President Donald Trump trolled opponents of his disastrous Kennedy Center takeover on Wednesday night with a stage-managed glimpse into Air Force One.
Trump was seen from the tarmac reviewing a poster board depicting heavy machinery tearing down the living memorial to President Kennedy, with the headline “Kennedy Center DEMOLITION” above the image.
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Pool photographers with long lenses captured the image at Joint Base Andrews after Trump’s Qatari-donated jet landed. He exited the aircraft and waved to reporters without taking questions.
The stunt was just one of a series of fast-moving developments amid the chaos enveloping the Kennedy Center this week, which started on Tuesday with a ruling from federal Judge Christopher R. Cooper barring the president — for a second time — from adding his name to the center’s facade.
The president’s hand-picked board of directors at the Kennedy Center, of which he appointed himself chairman last year, had voted a third time to add Trump’s name to the center, this time with an inscription below the main signage that would read “Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump.”
That effort earned a furious reaction from Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), the Democratic ex officio board member whose lawsuit challenging the original name change is at the center of the legal battle over who controls the Kennedy Center, the president or Congress. Calling the revised inscription a “breathtaking act of defiance,” Beatty’s lawyers asked the judge in August to block the center from adding it.
On Tuesday, Judge Cooper agreed, calling the new formulation “linguistic gymnastics.” The new inscription would violate his previous order, the judge ruled, as would a second proposal to rename the center’s grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Cooper wrote. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
“Legal sanity has once again prevailed over Trump’s vanity,” Ms. Beatty’s lawyers said following the decision Tuesday morning.
In a remarkable coincidence of timing, Beatty went right from court to joining a virtual Kennedy Center board meeting, with Trump in attendance, and was there when news of the ruling was shared.
The president lost it, Beatty said.
“So they opened up the board meeting by informing the board that we had again, Beatty v. Trump, been victorious,” Beatty told MS Now on Wednesday. “And he went into a tantrum. I mean, let me just make it simple: it was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of.”
The president called her “dumb” and an “obstructionist,” among other epithets, Beatty said.
“I looked to the chair who was chairing it, and I said, ‘Are we really going to do this? This is unprofessional.’ But I was not going to let him call me awful things.”
By her own account and others’, Beatty gave as good as she got.
“He said, ‘I think you’re incompetent,’ and I said, ‘I know you’re incompetent.’”
Beatty called Trump “ignorant,” and blamed the Kennedy Center’s financial woes on him, according to one of the attendees.
“I reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room,” Beatty added.
The public lashing may have helped spur Trump toward his next outburst: shutting down the Kennedy Center altogether.
Following the board meeting Tuesday afternoon, an announcement over the center’s public announcement system blared that the building was closed, effective immediately, and instructed visitors and staff to leave.
Trump had already made threats to close the center, citing safety concerns after claiming a five-foot section of ceiling had fallen to the center’s lobby floor during a recent storm. That same claim and a video posted by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose wife serves on the Kennedy Center board, were disputed as staged and/or a fairly obvious AI fake.
“This is the most staged s**t I’ve ever seen,” one commentator wrote, maybe doubting the veracity of handheld security camera footage.
Adding to the drama on Tuesday, that night the Kennedy Center’s chief financial officer, Donna Arduin Kauranen, resigned without explanation.
Following the center’s closure, Beatty and her legal team, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, requested an emergency hearing with Judge Cooper, accusing the board of violating the judge’s previous order.
“If true, it would appear a direct violation of the court’s order and courting contempt,” the lawyers said in a statement. On Thursday, the Justice Department filed a response, stating the closure would last seven days and was undertaken for safety reasons.
Matt Floca, the current executive director of the center following the departure of gay Trump administration toadie, Ric Grenell, who was under investigation for corruption in the same role, said in a sworn declaration that extending the closure would be assessed on a “weekly basis,” The New York Times reported.
Late Thursday, Judge Cooper denied Rep. Beatty’s request for an emergency hearing and allowed the temporary closure to continue, with a proviso that the congresswoman and a collection of preservation groups be given 30 days’ notice of any significant changes to the renovation plan, “including but not limited to any ‘demolition’ of the center’s main building,” according to The Hill.
The judge said his requirement seeks to “avoid any confusion on that score given more recent events.”
Judge Cooper had already barred the board from closing the center for a two-year renovation — with Trump claiming the building to be in a “virtual state of collapse” — because the board hadn’t exercised due diligence before assenting to the president’s demand.
The first closure announcement came in February as artists canceled dates en masse at the center amid backlash over Trump adding his name to the center in December. Judge Cooper ruled in May that Trump’s name be taken off the building.
This week, the president also tied money he said he had raised for the center explicitly to an acknowledgement of his efforts in the form of the new signage addition.
On Wednesday, he told reporters as much.
“The Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” he said. “Because, frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down.”
Yesterday evening, thousands of protesters formed a human chain around the center to protest Trump’s threats to indefinitely close, rename, or demolish the landmark venue.
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