The board of the Kennedy Center voted Sept. 15 to close the arts facility “immediately” for safety reasons so rehabilitation work may be performed on the building, President Donald Trump said.
Trump made the announcement on Truth Social hours after a federal judge blocked the board from putting Trump’s name on the building’s facade or renaming its grounds in his honor.
U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled that the plan to add inscriptions honoring the current president would violate an existing injunction and the 1964 law that made the cultural center a memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy, which only Congress may alter.
The judge said that in 1983, Congress amended the 1964 law to ensure that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.”
Trump said the U.S. Department of Justice is seeking an expedited appeal of Cooper’s new ruling.
He said the closing of the center would happen “immediately,” but the rehabilitation project, which he described as “a very large and complex job,” cannot get underway until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issues a ruling “on the Board’s approved name.”
Trump also said that in the meantime, $17 million that he raised “has been put into The Kennedy Center account to keep it afloat.”
This is a developing story that will be updated.
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