Kennedy Center board tells judge it won’t remove tarp showing Trump’s name removed

CNN

By Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — The Kennedy Center plans to add President Donald Trump’s name back to the front of its building in early September, lawyers for the institution told a federal judge.

The revelation came in court filings submitted late Tuesday as part of a protracted legal fight over the fate of the historic preforming arts venue and memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy, which just last week voted, once again, to close its doors for a yearslong renovation and to add the president’s name to its marble façade.

The latest change would see the addition of an inscription below the Kennedy Center’s sign that says the venue was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”

Another add to the front referencing Trump could come later if an endowment reaches $100 million, the board said. The center also plans to rename the physical site the building sits on in honor of Trump.

Meanwhile, long white tarps that cover the part of the building where Trump’s name once sat atop Kennedy’s have remained there for much of the summer and do not appear to be coming down any time soon.

A federal judge had previously ruled that the center’s board violated the law when it added Trump’s name alongside that of Kennedy, the 35th president, and lawyers representing Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, who brought the legal challenge, plan to ask him to step in again to block this latest change. The center told the court in the filing that they won’t add Trump’s name back until September 8 at the earliest.

“This Court should not permit defendants to effectuate this latest gambit, in direct contravention of its earlier decision and in naked defiance of the law,” lawyers for Beatty told US District Judge Christopher Cooper, urging him to decide whether adding Trump’s name back to the building is lawful before September 8.

The lawyers blasted the center for its decision to “refuse to unequivocally commit to forestall effectuation” of the latest name change until Cooper has a chance to decide whether or not it’s legal.

The case is one of several questioning the legality of Trump’s efforts to leave a lasting mark on historic sites in and around Washington, DC, by renovating buildings or adding new memorials. The center’s board, which is stacked with individuals picked by the president, is trying to close the center for extensive renovations to the building, but critics contend that the plans were cooked up so the center wouldn’t continue to face slumping ticket sales and lackluster programming.

Tarp remains

Earlier this summer, Trump’s name was removed from the front of the building after Cooper, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled the venue could only be named for Kennedy. Crews standing on scaffolding erected outside the building worked behind tarps to take down the letters spelling out “The Donald Trump and.”

But since then, the tarps have remained, obscuring the public’s view of the official name of the building.

The center had previously said that the tarps and scaffolding needed to remain up so workers could address damage to the part of the building where Trump’s name used to be. But in Tuesday’s filing, they said the scaffolding was still in place to help workers “investigate, and engineer structural repairs to the overhead soffit.”

Beatty’s lawyers say that explanation falls flat since “the soffits are some twenty feet or more above the scaffolding.” They’re asking Cooper to issue an order that would require the center to explain why the tarp should not be taken down in coming weeks.

“Defendants imply that they will erect more scaffolding around the rest of the Center, presumably to examine other portions of the roof,” they wrote. “But defendants tellingly have not done so for months, leaving only the Center’s iconic name obscured – a strong indication that this structure has nothing to do with the roof and is, instead, meant to defy a return to the status quo.”

CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty and Besty Klein contributed to this report.

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