President Trump will do anything to get his name on the Kennedy Center. A federal judge blocked Trump’s audacious push to put his name on it earlier this year, ordering the signage removed. Now, the administration is making another attempt. During a mid-August meeting, the Trump-appointed board voted in favor of adding the phrase “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” to the end of the center’s formal name, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and moved to rename the physical site as the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
This attempt has been challenged before the same court. But to ensure this time that the court rules in its favor, the DOJ is raising the stakes, essentially telling it: “approve the renaming, or watch it get demolished.”
CBS News reports:
The Trump administration said it may need to demolish the Kennedy Center if a plan to close the building for two years as part of a controversial renovation project pushed by President Trump and the organization’s board of trustees is blocked by a federal judge. In a Tuesday court filing, the Justice Department said the center’s “dangerously dilapidated, outdated, and decrepit” conditions, in addition to millions in financial losses, put the living memorial to President John F. Kennedy in a “financial and structural death spiral” that will require it to close for renovations. The filing suggested that if the current renovation plans don’t move forward, the center could ultimately be replaced with something like “a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.” … “This is a not-so-subtle threat to demolish the Kennedy Center if the President doesn’t get his way,” said attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky. “This is unconscionable, it is unbecoming of the Department of Justice to even put this in a filing, and we will answer in court.”
CNN adds a key detail on the money angle DOJ is leaning on:
An order blocking the Board from appropriately recognizing President Trump will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop. … There will simply not be the expertise or funding necessary to rebuild and renovate this decimated structure. The Trump Administration is ready to go but, without it, the Kennedy Center cannot be saved.
Translation: Nice Kennedy Center you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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