President Donald Trump governs with the mindset that “there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” his chief of staff said recently to Vanity Fair. It shows this week on the walls of the Kennedy Center – or “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” as it now reads.
The move is in line with the overall bulldozer mentality of Trump’s second administration.
► Don’t like the East Wing? Tear it down. Building plans can wait.
► Disagree with foreign aid passed by Congress? Stop it. And shut down USAID for good measure.
► Want to end the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? No matter that it was created by Congress.
► Dismantle the Department of Education? Fire Democrats on agencies set up by Congress to be bipartisan and independent. Ignore the 14th Amendment. Use the Navy to take out speedboats in the Caribbean. Put tariffs on most foreign goods. Rename the Gulf of Mexico and the Department of Defense. Trump even says he can run for a third term, despite the Constitution, though he currently says he won’t.
Laws are suggestions in Trump 2.0, and the president is fine ignoring them.
The US government is supposed to act a bit like rock, paper, scissors — with the courts, the Congress and the White House able to keep each other in check.
But a pliant Congress and a deferential Supreme Court, both run by conservatives, have so far let Trump dominate every shake.
That claim of a “unanimous” board vote has been challenged since one ex-officio board member, Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat, said she was muted and prevented from speaking on the phone meeting where she said the vote took place. Beatty talked about the meeting in an appearance on CNN.
“When you think about not even allowing me to speak, that’s a form of censorship,” Beatty told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Early in his presidency Trump had purged other board members and installed primarily people from his inner circle. They made him chairman. He said he was surprised and gratified by the renaming, but that statement is complicated by the fact that he has referenced adding his name to the Kennedy Center for himself in the past.
The law seems pretty clear. There’s an entire subchapter in US code that deals with the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” and it says nothing about the board being able to change the name.
The law was passed not long after Kennedy’s assassination and it decreed that the center be a “living memorial” to the slain president and that it be called the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
In December of 1983, Congress added language, signed by President Ronald Reagan, that prohibited further memorials be installed at the Kennedy Center.
Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, who is running for Congress as a Democrat in New York, pointed to that ‘83 law in an angry post on X. He didn’t mention another portion of the law that allows for memorials if Congress is notified and the Smithsonian board, which oversees the Kennedy Center Board approves. Adding the name of a living president also does not seem, technically speaking, like a memorial.
Expect lawsuits from members of the Kennedy clan, although at least one notable Kennedy appears to be onboard. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, a nephew of JFK whose own father was also assassinated, is a Kennedy Center Board Member. It’s not clear if he was part of the renaming vote, but CNN has reached out for comment.
David Super of Georgetown Law School told CNN’s Betsy Klein that it is unclear who might have legal standing to sue the Trump administration or the Trump-aligned Kennedy Center board over the name change.
“The administration is not concerning itself with laws unless it has a realistic prospect of getting sued,” Super said.
“They don’t have the power to do it,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a press conference on Capitol Hill this week. “Only Congress can rename the Kennedy Center. The wannabe king and his sycophantic minions can’t do it.”
But Jeffries said Democrats are going to stay focused on kitchen-table issues such as the cost of health care, which means that for now, Trump’s allies can, in fact, do it.
Whether or not Trump and his allies can change the name of the Kennedy Center is secondary to the fact that they have put his name on the wall, just as they put his name on the wall at the former US Institute of Peace, almost within sight of the Kennedy Center.
From an irony perspective, both changes are rich, according to the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer.
“A president whose administration has mounted a sustained assault on cultural funding — an agenda antithetical to the very reasons the center was created — is poised to have his name placed on the marquee,” Zelizer writes.
Trump and many Republicans want a more powerful executive, and there’s been a major shift in that direction since the Supreme Court granted presidents the superpower of legal immunity for official and most nonofficial acts, at Trump’s request.
They’re also utilizing a so-called shadow docket of temporary unexplained orders to shut down lower courts that put holds on Trump’s actions, allowing the White House to carry forward with firings that could ultimately be illegal, or ignoring spending mandated by Congress.
Despite some few recent flashes of independence, Republican lawmakers have primarily acted as Trump’s enablers rather than as defenders of a coequal branch of the government.
“Trump’s view is that the president cannot be limited in his management of the executive branch by statutes passed by Congress or regulations enacted by lower-level executive branch officials,” CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig told me. “And he might well be right; recently, this approach – sometimes dubbed the ‘unitary executive’ has gained substantial support in the courts.”
The marking of Washington with Trump’s name will present an interesting dilemma for any future Democratic president, assuming courts do not ultimately step in. Does a theoretical future Democrat simply rip Trump’s name off buildings? By the unitary executive theory, they could.
“If Congress doesn’t defend its institutional prerogatives, then the president can act unilaterally, as he has been doing in a variety of areas,” Mark Rozell, an expert on the unitary executive theory and dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University told me in an email. “The Center’s Board cannot officially change what was created by statute, but if Congress doesn’t act, the signage at least remains until perhaps some future Board acts to remove it.”
