In the early hours of Saturday, a court-ordered removal erased the 47th president’s name from one of America’s most iconic cultural landmarks — capping a dramatic overnight legal battle that ended in defeat for the Trump administration. Workers peeled Donald Trump’s name from the exterior of Washington’s Kennedy Center in the dead of night, completing a court-mandated restoration that the president’s lawyers had fought to the last hour to prevent.
The removal began shortly after midnight on Saturday, June 14, hours after US District Judge Christopher Cooper rejected a succession of emergency appeals by the Trump administration and the center’s board to keep the president’s name on the building.
Draped in tarpaulin to shield their work from the crowd gathered outside, crews in hard hats and high-visibility vests were spotted pulling the letters down at around 3am, wrapping up the job in roughly half an hour. By morning, the words “The Donald J Trump and” — added to the building’s facade last December — were gone.
How It Came to This
The Kennedy Center was established by Congress in 1964 as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy and opened its doors in 1971. For more than five decades, its identity was singular and non-partisan.
That changed in February, when Trump seized control of the institution, removing the 18 trustees appointed by former President Joe Biden and installing a hand-picked board of his own — with himself as chair. In December, that board voted unanimously to append his name to the venue’s title, prompting a legal challenge from Joyce Beatty, a Democratic congresswoman from Ohio who holds an ex-officio seat on the board.
Judge Cooper ruled last month that the renaming had been carried out illegally, and set a deadline of Friday, June 13 at 11:59pm for Trump’s name to be removed.
The final hours before the deadline unfolded as a rapid sequence of courtroom confrontations. At 1pm on Friday, Cooper dismissed a last-minute appeal from the centre’s lawyers, finding they had not demonstrated a likelihood of winning on the merits, nor that the centre would suffer any irreparable harm from compliance with the order.
The Department of Justice, representing the centre, took the fight to the appeals court at 3:46pm. In its filing, the DOJ argued: restoring the original name now, only to potentially reverse course after a successful appeal, would be disruptive and served no practical purpose.
Just after 7pm, that appeal was also denied — setting off celebrations among the more than 100 people gathered outside for a Hands Off the Arts rally, who erupted in cheers and began demanding the name come down immediately.
Workers had begun erecting scaffolding on Friday evening in anticipation of the ruling. After the final legal avenue closed, they covered the structure with tarpaulin at 2am — obscuring the work from view, though onlookers caught glimpses through a gap in the sheeting.
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A crowd remained through the night, chanting “Shame!” and “Take it down!” as the letters were stripped away. In a subsequent court filing, the centre’s executive director and chief operating officer, Matt Floca, confirmed compliance, certifying that “all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump” had been removed.
The tarpaulin was still in place on Saturday morning, but the legal record confirmed what the night’s work had accomplished.
Trump’s Response
The president reacted by declaring he was relinquishing control of the venue — though the statement came only after the courts had stripped him of any practical means to enforce the renaming. Cooper had also issued a separate temporary block on Trump’s plans to close the Kennedy Center for two years of renovations, which had been scheduled to begin in July.
In a telling sign of how the institution had already begun repositioning itself ahead of the deadline, the centre had removed Trump’s name from its website and had reportedly sent ticket emails referring simply to “the Kennedy Center” — without any mention of the 47th president — even before the final court orders came through.
The Kennedy Center now stands once again as it was designated more than six decades ago: a memorial not to a sitting president, but to the one whose name it was always meant to carry.
Credit: The Guardian