President Trump seeks to rename Kennedy Center

The saga of Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to slap his name onto the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will not go away. In May, Trump lost in court and was ordered to remove his name from the building. But now—according to a 57-page presentation by Trump’s hand-picked executive board obtained by The Washington Post—the Kennedy Center is warning that it will likely go bankrupt. Unless, that is, Trump gets to put his name back on the wall next to that of his slain predecessor.

Trump’s support hinges on getting public credit for his involvement. The financial resolution says Trump has offered to “raise the necessary funds to keep the Center from bankruptcy” while the building undergoes a sweeping renovation. But it says Trump is unlikely to provide “fundamental oversight” of that project or lead a financial rescue without “appropriate recognition” of his role.

That’s not an offer of help; it’s a shakedown—or, in more direct terms, political blackmail. Two lawyers who have been fighting the Trump administration, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said in a statement: “Trump is taking the Center hostage and threatening to in effect kill it unless he gets his way.” The president is counting on the board’s civic spirit and affection for the institution—neither of which he evidently possesses—to strong-arm it into giving him what the law and courts would not allow.

Even more galling than Trump’s attempt to pressure the trustees is that his offer is a response to a crisis mostly of his own creation. It’s true that the Kennedy Center, opened more than a half century ago, needs investment and repairs. But the plummeting ticket sales are a result of Trump’s hostile takeover. Performers and patrons alike did not want to legitimize the obscenity of placing Trump’s name on an institution meant to honor Kennedy, and they voted with their feet and their dollars. This very public repudiation of Trump by a slice of the American cultural elite appears to have been an embarrassment to the president; Trump then claimed that he needed to close the center for two years (ostensibly for a complete reconstruction) rather than suffer further humiliation.

(Trump, apparently, could not submit to the public indignity of having his name removed from the building in June. He—or someone seeking to please him—ordered workers to cover the building’s wall with tarps at 3 o’clock in the morning so that no one would see the removal. The tarps remain in place.)

The only way to avert letting the center go bankrupt, according to the executive board, is to let Trump raise money—and heaven knows what kind of ethical issues that effort would entail—and then to add his name to thank him. The presentation to the board suggests 10 possible statements to place on the building, including “Renovation Restoration and Endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” Putting Trump’s name in front of Kennedy’s is an especially offensive touch, and would enshrine the idea that the center would no longer be named solely for Kennedy.

The American people do not support Trump’s mania for renaming things, of which the Kennedy Center is just one example. (The White House itself has become a public exhibit of Trump’s garish taste, including gold script identifying The Oval Office, as if it’s a function room at one of his resorts that needs to be labeled in case a tipsy wedding guest gets lost.) All of this architectural bombast and glitz are expressions both of ego and of insecurity: Trump wants to leave his mark—and his name—on a city that has never accepted him and that will almost certainly try to scrub away his influence when he is gone.

The president admitted as much recently, when the writer Ben Terris asked him whether he is building monuments to himself because he is worried that no one else will build them when he’s gone. “That’s true,” Trump said. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

The president’s admission suggests a way to deal with his attempted shakedown of the Kennedy Center board: take his dare.

The center’s top officials, the people who were supposed to be entrusted with the future of this cultural icon, have admitted their failure. They acknowledge that Trump will not support the institution unless his name is on it. Well, so be it. The trustees should let the center close, declare bankruptcy, and come to a sad end—all on Trump’s watch. Allow the Kennedy Center to fail in full view of the American public, and let them decide whether such things matter.

Otherwise, Trump will plow ahead and do something no one wants, because no one bothered to stop him.

The Kennedy Center can always be rebuilt and reopened. Indeed, the restoration of the center could be one of the items on the next president’s to-do list. Scrap the czarist-style ballroom. Rebuild the East Wing of the White House. Halt the fascist-flavored victory arch that will dishonor nearby Arlington Cemetery. Fix the Reflecting Pool. Chisel Trump’s name off the U.S. Institute of Peace. (If the president wants to land at Donald J. Trump International Airport in Palm Beach when he leaves office, that’s between him and the people of Florida.) Painful as it would be to see the Kennedy Center go bankrupt, it would be more painful to cave to Trump’s deeply cynical refusal to save a national treasure unless he gets his name on it.

In a famous 1911 poem that gave the world another name for blackmail—danegeld, a reference to the protection money that medieval English villages paid, often in vain, to Danish raiders—Rudyard Kipling warned powerful countries against caving to extortionary threats. The Kennedy Center board, and the American people, should heed Kipling’s advice:

We never pay any-one Dane-geld,

No matter how trifling the cost;

For the end of that game is oppression and shame,

And the nation that plays it is lost!