The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted for a second time Thursday to shut down the main building for a two-year renovation and put Donald Trump's name on the entrance. The meeting took place over a private Zoom call, closed to the public. As you may recall, the board's first attempt was thwarted in March when a federal judge blocked the shutdown and ruled that the members lacked sufficient information to justify it. The question I have right now is whether this fight is worth starting up again.
The new plan goes further. The main entrance will now read "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump," a direct test of Cooper's ruling and a related federal appeals court decision. The REACH, the center's 2019 addition, will remain open for limited programming and continue to serve as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. The board doesn't expect the main campus to reopen until summer 2028.
The Kennedy Center board voted on Thursday to inscribe President Trump’s name on its building, aggressively testing a federal judge’s order to remove it, according to two people with direct knowledge of the proceedings. https://t.co/slXhPjyFsu pic.twitter.com/yHXv6fV8dQ
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 13, 2026
Much of the renovation, which has a $250 million budget, isn’t likely to be controversial. There are structural repairs, new marble flooring, and nearly $12 million in acoustical upgrades. But the name thing… that’s gonna be all we’ll hear about.
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The board's decision still needs sign-off from the federal judge before it can move forward. So, I’m sure we all know how that’s going to go. I don’t see this fight ending any differently, and I keep coming back to whether this is a fight worth having; at the moment, I don't think it is.
Oh sure, triggering the left is always fun, but that shouldn’t be the point. Now, I’ve defended Trump's building projects before. The White House ballroom addition is a legitimate, necessary renovation, and I even like his idea for an arch, though I think it's way too big and poorly placed. The reflecting pool obviously needed to be repaired, and the left looked stupid opposing it. And there have been other improvements that have made Washington, D.C. a beautiful city again. There are plenty of things Trump has done that the left has stupidly resisted because its base expects it to resist everything.
The Kennedy Center fight is different. Renaming a building after yourself while you're the sitting president and the board chairman looks less like restoration and more like a monument to your own ego. I don’t care whether you think it is or isn’t a vanity project; that’s how it looks. That hands Trump's critics a free argument that he cares more about vanity projects than governing.
Trump is inviting that criticism by turning a building's name into a hill to die on. Picking this fight again, months before the midterms, is a distraction Republicans don't need.
Republicans have real fights ahead of November: the economy, the border, the rise of socialism, and keeping the House and the Senate. The Kennedy Center fight isn't one of them. Trump can win this legal battle and still lose the argument that matters most: proving his second term is about results, not monuments.
