Kennedy Center Creates a Trump Fund, Days After Removing His Name
A court said the board couldn't rename the building for Trump. So the board named a fund for him instead, tied to the center's $257 million in federal money.
Days after a court forced Donald Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center, its board has found a way to put it back, on the money. The performing arts center is establishing a new endowment, the Trump Kennedy Center Fund, in the president’s honor.
The board of trustees, reshaped with Trump appointees, voted unanimously at a Thursday meeting to “acknowledge the president’s contributions to the center by all legal means,” according to CBS News. The move comes after a federal judge ruled the same board had no authority to unilaterally rename the building itself, an order that saw crews strip Trump’s name from the marble facade before dawn last week.
A Kennedy Center official described the fund to CBS as “a landmark commitment to securing the future of the nation’s preeminent performing arts institution.” The endowment would sit alongside the center’s existing private funds and its roughly $257 million in federal funding; a person familiar with the plans said it would focus on the building’s “physical disrepair,” which the current board argues was long neglected. Coverage of the dispute has tracked each turn.
The maneuver threads a legal needle. The court’s ruling was narrow: the board could not rename a building Congress dedicated to John F. Kennedy. It said nothing about naming a fund. By honoring Trump through an endowment rather than the portico, the trustees keep his name attached to the institution while staying, at least on paper, inside the judge’s order.
It is the latest turn in a months-long fight over an institution Trump moved to control on returning to office, installing a loyal board and adding his name before the courts intervened. The letters are down from the front of the building. Whether a fund in his name draws the same legal challenge is the next question, and the people who sued to take the name off the wall are unlikely to consider the matter closed.
