One week after a ruling declared his name had been added unlawfully, the Kennedy Center is removing the president’s traces, and it must be completed by June 12!
Washington, D.C. – The Kennedy Center has begun removing the president’s name again, one week after a federal court ruled that Donald Trump’s name had been attached to the performing arts institution unlawfully. It is a rare event, immortality with an expiration date. By June 12, according to a memo from the institution’s legal department sent to staff, email signatures, letterheads, and all other documents must once again carry the name that had been there from the beginning, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, or simply the Kennedy Center. The kingdom of the added name, it turns out, extended in the end as far as the email signature and not one step further. One should consider the entire process in all of its peculiar character. A building dedicated to the memory of a former president who was killed in office was overwritten by a living president with his own name.
The memory of one man was meant to serve the glory of another, and a court brought that to an end by stating something that should never have required a ruling at all, that you cannot simply write your own name onto someone else’s building.
How one accompanies the inevitable is reflected in the institution’s statement. The center would comply with the court’s order, said Roma Daravi, who oversees public affairs for the institution, while also reviewing all legal options to “preserve this renewal and honor President Trump’s leadership.” It is the subtle art of removing a name with one hand while praising it with the other, obeying the ruling and in the same breath searching for ways to escape it anyway. Obedience disguised as admiration obeys only halfway.
The ruling of May 29 concerned more than the name alone. It also prohibited the administration from closing the arts and cultural institution for extensive renovations that had been scheduled to begin in July. Hours later, Trump declared that he was withdrawing from the project and making arrangements to transfer oversight of the institution back to Congress, the same institution that until his second term had been the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and now once again is. As quickly as the name had arrived, the plan intended to carry it disappeared as well.
What remains is the question of what a name on a building actually is. It is the desire to borrow the permanence of the structure, to remain in memory by attaching oneself to what already remains. But being remembered cannot simply be installed, it must be earned, and what power writes onto stone, law can remove again. Kennedy’s name stands there because he came to represent something. The added name lasted only as long as the ink and the patience of the courts allowed. It is the same man who elsewhere wants a triumphal arch built in his own honor, and here he is learning the difference between an honor one receives and one one takes for oneself. The first outlives the person. The second comes with a date by which it must be removed, and in this case it reads: by June 12.
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