding being carried out in his second term, with the addition of his name to federal buildings, battleships, passports, a drug website and more.
On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said his department was preparing to print $250 bills with Trump’s face on them if Congress passes legislation to do so.
