RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 17 sourcesDonald Trump’s passionate love of sticking his name on things—in many ways, the great love affair of his long and eventful life—hit a major snag earlier this year, when some killjoy judge noted that, legally, the only body allowed to change the name of The John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts was Congress. (And not, say, the Center’s own board, which Trump spent the first few week of his second term in office gleefully purging and refilling with his cronies.) But having had to suffer the indignity of massive crowds of people gathering to watch workers prepare to strip Trump’s name back off the building—an act completed, with an atypical lack of showmanship from TV’s reality show president, mostly under a tarp—Trump has now found an alternate way to get the letters T and RUMP stuck to this damn thing. If he can’t title the building, turns out, he’ll damn well subtitle it.
This is per The New York Times , which reports that the Center’s board, having been told they can’t rename the 62-year-old building, will now simply resort to sticking letters to it declaring that the center has been “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” (This, despite the fact that the same rules about renaming the Center also say “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas;” the thinking, presumably, being that a note about a restoration skirts those rules.) This was apparently one of several ways board members were trying to still figure out a way to get Trump’s name attached to the building within the existing law, including a proposal to name the area around the Center the Donald J. Trump Plaza, because, seriously: Sticking his name on stuff is this guy’s sole obsession in life. One of Trump’s cronies on the board told the Times the intention was to make the letters “as big as it can get,” because these folks have clearly heard your “over-compensating for inadequate genitals” jokes at this point, and have just decided to steer into the skid.
Meanwhile, the board also voted to move forward with plans to close down the Center for two years, a previously launched decision that had also been stymied by a court case from Democratic lawmakers. The main Center building will be shut down for renovations, while a smaller building known as The Reach will be kept active.
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