The Kennedy Center Is a Metaphor for De-Trumpification

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No event at the Kennedy Center in recent months has drawn as much anticipation in Washington as the removal of President Trump’s name from the building’s facade. The date and time of the performance are not yet public, but residents and reporters are on alert to watch workers pull down the letters that were hastily added in December, when the institution was ungrammatically rechristened “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Already, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reported last week, Trump’s name has been removed from the center’s website, as well as from “email signatures, email communications, letterhead, website, brochures, promotional materials, press releases, signs, references in contracts, MOUs, and other agreements.” These are signs of the center moving to comply with a judge’s ruling late last month that ordered it to revert to its statutory name.

The re-renaming is a welcome win for the rule of law, but the precarious path ahead for the Kennedy Center is a useful metaphor for the United States in the Trump era as a whole. Removing Trump’s name is the easy part—a discrete step that a judge can straightforwardly mandate—but repairing the damage will be a much longer and more difficult process, assuming it’s possible at all.

Trump remains in charge of the Kennedy Center, which means he could continue to wreak havoc, but he’s also threatened to just walk away, which would leave the center hollowed out and rudderless. Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the center’s board had not been given sufficient information to approve the two-year closure announced in March, but, he added, “this Court is not to substitute its judgment for the Board’s as to whether a temporary but long-term closure is, all things considered, a good idea. The Court takes no position on that question.” And as Kingsberry has reported, there is not much Kennedy Center left to keep open. The Trump-installed leadership—the president fired half of the board, replaced it with loyalists, and appointed himself chairman; many staffers quit or were fired—has driven away artists and attendees, and has left the center without scheduled programming.

When the Kennedy Center was dedicated, in 1971, speakers presented it as a symbol of the nation. Its current travails are likely to be a model for the nation too. Even a hypothetical future president who has respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers will have a difficult time fixing what is broken. Such a president can remove the Ultimate Fighting Championship arena from the White House lawn or even demolish Trump’s intended ballroom, assuming it gets built. But something will need to fill the hole in the ground where the old East Wing used to sit. More important, that president will need to fix what happens inside the White House, the West Wing, and the executive-office buildings by reconstituting the National Security Council, replacing partisan hacks, and re-creating the interagency process for policy making. That damage is less visible and less easily reversed.

At the Pentagon, restoring the legal name of the Department of Defense will be easy, and so will taking Trump’s name off the “Trump class” battleship, the huge nuclear-powered naval vessel he proposed last year. But replacing the ammunition used in Trump’s unauthorized and aimless war in Iran will not. A pipeline of promising officers who had the misfortune to be female or nonwhite while serving under Secretary Pete Hegseth, and as a result had their career stall rather than being promoted, will take years to refill.

A future attorney general—with White House endorsement—could work to restore the independence of the Department of Justice and prevent it from becoming a tool for pursuing the president’s personal vendettas. But he or she will have a much harder time restoring the presumption of trust from federal judges that has been squandered over the past 17 months, especially given how many experienced, nonpartisan lawyers have left the department, and how many attorneys with dubious qualifications have been hired. (As former Attorney General Merrick Garland can now attest, any restoration of principles at DOJ will also be fragile without accompanying changes to the law.)

Unless Congress passes a law abolishing the Department of Education, which seems unlikely, the next administration can give up on Trump’s attempt to kill the department, but the loss of thousands of experienced civil servants at that and other departments will be challenging to reverse. An Ebola outbreak has spread quickly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in part because funding for U.S. work to monitor and contain the virus was slashed by DOGE last year—some of the many cuts that DOGE made while federal spending actually grew.

A future president will likely be able to fire commissioners and other officers at bodies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission—thanks, ironically, to Trump’s efforts to knock down protections around what used to be called “independent regulatory agencies.” The Supreme Court appears poised to approve Trump’s power grab, so unless Congress passes new legislation to reestablish the independent functioning of those bodies, they will forever be susceptible to political interference.

Trump’s threat to walk away from the Kennedy Center suggests an additional danger: He could lose interest and doze off, as if at yet another Cabinet meeting or NBA Finals game, leaving parts of the government to fend for themselves. At one time, that might have been for the better, but in their already injured state, the neglect would probably not be benign.The successful legal battle to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center is not hollow, but it is incremental. The hardest work, for both the Kennedy Center and the rest of the nation, remains ahead.

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Today’s News

President Trump said in a social-media post that he had “cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran” that were supposed to happen tonight, claiming that the United States and Iran have made progress toward a peace agreement; he said that the U.S. naval blockade would remain in place until the agreement is finalized. The announcement follows the second consecutive night of strikes on southern Iran, to which Iran responded with strikes near U.S. bases in Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain.
Trump said that he would nominate Jay Clayton to serve as the director of national intelligence, replacing Bill Pulte as the acting director after hearing bipartisan concerns about Pulte’s lack of intelligence experience.
The Florida Supreme Court cleared the way for new GOP-drawn congressional maps to be used in the 2026 midterms, rejecting an effort to block them. The maps, backed by Governor Ron DeSantis, could help Republicans gain several U.S. House seats and reshape races across the state.

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The Weekly Planet: Jason Dove Mark writes about why the media keep quoting the same climate scientist.

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Evening Read

An orange is wrapped in plastic like candy — Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Fruit Is Too Sweet

By Ellen Cushing

If it is possible, in this fascinating age, to be a celebrity fruit, the Sumo Citrus is definitely a celebrity fruit. The mandarin-satsuma-orange hybrid, originally developed in Japan and brought to American grocery stores in 2011, is by far the most popular new member of the citrus family, accounting for almost a third of the entire sector’s recent growth. This winter, like the winter before, my local Trader Joe’s displayed piles of them in prime position, and many times the store would be half sold-out before sunset. Sumos are discovered anew every season on social media, where people talk about their adorable bumpy heads, their generous size, and—oh!—their sweetness.

Of course. As soon as you taste one, you understand. The eye-widening, tongue-coating syrupyness; the sticky dribble down your chin; the sensation of eating candy that is, somehow, also fruit, a feeling that is a teeny tiny bit like you are robbing a bank at breakfast.

Read the full article.