Judge blocks Trump administration from renaming Kennedy Center

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the Kennedy Center is "in a virtual state of collapse" and that a falling chunk of concrete and steel left a security guard "60 seconds away from certain death," as he lashed out just before a federal judge permanently blocked his administration from inscribing his name on the building for a second time.

"The Kennedy Center is in a virtual state of collapse, and has been for many years," Trump wrote. "A large piece of concrete and steel just dropped down, in a thud, from the ceiling of a heavily trafficked main hallway. If the Building were open, innocent people would have been killed. A security guard had just passed the area, one minute prior to this ceiling collapse. He was, therefore, 60 seconds away from certain death."

Trump did not mention that the Kennedy Center's own communications office, describing the same Grand Foyer ceiling incident after storms hit Washington earlier this month, said only that a section of ceiling had come down and that "no one was hurt."

The post came not long before U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued an order blocking the Kennedy Center's Trump-appointed Board of Trustees from inscribing "renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump" on the building's main facade or renaming the center’s campus "President Donald J. Trump Plaza" in what is the latest defeat for a White House that has spent the better part of a year trying to attach the president's name to the Kennedy Center.

Trump, who has installed himself as the Center's chairman, blamed the building's purported condition on the litigation rather than on his own administration's decision to keep it open without a full renovation underway.

"The Judge has made us keep it open even though there are no performances, and no people that would have the Courage to even go in," he wrote, before pivoting to a familiar attack line: "A very hostile and conflicted Judge (What else is new?) seems like he won't let that happen, in which case, unfortunately, the Building is destined to doom. Isn't that too bad? We have already wasted more than 6 months 'playing around' in Court. Time is our Enemy!"

He closed by noting the Board — which he described as "comprised of some of the most prominent and respected people in our Nation" — was "meeting again today," adding: "It will be interesting to see what happens!"

What happened, according to Cooper's 44-page memorandum opinion, was another loss for the administration.

The order enforces a permanent injunction Cooper issued on May 29 requiring the removal of Trump's name from the Center after Congress's Kennedy Center Act — which the judge noted bars "additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials" from the building's public areas — went unheeded by a Board that voted in August to try again. That August 13 resolution proposed inscribing Trump's name on the building, renaming the grounds "President Donald J. Trump Plaza," and eventually adding a third inscription crediting a "Trump Kennedy Center Fund" once its endowment hits $100 million.

Cooper blocked the first two outright, rejecting the administration's argument that the injunction applied only to the building itself and not the surrounding campus. "The Kennedy Center's public spaces honor President Kennedy and President Kennedy alone," he wrote. "Alone means alone." He was similarly unmoved by the government's warning that the Center could face financial ruin without Trump's name attached, noting officials had "failed to support th[e] assertion" of irreparable harm "with any specific facts or evidence" — a finding the D.C. Circuit had already made once, in July, when it denied the administration a stay. The Endowment Fund inscription survived for now only because the fund, by the administration's own account, "has not yet started raising money"; Cooper ordered the Board to give the court and Beatty 60 days' notice before installing it, should the $100 million ever materialize.

The ruling capped a summer of escalating filings in Beatty v. Trump, the suit the Ohio Democrat brought as an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center's board after the panel first voted to rename the institution in December. When ticket sales sagged and the administration abruptly announced in February that it would shutter the Center "ostensibly for renovations," in the words of a Beatty court filing, she amended her suit to block that too. The Board's renewed push in August — after Cooper's May injunction — prompted the Justice Department to warn the building could be "required to be taken down," which Beatty's attorneys, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, cast in an August 26 reply brief as a threat rather than a warning: "Defendants have not-so-subtly said: 'This is a nice Kennedy Center you have here, and what a shame should something happen to it.' This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop."