The Battle Over the Kennedy Center's Soul

When a president tried to rename a memorial Congress built for John F. Kennedy and replace Pablo Casals with a South Lawn cage match, a federal judge reminded him that some things belong to the American people — and always have

The building that Donald Trump tried to rename did not begin as a memorial to anyone. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed bipartisan legislation authorizing the creation of a National Cultural Center in the nation's capital — a straightforward acknowledgment that Washington, as the seat of American government, lacked a world-class performing arts venue. The idea had broad political support but the money to build it did not follow. For years the project sat largely inert, a good intention without a foundation.

When John and Jacqueline Kennedy arrived at the White House in 1961 they brought genuine cultural energy to the stalled initiative. In November 1962, President and Mrs. Kennedy launched a $30 million fundraising campaign for the Center's construction, with former President Eisenhower and his wife Mamie participating to demonstrate the effort's bipartisan credentials. Kennedy signed legislation the following year extending the fundraising deadline. The donations still did not come in fast enough, and he never saw the building rise. On November 22, 1963, he was shot dead in a motorcade in Dallas.

Two months after the assassination, Congress passed and President Johnson signed legislation on January 23, 1964, renaming the National Cultural Center as a living memorial to President Kennedy and authorizing $23 million in federal funds — money that had proven nearly impossible to secure across six years of ordinary political effort. The assassination unlocked both the legislative will and a flood of private donations that the project had struggled to attract since Eisenhower's original bill. Grief accomplished what lobbying could not.

The chosen site was largely undeveloped federal land on the eastern bank of the Potomac River in Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood, with a small parcel donated by a private family rounding out the footprint. Its proximity to what is now Reagan National Airport created an immediate practical problem: flight paths overhead required extraordinary soundproofing in every performance space, a constraint that killed the original design — a dramatically curved structure described at the time as resembling a spacecraft protruding into the Potomac — and produced the elevated marble box that Edward Durell Stone eventually built in its place. President Johnson broke ground in December 1964, using the same gold-plated spade used at the groundbreakings of both the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial. Construction took seven years. The New York Times called the result on opening night a gigantic marble temple to music, dance, and drama on the Potomac's edge.

There is a footnote to the naming that adds a layer of poignancy to the current legal fight. An October 1964 letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to founding Kennedy Center chair Roger Stevens, preserved in the JFK Presidential Library, reveals that she had not wanted the naming at all. She wrote that when the decision was made the previous winter she was not capable of making any decision and that too many people were pressuring her. She expressed doubt that her husband needed any memorial and said her primary concern was simply sparing him controversy. She added a pointed observation: if, after a fair amount of time, she did not think the memorial was what she wished for him, she would ask Congress to change its name — and that Congress would do so. Even in her ambivalence, Jackie Kennedy understood instinctively what the Trump administration would later discover the hard way: the name belonged to Congress, and only Congress could touch it.

Jackie came to the White House with a cultural formation genuinely unusual for an American political spouse of that era. She had studied at the Sorbonne in 1949, spoke French fluently, read Italian and Spanish, and had absorbed European cultural life not as a tourist but as someone who had lived inside it. When she arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue she was looking at the most powerful address in the world and seeing, with clear eyes, a cultural vacancy. The great European capitals — Paris, London, Rome, Vienna — had centuries of institutional arts patronage behind them. Royal courts had commissioned composers, supported opera houses, and made the arts inseparable from the idea of civilized governance. Washington had none of that tradition. What Jackie set out to do, deliberately and systematically, was close that gap.

She negotiated personally with André Malraux, France's Minister of Culture and one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century, to arrange the loan of the Mona Lisa to the National Gallery of Art in January 1963 — bringing the most famous painting in Western civilization to American soil for the first time. Two million people lined up to see it. The symbolism was pointed: Europe's greatest cultural treasure coming to Washington was a statement that America had finally built a capital worthy of receiving it.

The invitation extended to Pablo Casals carried equal and perhaps greater weight. Casals was not merely a celebrated cellist — he was arguably the greatest living interpreter of Bach, a Catalan exile who had fled Franco's Spain and refused to perform in any country that recognized the Franco regime. His self-imposed silence was an act of political conscience that the world understood and respected. Jackie and the president persuaded him to make a singular exception for the White House. His performance in the East Room in November 1961, before an audience of 153 artists, scientists, and writers, was covered internationally as a cultural event rather than a political one. It announced that the Kennedy White House intended to be taken seriously as a place of intellect and genuine artistic encounter — the democratic equivalent of what the great European courts had once offered their most distinguished guests.

Her most direct imprint on the Kennedy Center came at the opening. She had commissioned Leonard Bernstein to create a theater piece for the 1971 inaugural night, and the result was his Mass — a sprawling, theatrically ambitious work that was simultaneously a requiem for her husband and a reflection of the fractured America of the early 1970s. It was a bold and genuinely controversial choice, not a safe commemorative piece, and it reflected her understanding that the Center should be a living artistic institution rather than a marble monument.

Then came Donald Trump.

In February 2025, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had been unanimously elected as the new chair of the Kennedy Center, after removing a substantial portion of the board's existing trustees and replacing them with allies. He renamed the institution the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in December 2025 — a board vote that Judge Cooper later found to have been foreordained. Trustees had learned of the plan through a social media post at the same moment as the general public, leaving them no meaningful opportunity to deliberate. He announced plans to close the building for a two-year renovation and framed all of it as rescue — the savior of a failing institution, the man who secured the funding that made restoration possible.

What he planned to bring to the White House grounds as his signature cultural contribution to the 250th anniversary of American independence was something rather different from Pablo Casals playing Bach in the East Room. On June 14, Trump will celebrate both his 80th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding by hosting a UFC championship fight on the South Lawn, where a domed star-spangled arena is already visible on the grounds. The event, called UFC Freedom 250, is expected to draw 20,000 to 25,000 people. The financial entanglements surrounding it are considerable. Trump purchased TKO Group Holdings stock valued between $15,000 and $50,000 in March 2026 — TKO being the parent company of both the UFC and the WWE — a purchase revealed through his financial disclosure filing in May, meaning he bought stock in the company whose event he was actively promoting and hosting at the White House. Ethics watchdogs called it a straightforward conflict of interest. The conflict does not end with the president. Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education of the United States, holds over $50 million in TKO stock — a nine-figure personal financial stake in the same company whose cage fight is being staged on the South Lawn as the administration's signature cultural offering for the 250th anniversary of the republic. The lines between the White House, the cabinet, and the entertainment conglomerate have, by any honest accounting, ceased to exist.

The contrast deserves to be stated plainly. Jackie Kennedy spent her time in the White House trying to bring the cultural seriousness of the great European capitals to Washington — commissioning Bernstein, persuading Casals to break a decade of political silence, negotiating the Mona Lisa across the Atlantic. She understood that what a nation chooses to celebrate in its public spaces is a statement about what it believes itself to be. What is being erected on the South Lawn right now is a domed star-spangled arena for cage fighting, hosted by a president who holds stock in the company running it. Jackie spent her years in the White House trying to bring Versailles to Washington. The present occupant appears to be bringing Mar-a-Lago.

That understanding is precisely what Judge Cooper applied when he issued his ruling on Friday. Federal law requires that after December 2, 1983, no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. That language does not leave room for creative interpretation. Congress said one thing, the board did another, and the board was wrong. Cooper's ruling ordered all signage referencing the Trump Kennedy Center removed within two weeks and temporarily blocked the planned closure, finding that the board vote had been structurally hollow — a social media announcement dressed up as governance.

The man Trump called out by name on Truth Social, demanding he be ashamed of himself, is not an obscure or ideologically suspect figure. Christopher Reid Cooper graduated summa cum laude from Yale and with distinction from Stanford Law School, where he served as president of the Stanford Law Review, clerked for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and spent seventeen years in private practice specializing in white-collar criminal defense and internal corporate investigations. He was confirmed to the federal bench in 2014 by a vote of 100 to zero. A judge confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate does not become a partisan actor because a president finds his ruling inconvenient.

Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, the Democrat who filed the original lawsuit as a sitting member of the Kennedy Center board, put it plainly after the ruling: the Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump.

Jacqueline Kennedy, writing in grief and ambivalence from a house in Georgetown in the autumn of 1964, would likely have found that an entirely reasonable conclusion. She had asked only that Congress retain the authority to change the name if the memorial proved unworthy of her husband. It did. And a federal judge, confirmed unanimously by the Senate of the United States, agreed.