A tarp covers the facade of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026.
Graeme Sloan | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts from returning President Donald Trump’s name to the center in some fashion, months after the same judge ordered the removal of Trump’s name from its facade.
Later Tuesday, the Kennedy Center’s board voted to close the center to undergo renovations.
Judge Christopher Cooper’s order came after a renewed push by the Kennedy Center’s board — which the president chairs — to get Trump’s name on official markers at the center.
In May, Cooper had ordered that Trump’s name — which the board added to the center’s official name and facade in December — be removed because that action violated the law.
In his new order Tuesday, Cooper said he agreed that inscribing Trump’s name or renaming the grounds violated the terms of the permanent injunction he issued in May directing the president’s name be removed from the center’s official name.
“Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote in his order in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., shortly after overseeing a conference there on the issue.
“The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted,” Cooper wrote.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, an ex officio member of the center’s board who sought the order, said in a statement, “President Trump is holding the Kennedy Center hostage unless he can put his name on this sacred memorial.”
“The Court just rejected this proposal for the second time,” Beatty said. “This unlawfulness is as breathtaking as it is wrong, and it needs to stop.”
The Department of Justice, which defended the board’s actions, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Cooper’s ruling, and if it would appeal the decision.
The center’s board, in an Aug. 13 resolution, said it intended “to recognize and honor President Trump’s future existential and unprecedented contributions to the survival of the Center.”
The board said it would inscribe Trump’s name on the center’s building so that it would read, “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” with the words “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” underneath.
The board also said it would name the center’s physical grounds “The President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
Both actions were originally planned to be completed by Sept. 8, but the board later extended the deadline to Oct. 8.
The Department of Justice, in defending the board’s actions, argued to Cooper that if he blocked the moves, donors would stop contributing to the center, leaving the facility short of funds while it badly needed renovation.
Cooper, in his order Tuesday, said the DOJ offered “no proof that current or future donations hinge on President Trump’s being on the building” and “no competent proof that removing the Trump name would prevent the Center from fulfilling its artistic mission.
“Four months ago, this Court declared that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone,” Cooper said.
“It came to this conclusion for a simple reason: The federal law that created the Kennedy Center permitted no other result,” Cooper wrote. “In 1983, Congress amended that law to guarantee ‘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.’ “
“Yet the drama at the Kennedy Center continues,” the judge added, referring to the board’s resolutions.
Beatty’s lawyers, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, in a joint statement said, “Two times the court has told President Trump the same thing: You are not above the law. Legal sanity has once again prevailed over Trump’s vanity.”
NBC News reported later Tuesday that the center’s board had voted to shutter the center to allow renovations to begin on it.
A spokesperson for Beatty confirmed that report to MS NOW.