Given Donald Trump’s obsession with self-aggrandizement and self-glorification, it didn’t come as too big of a surprise when the president’s handpicked allies claimed they had renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But surprising or not, the absurdity got messy in a hurry.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, for example, claimed the Kennedy Center’s board, stacked with Trump loyalists, “voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center.” As is too often the case, she was apparently not telling the truth.
More importantly, Team Trump characterized the name change as a done deal, which it was not. Congress created the name for the Kennedy Center, and at no point did lawmakers delegate powers to the center’s board to rename the institution unilaterally.
The president’s operation, which has never been overly concerned with following laws, didn’t appear to care: By Thursday night, the center’s official website had been changed to include Trump’s name.
By Friday morning, crews were already hard at work. The Washington Post reported:
The Kennedy Center installed President Donald Trump’s name on its exterior Friday morning, a dramatic change to a building established by law as a ‘living memorial’ to a slain president. […]
A blue tarp was stretched across a portion of the building the next morning as a small team on scaffolding started the work. Loud drilling could be heard nearby. Inside the building, large letters spelling ‘Trump’ could be seen on the floor of the entry hall, according to a photograph obtained by The Washington Post.
It’s hard to know where to start with an initiative this ridiculous, but one of the first things that jumped out at me was the speed with which this came together. The president’s operation managed to acquire the materials, arrange the crews, secure the equipment and begin the installation work over the course of roughly half a day.
If you’re thinking the plans for this were in motion before Thursday afternoon’s announcement, you’re not alone.
Nevertheless, by midday Friday, the crews were gone and the arts center’s façade was changed.
As things stand, the exact wording on the front wall of the center reads, “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
No, seriously, that’s what it says. At this point, we could talk about the weird double “the.” We could also joke about the fact that this is now apparently a “memorial center” to two people, one of whom is alive. While we’re at it, we could draw attention to the fact that the fonts don’t exactly match — and given the Republican administration’s interest in type settings, this is tough to overlook — while simultaneously noting the encouraging fact that the placement of Trump’s name will make it easy to take it down in the future without disturbing the original lettering. But as notable as these elements are, and while I appreciate the temptation to find humor in such head-spinning absurdities, I think it’s also worth describing what transpired at the Kennedy Center accurately: A group of people associated with the president just vandalized one of the nation’s premier performing arts centers. As MS NOW’s Chris Hayes noted, it’s “interesting to consider that if you were to go and deface the Kennedy Center by removing Trump’s name, you’d be arrested and charged with a crime, but your act would be no more unlawful than what they’re doing right now.” The president and his team have already gone to outlandish lengths to vandalize the White House. They’re now adding additional buildings to their target list. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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