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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration threatened to tear down the Kennedy Center if plans to add President Trump’s name to the front of the building and also make extensive repairs are blocked.
Without the president’s support, the Kennedy Center will need to be demolished and replaced with a new structure, lawyers for the Trump administration warned in a legal brief filed late Monday.
And donors will flee — leaving the center in a “financial and structural death spiral” — if they don’t see Trump properly honored with his name on the entrance of the building, they argued.
“The Kennedy Center is in terrible trouble,” the brief warns.
“The crisis is so acute that, without the Trump Administration, its people, and President Trump, the Center cannot survive, either structurally or financially.”
The attorneys, led by Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, outlined Trump’s support for construction repairs as well as his financial backing, which includes $258 million from Congress and millions of dollars from new donors.
“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” they note.
The historic facility would likely be replaced with a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that “will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.”
The Trump administration was filing its response to a lawsuit from Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) to keep the president’s name off the building exterior and to stop a planned two-year closure for renovation work.
“President Trump’s efforts and prestige provide the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival, and structural renewal,” the attorneys write.
Without it, “the Center will continue to be in a financial and structural death spiral,” they add.
They also bash Beatty for bringing the suit, claiming that, as a Kennedy Center board member, she supported renaming the land around the center after President Trump. Beatty did, however, vote against a proposal to add Trump’s name to the entrance — alongside Kennedy’s — but that won overall approval from the board.
But Nathaniel Zelinsky, an attorney at Washington Litigation Group who is working with Beatty, said she did oppose the naming of the Plaza after Trump.
“Rep. Beatty voted no on the resolution, and she is staunchly opposed to this latest illegality — including the unlawful effort to rename the plaza. She will refute their characterization of her comments in Court,” he said in a statement.
“The government’s latest filing is a not-so-subtle threat to demolish the Kennedy Center if President Trump doesn’t get his way. This is unconscionable, it is unbecoming of the Department of Justice to even put this in a filing, and we will answer in court,” he added.
Last month, a federal judge ordered the center to remove Trump’s name, which had been added to the front of the building, and blocked a planned closure for renovations.
Trump is appealing that ruling and a hearing is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.
Congress named the performing arts center as a living memorial to Kennedy in 1964, the year after he was assassinated. The law explicitly prohibits the board from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior.
Beatty is using that to argue that the board’s actions are illegal.
But the Trump attorneys argue that the resolution to install Trump’s name was “completely lawful,” as it is not a “memorial” under “any plausible reading of the statute.”
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