Kennedy Center Removes Trump’s Name From Facade

After a night of storms, both political and meteorological, workers removed President Trump’s name from the white marble facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts early on Saturday morning, responding to a federal judge’s ruling that its rebranding was unlawful.

The letters began coming down just past 3 a.m., after the center was granted an extension of a midnight deadline. Matt Floca, the center’s executive director, attributed the delay to a cluster of summer storms. On Saturday morning, he filed a sworn declaration with the court confirming that Mr. Trump’s name had been removed.

Workers spent about eight hours on Friday building towering scaffolding in front of the section of the facade bearing Mr. Trump’s name. Then, in the early hours of Saturday, they hung heavy white tarps from the structure. It obscured views of the removal, which was a significant symbolic victory for opponents of Mr. Trump’s takeover of an iconic performing arts center.

But a gap in the tarps allowed a New York Times photographer to observe a worker pulling the letter “A” from the wall. (The signage had read “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”) There was no sound of power tools; the letter appeared to come off by hand.

For all of Friday, lawyers for Mr. Trump and the center had been seeking legal intervention to keep his name on the marble as they pursue an appeal.

But after both the district court and a federal appeals court denied their requests for an immediate stay on the ruling, workers began erecting scaffolding in earnest to reach the letters. A rowdy audience of a few hundred people gathered to watch.

The center’s Trump-allied board voted to add the president’s name to the institution nearly six months ago, causing an uproar in Washington and a crisis within the city’s pre-eminent arts center. At an institution that had already been rocked by the president’s takeover, the 18 new letters affixed to the building — less than a day after the board vote — increased the temperature even further.

Democratic legislators condemned the move as an act of “narcissism”; a series of artists canceled engagements at the center; and Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat of Ohio and an ex officio member of the center’s board, filed a lawsuit calling the move a “flagrant violation of the rule of law.” Ms. Beatty was on hand for the operation on Saturday morning, remaining on the plaza outside the Kennedy Center even after the work crew departed around 4 a.m.

The ensuing debate over the appropriateness of the renaming led to a bizarre scene in Washington where, for two days, the arts center on the Potomac River saw a flurry of visitors, not there for a symphony or ballet, but to see whether the president’s name would be detached from the marble. While onlookers kept watch, a steady drumbeat of legal developments drove a sense of uncertainty over whether the removal would happen at all.

On Thursday, one of the first signs of movement came when security guards erected black bike racks to close off the main drive and walkway near the front of the building. Passers-by quizzed volunteers and guards inside the center about when the letters would come off, with little success.

A short walk from the Kennedy Center, residents of the Watergate were planning impromptu house parties at the sprawling condominium complex. Two volunteer organizations, Hands Off the Arts and Free the Kennedy Center, coordinated to livestream the signage on the building from a webcam situated on a balcony at the Watergate.

Christine Lienert and Debra Wilfong kept their celebratory champagne on ice until 10:30 p.m. on Thursday. As news emerged that Mr. Trump’s name would not be coming off the building that night, they slipped the bubbly back into the fridge.

On Friday, Ms. Lienert reloaded the cooler and joined the throng awaiting the letters’ removal. But after news spread that Mr. Trump’s name might not be removed for hours, she packed up her champagne, the ice in her cooler having long melted.

Not everyone who milled around the Kennedy Center was opposed to keeping Mr. Trump’s name on the building. Jeanette Mercado and her husband, Bert, had traveled to Washington from Wasco, in California’s Central Valley, to see the capital’s monuments and came upon the scaffolding and the gathering crowd.

“I like Trump, I like what he’s doing for our country. I think he’s a blessing for our country, and I don’t see anything wrong with his name being added,” Ms. Mercado said, her voice almost drowned out by chants of “Take it down.”

Mr. Mercado, who said he was also a Trump supporter, took a different view. “There should be a sense of continuity here — why are you going to interject your name?” he said.

In December, the Kennedy Center board voted to put Mr. Trump’s name on the building in recognition of what officials have described as his dedication to the institution and his help in securing $257 million to finance what officials said was a much needed renovation.

When Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington ruled on Ms. Beatty’s suit late last month, he found that the board did not have the power to unilaterally rename the institution. That power lies only with Congress, he wrote in his order, citing legislation enacted in 1964 that dedicated the institution to Kennedy, a supporter of the arts who had advocated its establishment.

“The ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ label adds an entirely new name to the center’s formal title,” Judge Cooper wrote, “and relegates President Kennedy’s name to second place.”

The judge gave the center until Friday, a two-week deadline, to restore the original name to the building and all official materials.

In declining to suspend his own deadline on Friday, Judge Cooper noted that the Kennedy Center had already taken steps to comply with the ruling. Last week, employees were told to “immediately” change forms, social media accounts and email signatures. Mr. Trump’s name was soon scrubbed from the top of the center’s official website.

“These efforts undermine the notion that defendants face irreparable harm in complying with the order in full,” the judge wrote.

When the Kennedy Center asked the appeals court to grant a stay, it argued in part that removing the president’s name now, only to restore it later, would be “incredibly confusing for the public.”

The motion filed with the appeals court discussed legal technicalities and precedent, but it also contained an opening salvo written in a style that called to mind the president’s own cadence, punctuation choices and penchant for self-promotion.

Signed by Brett A. Shumate, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, the motion warned that removing the name would seriously threaten fund-raising at the center because many donors who had given millions of dollars “were only willing to do so with the name ‘Trump’ on the building.”

“Many did it,” the filing added, “because they loved the concept of two Great Presidents, one Republican, one Democrat, working together as one — In many ways, a bipartisan relationship!”

Lawyers for Ms. Beatty countered that the appeal was filed “at the eleventh hour, in a transparent effort to jam the court and game the judicial system.”

Judge Cooper’s rulings have threatened to undermine Mr. Trump’s effort to transform Washington’s cultural landscape. At the start of his second term, he made the Kennedy Center a centerpiece of that vision.

He commandeered the institution from the inside, purging the board of Biden appointees and installing loyalists who quickly voted him in as chairman. And he began to remake it from the outside, ordering aesthetic changes to the building — such as painting the gold columns white — to fit his tastes. For the center’s marquee event, the Kennedy Center Honors, he stepped in as M.C.

In February, Mr. Trump announced his intention to close the institution for two years, a decision he said was intended to address serious maintenance problems at the building.

The lawsuit filed by Ms. Beatty also objected to the planned closure. Her suit questioned whether it was actually “designed to obfuscate the plummeting ticket sales and the flight of artists.”

After months of legal sparring, Judge Cooper agreed to temporarily block the closure. He found that the board had made an “ill-informed and seemingly preordained decision” in voting to approve the president’s plan. But he said that if the board members were to give serious consideration to the issue, he would not continue to block them.

Trump-allied officials at the Kennedy Center immediately announced that they would fight the ruling over the name change, saying they were confident that the court would uphold the “board’s will to recognize President Trump’s historic contributions to our nation’s cultural center.”

The plans for an appeal grew less certain after Mr. Trump responded to the judge’s ruling with a tirade on social media. Unless he had control over the center’s affairs, Mr. Trump wrote, he had “no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND.’”

The president’s name appeared not only on the front of the building, but on letterhead, posters and directional signs. This week, a parking lot sign had white tape pasted over the word “Trump,” while one of the center’s shuttle buses had it scribbled over in black marker.

But then, the center’s board voted to pursue an appeal.

On Friday, Allerton Kilborn, 79, brought a book to occupy him while he waited for what he hoped would be the removal of Mr. Trump’s name. He had traveled to the Kennedy Center from his home in Chevy Chase, Md., and wound up staying on the grounds for more than 12 hours, roving between the scene outside and the air-conditioned center.

“For the adventure of it — this is history,” he said.

“I’m so old that I once met John Kennedy and have been an enormous fan of his,” he said. He said he thought the addition of Mr. Trump’s name had been a desecration of the memorial to Kennedy.

“I’m not religious,” he said, “but I see it in religious terms.”