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.
U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled that the plan to add inscriptions honoring the current president would violate his existing May 29 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.”
In his May ruling, Cooper ordered that Trump’s name be struck from the building and blocked officials from shuttering the venue for two years for renovations. Crews removed the letters in June.
The new block came in response to a motion filed by attorneys for plaintiff Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the board, in the ongoing federal lawsuit over the center’s name.
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 D.C. Circuit issues a ruling “on the Board’s approved name.”
A separate appeal of the May injunction is already pending in the D.C. Circuit.
Trump also said that in the meantime, $17 million that he raised “has been put into The Kennedy Center account to keep it afloat.”
Cooper has not blocked the renovations themselves and said in his Sept. 15 ruling that the board may access $257 million that Congress appropriated for needed capital improvements, an outlay that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at the Aug. 13 board meeting that Trump is prepared to use to complete the rehabilitation project.
The government has not shown that “current or future donations hinge on President Trump’s name being on the building,” the judge said. He also rejected claims that removing the Trump name “would prevent the Center from fulfilling its artistic mission, as it has done for the last sixty years.”
The renaming of the center “coincided with declines in revenue and contributions, as artists cancelled performances, the Washington National Opera ended its 50-year residency, and ticket sales and viewership of the Kennedy Center Honors broadcast dropped precipitously,” Cooper said.
Roma Daravi, the center’s vice president of public relations, said the board’s decision to shut down the center “reflects sound judgment and a clear prioritization of safety above all else.”
The renovations are “long overdue and desperately needed to protect the safety of patrons, artists, and staff,” she told The Epoch Times.
She said there have been “decades of water intrusion and compromised concrete,” and referenced a recent incident in which a slab in the grand foyer that weighed more than 150 pounds fell 60 feet. The electrical infrastructure has also been rusting under wet conditions, Daravi added.
Norm Eisen, one of Beatty’s attorneys, said in a post on X that minutes after Cooper ruled, the board “moved to shut the doors on everyone else.”
“This is spite, not stewardship,” the lawyer said.
Eisen said the renaming of the center “drove audiences and artists away,” and now the board has voted to shut down to conceal “the terrible mismanagement under its current leadership.”