Trump Renames the Kennedy Center After Himself

The decision has been made. The most important cultural institution in the United States will now also carry the name of the sitting president. The supervisory board personally appointed by Donald Trump has decided to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as the Trump-Kennedy Center. The move was confirmed by the White House. This completes what Trump has been publicly anticipating for months and has long since put into practice linguistically. The decision comes from a board that Trump himself assembled. He is also its chairman. Formally, the process is covered, politically it is an act of considerable gravity. A national cultural institution, named after an assassinated president and a symbol of state-supported culture, is turned into an object of personal self-promotion by a holder of power.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the renaming was recognition of Trump’s alleged achievements in saving the building. He had rescued the venue structurally, financially, and in terms of its reputation. This justification is part of a narrative Trump has been promoting for a long time, but according to our research does not hold up at all. He has publicly referred to the Trump Kennedy Center as if the renaming were already a reality. Now it is.

At the beginning of December, Trump was asked on the red carpet of the Kennedy Center Honors whether he planned to rename the venue after himself. His answer was evasive. That decision would be up to the board, he said. A few days later, he spoke at an event about a major appointment at the Trump Kennedy Center, half laughing as he corrected himself and said the Kennedy Center after all. The audience laughed. By that point, the direction was already clear.

Within the Kennedy family, the move has met with open rejection. Maria Shriver, a niece of John F. Kennedy, had already reacted in the summer to corresponding legislative initiatives in Congress. She called the plan insane, ridiculous, and petty. It made her blood boil, she wrote. What was this really about, she asked, and listed what had already been changed in recent months. First the Rose Garden, then the Kennedy Center. What would come next. The reference is not accidental. Trump had the historic Rose Garden at the White House remodeled, removed the lawn, and replaced it with paving stones. There, too, a symbolic place was altered according to personal taste without public debate and against broad criticism. The Kennedy Center is now the next step. The difference is the scale. This is not about architecture, but about national memory.

Especially delicate is the family constellation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another member of the family, serves as secretary of health and human services in Trump’s Cabinet. While the name Kennedy is being politically appropriated, the family itself is deeply divided. Approval and rejection exist side by side, but the decision does not lie with them, it lies with a president who appropriates public institutions as if they were part of his property.

What is happening here is not a symbolic sideshow. A president is using his power to permanently inscribe his own name into a state cultural institution. Without necessity, without restraint, without respect for history, in which Trump has long since found his place, surrounded by such greetings as Hitler, Putin and company. It is an act of megalomania through state authority. History is not preserved, it is used. In the end, an impression remains that can hardly be argued away. This is a man who has lost every boundary and whose mental state must raise more and more questions.