Donald Trump’s Name Does Not Belong on the Kennedy Center

by Chris Peterson

I had to read the headline twice, then a third time, because surely this couldn’t be real. The Kennedy Center is set to be renamed after Donald Trump.

That sentence alone feels like satire or the kind of thing someone would joke about just to see how uncomfortable everyone else in the room would get. And yet, here we are.

The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, commonly known as the Kennedy Center, will be renamed the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. The cultural center’s board of trustees, who were appointed by President Donald Trump in February, “have just voted unanimously” on the name change.

It’s worth noting that, technically, this name change may still require an act of Congress to become fully official. The Kennedy Center was named by law, and laws are not supposed to be rewritten by a board vote alone. But even if Congress steps in, even if this is delayed or challenged or eventually reversed, the intent has already been made clear. The message has already been sent. And that message is that cultural institutions are no longer protected from ego, only temporarily spared by process.

What makes this especially galling is that this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Over the past year, he has systematically dismantled what the institution was meant to stand for. He replaced long-standing board members with political allies. He installed leadership with little connection to the arts community. He presided over an era where artists canceled performances, resigned from advisory roles, or publicly distanced themselves from the Center altogether because they no longer felt it was a safe or principled space for creative expression.

The Kennedy Center was never meant to be a vanity project. It exists because John F. Kennedy believed the arts were essential to a healthy democracy. Not window dressing. Not branding opportunities. Essential. It was built to honor an idea that culture reflects who we are and who we aspire to be.

Under Trump’s watch, that idea has been steadily eroded.

So when a board largely shaped by Trump himself votes to attach his name to the building, it doesn’t feel like recognition. It feels like the final step in a takeover. A rebrand that turns a public cultural institution into a personal monument.

And that’s the part that really sticks in my throat. This isn’t just about a name change. It’s about what happens when power decides it deserves applause instead of accountability. When an institution devoted to reflection and humanity becomes another object in a long line of things stamped with one man’s name.

I keep thinking about the artists who once dreamed of that stage. The performers who saw the Kennedy Center as a symbol of arrival, of respect, of something bigger than ego or politics. What does it mean to walk into that space now, knowing how deliberately its meaning has been hollowed out?

You can change the signage. You can rewrite the brochures. But you cannot rename what the Kennedy Center meant before it became another exercise in self-glorification. What’s being lost here isn’t just tradition. Its credibility. And once that’s gone, no amount of marble or gold lettering is going to bring it back.

President Trump, this building did not ask for you. The artists did not invite you. The audience did not vote for this. You forced yourself into a space meant for humility, not dominance. You took a memorial and turned it into merchandise. You didn’t elevate the arts. You shrank them to fit your name. And history will remember that distinction long after the lights dim and the applause moves on, regardless of whatever legacy you imagine.