Five months after Donald Trump and his allies tried to force his name onto the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a federal judge made the obvious call: The law says only Congress can change the name of the memorial, and that didn’t happen.
Late last week, the administration made several last-ditch efforts to halt implementation of the ruling before the court-imposed deadline, but to no avail. MS NOW reported:
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has been restored to its original name.
President Donald Trump’s name was officially cleared from the marble façade of the storied cultural institution on Saturday, the Kennedy Center said, after last-minute attempts by the Trump administration to delay a federal judge’s ruling that the name cannot be changed.
There’s still some legal wrangling on the horizon, but at this point, it’s worth pausing to note how exactly the Kennedy Center was restored to its legal name.
On Friday, a crowd assembled to watch crews remove Trump’s name from the wall, and while I wasn’t personally there, by all accounts, the audience was prepared to celebrate a good show. The Washington Post reported, “The atmosphere was festival-like: People brought their dogs, their partners and their children.”
But it quickly became clear that spectators were going to be disappointed.
Crew members spent hours erecting scaffolding for reasons that weren’t altogether clear, at least not at first. It would have been easy enough to simply put someone in a boom lift, elevate them to the offending letters and have them remove the incumbent president’s name.
But it soon became clear why the scaffolding was put in place. The Wall Street Journal reported, “Between 1 and 2 a.m., the workers began to fasten large, white tarps to the scaffolding, obscuring the crowd’s view and drawing boos from some on the ground.”
To be sure, Trump’s name appears to be gone from the wall. In fact, some photojournalists managed to capture some images from behind the tarps, which showed a worker removing letters.