After illegally renaming the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself, Trump has now gotten his sycophants on the board of the Kennedy Center to rename that august institution after him. But this, also, is against the law.
The Washington Post reports:
The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Thursday to rename the storied arts institution the “Trump Kennedy Center,” an unprecedented change for the U.S. presidential memorial that drew swift condemnation from Kennedy family members and Democratic leaders.
The Kennedy Center confirmed the vote in an email to The Washington Post. The law establishing the building designates it as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. …
Trump in February purged members of the board not appointed by him, installed loyalists—including several White House aides, second lady Usha Vance and Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo—and became its new chair. …
“Beyond using the Kennedy Center to reward his friends and political allies, President Trump is now attempting to affix his name to yet another public institution without legal authority,” the group of ex officio members said in a statement. …
The Kennedy Center is a public-private institution founded to be the nation’s cultural center and a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Its founding statute mandates that the board “assure” that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the building. …
David Super, a Georgetown law professor, told The Post that such a name change would require Congress’s permission. “That statute is pretty unequivocal, and I can’t really find any loopholes in it that would allow this to happen,” he said in July.
Combine this with Trump’s claim that the vote was “unanimous,” but only after muting members of Congress on the Kennedy Center board who tried to raise objections. It is yet another expression of Trump’s complete contempt for Congress and defiance of its legitimate authority.
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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