Most transplants to Washington can recall their first time running afoul of local etiquette and getting corrected for their use of an improper name.
“We don’t call it that here,” the friend of a friend told me when I said I’d flown into “Reagan National.” When asked how I ought refer to the airport, she was less specific. “Anything but that.”
Over time, this debate has cleaved the population into stubborn factions who no longer argue the matter. I just call it the airport and point in the appropriate direction.
Things might be a little different this time around. On Thursday, the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted to rename the living monument to the 35th president as the “Trump Kennedy Center” and a nationwide freak-out ensued. Most of us haven’t experienced this level of dissonant brand synergy since our first visit to a combination KFC/Taco Bell.
Can he do that? Is it legal? If you ask Democratic leaders and members of the Kennedy family, they’ll say no, maybe even “absolutely not.” If you look at the side of the building — where letters spelling out Trump’s name have already been bolted into place — the answer seems to be “We already did.” Ditto the website, now presided over by a refreshed “Trump Kennedy Center” logo.
This isn’t an administration known for seeking permission or forgiveness, but it certainly does approve of approval, and it’s difficult to imagine this move earning much.
Any sober reading of recent reports would suggest that the disastrous slumps in attendance and ticket sales impacting both of the Kennedy Center’s resident artistic institutions — the Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra — might be most effectively triaged through a wholesale retreat from political controversy. This is not that.
If anything, the name-change stunt feels needlessly provocative and strangely timed, and it certainly throws both the WNO and the NSO into further financial and reputational risk by leaning into an intrusive overhaul that has already alienated large swaths of its ticket-buying audience.
Center president Richard Grenell’s assurance on X that “the Trump Kennedy Center shows a bipartisan commitment to the Arts” contradicts his history of vocal dismissals of the (still-undefined) “woke” programming he blames for its alleged downturn. And the purging of past presidents’ appointees from the board didn’t seem very bipartisan, either. The performance of the apolitical at the center has itself been lousy theater.
This isn’t the first time Trump has tagged a government building. Just weeks ago the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” made its rebranded debut (formerly the “United States Institute of Peace”) through a similarly signage-first approach. (Even still, slapping your name on somebody else’s memorial does feel like an undiscovered level of audacity.)
It is clear that to this administration, remaking the Kennedy Center in Trump’s image amounts to stamping it with his brand — which here is not a metaphor for one’s personal aesthetic and political values, but rather a wordmark, a name: His.
The top billing Trump has given himself in the new moniker has less to do with some alignment with the way Kennedy thought about American arts and culture than with how Trump thinks about himself: Trump Kennedy Center. The name reads like a verb clause. Or a mission statement.
If, through legislative protocol, brute force, or a combination of the two, this name change sticks, it will undoubtedly cleave a new fork in the road between artists at the center and their potential audiences. After all, a major perk of the place is its historical attachment and cultural elevation of the arts. Under the new leadership of the center, we’ve seen the arts disparaged (and artists harassed).
Since I have been attending their productions, the WNO and NSO have each regularly invoked the legacy of JFK as a guiding principle in their work: the notion of art as “the great democrat,” as Kennedy put it, “calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color.” Does the Trump Kennedy Center’s new identity change the ideals that have long functioned as its foundation? Or is this new nomenclature oxymoronic from the jump?
If nothing else, the rebranding of the Center is as clear a signal as any that the administration intends to proceed on its own terms and use the Kennedy Center for its own purposes. (The postponement of several NSO concerts to make way for the FIFA’s World Cup draw is one particularly striking example.) Audiences who were on the fence about the newly politicized arts center probably won’t be lured back by the promise of further disruptions. Despite long affiliations and contractual entanglements, it may be time for the NSO and WNO to start thinking seriously about their respective paths forward — and whether that means staying put.
It could take months, years or decades for folks around here to call it by a new name. Far more urgently for concerned audiences and artists alike is that we start calling the Trump Kennedy Center for what it is.
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