The Congresswoman Who Got Trump’s Name Off the Kennedy Center
· The Atlantic
Three months ago, a 75-year-old lawmaker filed a complaint as part of an ongoing lawsuit in federal court, claiming that she had been unlawfully excluded from an upcoming board meeting that would determine the fate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
It turned out that the invitation had landed in her spam folder—an admission that quickly became a political punch line, a real-life Veep episode in Washington politics.
Visit betsport.cv for more information.
Today, the plaintiff—Representative Joyce Beatty—feels vindicated, she told me, after a federal judge last week ruled in her favor, ordering the removal of President Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center and temporarily halting his plan to close the institution this summer for a two-year renovation project. On Thursday, the Kennedy Center moved to implement the first half of that ruling, instructing staff to remove Trump’s name from signage and center materials. In a new filing yesterday, Beatty’s legal team told the court that the Kennedy Center has yet to clearly indicate that it will comply with the judge’s preliminary injunction requiring the institution to remain open past July 5.
“It appears, unfortunately, that Defendants may intend to proceed—full steam ahead—with the shutdown, or simply to effectuate a shutdown by inertia,” the lawyers wrote.
Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, has been the lone lawmaker behind the monthslong legal fight. (A coalition of historic preservationists and architects asked for a similar injunction in a separate lawsuit, which the judge denied because the plaintiffs had not shown that the renovations were subject to certain federal-review laws.) Now, as the Kennedy Center board faces a June 12 deadline to comply with the ruling—and 60 days to potentially appeal it—Beatty finds herself at the center of one of the most consequential cultural clashes of Trump’s second term. The ruling, she said, was just the “first step.”
She and other lawmakers are now discussing legislation that could reinforce the Kennedy Center’s statutory protections and prevent future administrations from exerting similar control over the institution. And observers of the center are beginning to wonder how to revive the institution after Trump’s damaging tenure as its board chair—a 16-month stretch that has seen artists cancel performances and sales decline, and which put the Kennedy Center’s most prominent tenant, the National Symphony Orchestra, in crisis.
[Read: The Kennedy Center enters the unknown]
As of yesterday afternoon, Trump’s name was still mounted on the building’s marble facade. Although the 18 new letters were installed in broad daylight—just one day after the board voted on the measure to add them—it’s unlikely that the center will want a scene when it reverses that work. Meanwhile, Beatty’s larger legal case will continue toward trial. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s ruling last week only temporarily blocked the center’s planned shutdown, leaving open the possibility that the board could still pursue renovations later after “independently balancing its multiple obligations to the Center in a prudent fashion.“
Beatty’s team says that the decision nevertheless gives it a strong foundation heading into the next phase of litigation. “The court found that we were likely to prevail on the merits and gave us a preliminary injunction on that basis,” Nathaniel Zelinsky, a senior counsel for the Washington Litigation Group, which is representing Beatty alongside Democracy Defenders Action, told me.
But saving the center legally may prove easier than restoring it institutionally.
Trump still controls much of the Kennedy Center. He remains the chairperson of its board of trustees, while Matt Floca—a facilities expert elevated by Trump to lead the center’s planned renovations—heads up the day-to-day operations inside the building. Ever since an announcement from Trump in February, the staff has been preparing for the center to shut down for two years while most artistic operations cease.
Now, even with the court temporarily blocking those plans, fundamental questions about the institution’s leadership, finances, and artistic direction remain in flux. “It’s not clear if there’s any money to stay open with,” former Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser told me. “And it’s also not clear who’s going to be in charge.”
Kaiser, a prominent arts administrator who led the Kennedy Center from 2001 to 2014, believes that the court ruling solved only one layer of the crisis—the in-your-face association with Trump that deepened the difficulty of attracting patrons and talent.
The broader uncertainty begins with governance. After Cooper’s ruling, Trump said that he would “transfer” the Kennedy Center back to Congress—a proposal that has puzzled arts leaders and legal observers. “The Kennedy Center is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization,” Kaiser said. “It’s not owned, frankly, by any one person.” (Yesterday, Trump told reporters he would remain the center’s chair.)
Congress could theoretically revise the institution’s governing structure, Kaiser said, but much remains unknown: whether the current board remains intact, whether former members (whom Trump purged) could return, and whether donors and artists would trust the institution again under existing leadership. “If this board continues to govern the organization, I don’t see where there’s that much change in terms of audiences, donors, artists’ desire to engage with the organization,” he said. Current members of the board, which Trump remade last year, include figures in the Trump administration (White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino), Fox News personalities (Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham), and the spouses of billionaires (Dana Kraft, Andrea Wynn).
Kaiser—who helped revive the fortunes of the American Ballet Theater, the Alvin Haley American Dance Theater, and the Royal Opera House in London—estimates that a full turnaround for the Kennedy Center could happen within three years, requiring the careful restoration of staffing, donor confidence, and artistic ambition.
“There’s going to be a groundswell of support for the Kennedy Center from both donors and the public, but also from artists, I believe, if things revert to a more normal status,” Kaiser said. “And I think therefore there will be some infusion of resources that have to be very carefully spent.” The center would likely first rely on smaller performances and goodwill from artists willing to return before it eventually restored larger productions, festivals, and educational programming. But goodwill alone doesn’t sustain institutions, he said.
“I do think that what’s going to make the turnaround happen or not over time is whether really good programming is created that makes donors feel, Yes, I really want to support this place in a major way, in an ongoing way,” Kaiser said. “You only remain the flagship organization if your programming says it is.”
Trump injected a partisan sensibility into the Kennedy Center from the moment he took over: hosting the Kennedy Center Honors, bringing in the FIFA draw (causing the cancellation of other events), renting spaces to conservative groups and foreign governments, and booking more Christian-themed events. But as the Kennedy Center has begun to wind down operations, programming hasn’t been a priority for months.
Fastening Trump’s name to its facade in December triggered renewed turmoil at the institution, accelerating performance cancellations and prompting the dissolution of its longtime affiliation with the Washington National Opera.
The center’s remaining tenant, the National Symphony Orchestra, has fallen behind in announcing its upcoming season of performances and its annual fundraising gala. (In a statement on Wednesday, the board said that it fully expects to stage upcoming performances at the center, if construction work permits, or at other suitable venues. Reports in The Washington Post and The New York Times portrayed an ensemble incapacitated because the Kennedy Center has not authorized it to commit funds toward booking its next season.)
Elsewhere, Broadway tours evaporated as leadership increasingly shifted focus toward campus rentals and a handful of special events, including a Mark Twain Prize ceremony honoring Bill Maher. One current staffer, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, told me that the institution also explored hosting a restaged White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (Trump announced on Tuesday that the redo of the event would be held on July 24 at the Waldorf Astoria.)
[Read: What I saw inside the Kennedy Center]
Beatty, now 76, told me that the instability consuming the Kennedy Center is precisely what her lawsuit sought to stop. “America, the arts, and the rule of law,” she said, are the three things she sought to defend in her legal challenge. She has served on the board since 2019, when she was appointed by then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a congressionally designated member. Beatty described the center’s governance before Trump as formal and collegial. Meetings were held at the institution itself, and all trustees were recognized by the chair and routinely invited to participate in discussions and votes, she said.
That changed quickly after Trump returned to office and made the Kennedy Center one of his first targets in reshaping Washington’s cultural institutions. “Everything happened in nanoseconds,” Beatty said. David Rubenstein, the Kennedy Center’s longtime chairperson, and President Deborah Rutter were ousted, and meetings became rushed and exclusionary. “Donald Trump is the chair—bam! Unanimous,” she recalled.
Major events such as Hamilton and an Issa Rae show were swiftly canceled, staff departures staggered departments and drained the organization of expertise, and ticket sales drastically declined. The center bragged for months about robust private donations, but Floca said in a court filing this spring that the number was in the tens of millions, not more than $100 million.
The erosion of the center’s governance processes received less attention but posed its own severe challenges.
In May 2025, the Kennedy Center revised its bylaws to limit voting authority to presidentially appointed trustees—a change that helped clear the way for Trump loyalists to unanimously approve the institution’s name change during a December board meeting in Palm Beach, Florida. At the time, the center said that the change was intended to reflect a long-standing precedent that ex officio members don’t have voting power. (Ex officio trustees are members not appointed by the president but who serve by dint of their office. They include some Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress such as Beatty, and other prominent officials such as the secretary of the Smithsonian. They are outnumbered by the presidential appointees.)
But Beatty disputed that assertion about ex officio voting rights, as did Kaiser. “In my time, ex officio members voted just like regular board members,” Kaiser told me in April. “Everyone voted.”
The question of voting power immediately became a point of interest—in large part because Beatty publicly came forward about the December board vote, saying that she was repeatedly muted when she tried to voice her opposition while attending the meeting virtually. It happened a total of three times, she said, before a message appeared on her screen: “You will not be unmuted.” Days later, she filed her lawsuit, alleging that the board proceedings had violated her rights as an ex officio member and that the name change exceeded the board’s statutory authority.
The legal fight intensified after Trump announced plans to close the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations—which critics charged was intended to cover for the institution’s operational troubles under Trump. Beatty amended her complaint, arguing in part that she had again been improperly excluded from an upcoming board meeting at the White House at which trustees were expected to approve the shutdown.
Although she later found the invitation in her spam folder, Beatty maintains that the notification process itself broke from normal protocol for missives coming from the White House. “To me, it was immaterial that I found it,” she said. “It was not sent to my chief; it was not sent to my scheduler.”
Beatty’s campaign never weighed on her more than when she arrived at the White House for the meeting, Beatty said. Sitting among Trump’s 40 or so handpicked trustees and other allies, including then–outgoing Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell, she realized that she was the only Democrat and the only Black person in the room.
“It was only a fleeting second that I thought about, I’m in this alone,” Beatty said. But the moment also clarified the stakes for her. “I am in this for history,” she said. “I’m in this for change.”
Beatty has built a political career around defiant stands. Before arriving in Congress in 2013, Beatty became the first female Democrat House leader in Ohio history and later chaired the Congressional Black Caucus. And she has built a national profile at the center of voting-rights and racial-justice fights. In 2020, she made national headlines after being pepper-sprayed by police during a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus. The following year, she was arrested during a voting-rights protest at the Capitol.
But she insists that her current struggle isn’t about her own prerogatives. “At the end of the day, I wasn’t fighting for myself,” she said. “I was fighting for an institution—the Kennedy Center that belongs to the American people.”
Beatty still seems to believe the Kennedy Center can recover—but first, it needs to simply survive.