UPDATED: There is a new wrinkle in the ongoing saga over the Kennedy Center: Officials with the institution are warning of “certain financial collapse within weeks” and say that restoring Donald Trump‘s name to the complex may be the only way to get him to “lead the financial rescue of the center.”
A draft board resolution, outlined in court documents on Monday, states that the center “is in such a precarious fiscal position that it will not be able to support its payroll obligations, nor routine maintenance contracts within a matter of weeks.”
The resolution also states that Trump, who serves as the center’s chairman, has offered to “step in and raise the necessary funds to keep the Center from bankruptcy during its much needed renovation.” The resolution adds that the board “is seeking to appropriately recognize and acknowledge President Trump for his well timed proffer of fiscal rescue. The Board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the Center.”
The draft resolutions were submitted in court documents by attorneys for Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio member of the board who fought an earlier effort to add Trump’s name to the institution and plans to close the complex for two years for renovations.
The Washington Post first reported on the proposed resolution as well as another calling for the immediate shutdown of the main complex. That resolution follows a recent incident in which a leak after heavy rains caused a portion of the ceiling plaster to detach.
The resolutions are expected to come before the center’s board meeting on Tuesday.
A federal judge ruled in May that the board lacked authority to add Trump’s name to the center late last year, and he ordered it removed from Kennedy Center materials and the front facade.
More recently, the board voted on a new resolution to add Trump’s name as many as three times to the center’s grounds. On the facade, below its official name, “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” there would be an additional line reading “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”
Once a $100 million threshold is met for an endowment the board set up for the center, per the resolution, a line would be added to read, “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”
The board also voted to designate “the physical site and grounds upon which the center sits” as the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
The newest resolution presents 10 different options for installing Trump’s name on the front.
The judge in Beatty’s lawsuit, Christopher Cooper, is currently considering whether the new naming proposal complies with his earlier ruling.
The board also voted last month to close most of the complex for renovations. The latest resolution cites the recent partial ceiling collapse and states that the board “believes that the risk associated with exposing patrons and employees to a hazardous building greatly outweighs any reputational risk
associated with closing the main building.” The resolution notes that programming would still continue at The Reach, the extension to the center that opened in 2019, while the National Symphony Orchestra would continue at alternate venues. The Kennedy Center Honors and the Mark Twain Prize also would continue at alternate venues.
Congress included more than $250 million in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year for Kennedy Center renovations. But since Trump’s takeover of the center just weeks into his second term, the center saw a drop in ticket sales and, after the president’s name was added to the complex in December, another wave of artist cancellations.
Cooper is holding a scheduling conference on Tuesday on the latest closure plan. Cooper’s injunction also prohibited the institution from closing unless the board more fully considered the impact of a shutdown.
A Kennedy Center spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Beatty’s attorneys, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said in a statement, “This constant effort to add Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center facade is the definition of insanity. This is now the third attempt to deface this sacred memorial and turn it into a vanity project for one man’s ego. Worse still, now Trump is taking the Center hostage and threatening to in effect kill it unless he gets his way. This has to stop.”
Leave a Reply