What did Donald Trump do today?
He got Americans excited about watching scaffolding go up in the middle of the night, among other arts news.
Trump's name was ordered to be physically removed from the facade of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, the capitol-area institution that he tried to rebrand after himself. Since returning to office, Trump purged the Kennedy Center's board, stocked it with personal loyalists, installed himself as the emcee of its awards ceremony, cancelled or drove away most of the artists scheduled to perform there, and tried to turn it into a culture-war battlefield. He also had his name installed above Kennedy's.
But only an act of Congress can rename the Center, and even with a Republican majority in both houses for the moment, there is very little appetite in Trump's party to indulge in his obsession with using the power of his office for self-promotion. Federal courts struck down the move, and last week Trump appeared to acquiesce, sort of. He issued a sulky social media post saying that if he couldn't have it named for himself, he'd "transfer" the Center back to Congress's control, which is legally meaningless.
But late yesterday, at the very last minute, Trump made one last-ditch attempt, in the form of a motion for an emergency stay of a judge's order to chisel his name off the building. In it, his loyalists on the Board claimed to have rewritten their own bylaws to cripple the Center's fundraising arm if and only if Trump's name was removed from the building.
In other words, Trump had his political appointees put a poison-pill provision in the Center's own governing documents designed to hurt it financially if a judge tried to enforce the law.
The motion was promptly denied.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people tuned into livestreams of the Kennedy Center's facade all day in anticipation of Trump's name being taken down. Scaffolding slowly went up over the course of the day, delayed for a while by lightning in the area. By midnight EST, Trump's name was still up, but workers continued preparations as raucous crowds chanted "bring it down."
Trump's loyalists on the Kennedy Center board are also being sued for a more traditionally Trump-like reason: they're accused of trying to steal funds from a non-profit organization, the Washington National Opera. (Trump's own "charity" was dissolved by the State of New York when he was found to be using it as a personal slush fund, vehicle for tax evasion, and as a way of making illegal campaign donations.)
The WNO's suit alleges that, after years of mutually beneficial partnership, the Center's board illegally used the WNO's endowment as collateral for its own loans. Then, when the WNO decided to end the partnership, the Center's board seized donations it had been managing for the opera. It also "cut off the opera’s access to its emails, donor records and board minutes dating to 2011; locked staff out of their offices; sent termination letters to WNO employees; and scrubbed the opera’s remaining season from the center’s website."
Why does this matter?
- This is the kind of destructive, self-centered behavior that would have parents worried if a four-year did it, much less a sitting President of the United States.
- There's a term for striking down monuments to self-glorifying dictators—damnatio memoriae—and all things considered, given how dictators usually meet their ends, it's the moderate response.
