President Donald Trump’s decision to ignore the law and attach his name to Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center is drawing criticism on several fronts.
The addition to the exterior of the memorial to John F. Kennedy is not only grammatically clunky and non-matching, but it also suggests that Trump, 79, is dead, as several X users pointed out.
As of Friday, the building now reads, “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” But only one of those presidents is no longer alive.
“Don’t you need to be dead to have a memorial center named after you?” one X user wondered.
“Has no one explained to him what ‘memorial’ means?” another responded, while another wrote: “‘Memorial’ stands for someone passed away.”
Others noted that the building’s facade now has two “the”s in its name.
“Why did they keep the ‘The’ before Kennedy’s name?” an X user weighed in. “Sounds redundant.”
Trump’s newly added letters also don’t match the existing font, others pointed out.
Just insane they didn’t even use the same font. Incredible display of incompetence pic.twitter.com/5rlPb3fEX8
— Mark Valorian (@markvalorian) December 19, 2025
That seems to be a trend, since Trump’s self-branding of the U.S. Institute of Peace earlier this month resulted in the same mismatched typography.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kennedy family members have understandably objected to Trump slapping his name on the 54-year-old memorial to the slain president, with niece Maria Shriver calling Trump’s renaming spree “obsessive.”
Shriver and others have noted that the Kennedy Center was named as such through an act of Congress, and so Congress alone has the ability to change it, no matter what Trump says.
Trump’s hand-picked group of allies on the Kennedy Center board voted Thursday to change the name—a vote which he said was “unanimous.”
But Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio member, said that when she tried to push her button to object, she was muted.
“Participants were not allowed to voice their concerns who were online, yet it was said at the end it was a unanimous vote,” she told CNN. “Clearly, the Congress has a say in this… The Kennedy Center was created by Congress.”
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