If Giant Baby Trump Can't Have Kennedy Center, Nobody Can Have Kennedy Center!
Waaaaaa.
We had barely finished writing about the current director of the Kennedy Center whining to a judge about what a burden it would be to remove Donald Trump’s name from the building when the judge on Friday ordered the president’s name removed from the building. Talk about serendipity.
It was a hilarious moment, not least because it sent cement-brained President Baby into a meltdown the likes of which will be very familiar to anyone who has ever parented, babysat, taught, been in a movie with, sat next to in public, or otherwise interacted in any way with children under the age of nine. The whining! The self-pity! The harrumphing about how he’s taking his ball and going home and he’s never having you over and you’re never allowed to play with him ever again, so there!
We’re not even exaggerating. But we’ll get to that.
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As we have been writing about for this last year, the longest year in American history, Trump had named himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, fired the board of trustees and restocked it with his own toadies, named his ultra toady Richard Grenell to run the place, put his own name on the building in front of that of President John F. Kennedy, and announced massive renovations to make the place look more like one of the Sultan of Brunei’s tackier palaces.
Then, when performers started canceling their shows in protest, Trump announced he would close the center for two years so he could restore it to “the highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur.” And not coincidentally, to spare himself the embarrassment of watching every artist at any level of fame from the Bruce Springsteen God Tier down to the hottest improv troupe in Flubber Butt, Idaho, pull out of performances.
Somewhere in all of this, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) filed a lawsuit protesting the renaming. Beatty had been an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, and sued after the board did not let her voice objections when its members voted for the name change. Later, she expanded the lawsuit to include the closure, on the grounds that neither the president nor the board had the authority to move forward on such massive changes without Congress and the review process normally given to every major federal building project in the Washington, DC, area.
Judge Christopher Cooper, a district judge in DC, agreed with Beatty. On Friday, he ruled that Trump’s name should be taken off the building, and the Center’s closure should be halted.
It wasn’t quite as clear a victory for the forces of good as some would have it, based on this “to be sure” paragraph in the decision:
This preliminary relief should not be understood to enjoin the necessary maintenance and repair work that Congress authorized last June through its OBBBA appropriation. That work may move forward ... Second, although the Board may not take steps to operationalize the March 16 decision, this ruling does not mean that it is necessarily barred from closing the Kennedy Center while renovations take place. ... The Court is not persuaded that the closure is categorically unwarranted or impermissible under the U.S. Code. The Court’s preliminary injunction thus does not bar the Board from reconsidering the closure issue in a prudent manner.
In other words, the board can still do what it’s doing, it just has to follow procedures, work with Congress, uphold its fiduciary responsibilities to steer the Center through this transition without bankrupting it, and not give a rubber stamp to the dementia-addled slob that appointed them just because he’s the president and they are a bunch of pathetic, insecure lickspittles.
The command to take Trump’s name off the Center and all associated signage, websites, letterhead, and what have you still holds because it is a clear violation of “Congress’s express statutory direction” that the building be a monument to President Kennedy, who would have thought Donald Trump is an uncouth jackhole.
The decision had barely been released when Trump posted his tantrum in response:
The original post on TruthSocial is here if you feel like bleeding out of your eyes. If you don’t, let us sum up: Radical judge appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, the Center was a disaster until Trump got involved, the Radical Dems would rather let it die than accept Trump’s beneficent upgrades, and so forth.
Then came the good part:
[W]e are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it. ... I cannot be involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight. Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into “NEVER NEVER LAND.”
And also, the judge is stupid and I hate his stupid robe and his stupid bench and his stupid face! HA!
And he wasn’t done. On Saturday he posted an even longer angry rant denouncing everything. Look at this crap: a single paragraph stretching on for 721 words! Truly, he is the David Foster Wallace of posting:
Again, we will sum up, though you are welcome to read the whole thing: this was going to be a top-of-the-line building, but unfortunately there is a Trump-hating judge and his Trump-hating wife, who is a lawyer who worked for Eric Holder and the House Unselect Committee on January 6 and the law firm that has been representing all my enemies (Sleepy Joe, E. Jean Carroll, the RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA Hoax), so her husband can’t treat me fairly and also we’re probably going to lose the birthright citizenship case, so fuck you, Trump OUT!
More or less.
We have yet to see anything about an appeal, though we’re betting there will be one. It seems likely Trump’s name will not get chiseled off that building until our enervated Justice Department exhausts all options. But it’s coming off eventually, whether it’s in the next two weeks or when the next Democratic administration comes in and cleans house.
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Cucumber gimlet or summery Old Fashioned this week? The Old Fashioned is stronger. Mind you, if I post cocktails based on alcohol content in reaction to the weekly news, we'll all be dead of liver failure before Trump leaves office. Your call.
I know Wonkette already wrote about it, but I think one of the most amusing parts of this whole stupid story is that after the Kennedy Center's current lickspittle executive director Charles Floca insisted that "Should President Trump's name be removed from the Center, that vital fundraising connection will be severed, causing irreparable harm and fundamentally destabilizing the Center's development efforts..." the judge added a footnote to his ruling that naw, mang, that is a bunch of bullshit (ok, I paraphrase a bit there).
https://bsky.app/profile/rparloff.bsky.social/post/3mn3hkwnrgc2p