Kennedy Center board votes an immediate shutdown after a judge again bars Trump’s name

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts closed its main building to the public on Tuesday after its board of trustees voted for an immediate two-year shutdown. The vote came minutes after U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper again blocked the board from putting President Donald Trump's name on the living memorial to John F. Kennedy.

Cooper's 22-page order said the board cannot install memorials for Trump "or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress's blessing." The same judge had already ordered an earlier facade inscription removed and had stopped a previous attempt to close the house for renovations.

Trump, who chairs the board and has packed it with cabinet officers and allies, wrote on Truth Social that the trustees voted "almost unanimously" to close "for safety reasons." He said the shutdown would take effect at once. He also said reconstruction "cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board's approved name." If that ruling is "a negative one" and the Supreme Court does not reverse it, he wrote, the reconstruction "will not take place."

The board has tied money and masonry to the naming fight. In August it approved an inscription that would have said the center was "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump." A second resolution contemplated renaming the campus "President Donald J. Trump Plaza" if a fundraising vehicle reached $100 million. Cooper treated both as memorials that only Congress can authorize. The 1964 statute that created the center as a memorial to Kennedy does not give the board a free hand to add another president's name to the stone.

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary and a trustee, has told colleagues that failing roofing, concrete supports and steel have produced "completely unsafe conditions." The board's latest resolution cited those defects and a worsening balance sheet. Trump said he had raised $17 million "to keep it afloat." The center has already cancelled concerts and faced at least one $250,000 judgment over a cancelled date.

Whether the doors stay shut is still a live question. Reporting in the Los Angeles Times said the closure cannot take effect unless Cooper lifts an existing injunction. Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex-officio trustee who sued last year to keep Trump's name off the facade, is seeking emergency relief against the shutdown. In a statement on Tuesday she wrote that "the law is extremely clear: The John F. Kennedy Center is named for President Kennedy, and no one else." She accused the president of holding the memorial hostage until his name goes on the building.

This was the third time since February that the board has voted to close. Programming was supposed to move to a smaller house on the grounds and to rented rooms for the National Symphony Orchestra and the Kennedy Center Honors. Performers, stagehands and ticket holders now face another season of uncertainty while the Justice Department prepares an expedited appeal.

The legal point is narrow and durable. Cooper did not rule on whether Trump's fundraising or his taste in renovation is sound. He ruled that a presidential memorial built by statute cannot be rewritten by a board resolution. The D.C. Circuit will decide whether that reading holds. Until then the country's official performing-arts memorial sits dark, and the renovation that the board says the building needs is on hold by the president's own condition.

What happens next is a calendar problem as much as a legal one. An appeals argument can take months. A two-year reconstruction cannot start if the president withholds it. Staff still have to be paid or laid off. Subscriptions already sold for the autumn season have to be refunded or moved. Beatty's filing and Cooper's injunction are the only instruments now standing between an immediate lock and a house that stays open while the name fight continues.

The center opened in 1971 as a marble box on the Potomac, paid for by Congress and private gifts, with Kennedy's name written into the authorizing act. That statutory choice is what Cooper keeps returning to. The board can raise money. It can hire engineers. It cannot, on the present record, chisel another president onto the memorial and then close the doors until a higher court agrees. Roma Daravi, the center's vice president of public relations, called Tuesday's vote a decision that put safety first. The court record puts the name first. Those two claims now sit in different buildings: one on the Potomac, one on Constitution Avenue, and neither has finished its work.