In his ruling that President Trump’s name must be removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a federal judge turned his attention to the statute passed by Congress in honor of the slain president.
Signed into law in 1964, only two months after Kennedy was assassinated, the legislation renamed what was first known as the National Cultural Center after a leader who had championed the performing arts.
“The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, designated by this Act,” the law read in part, “shall be the sole national memorial to the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy within the city of Washington and its environs.”
In his ruling on Friday, Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington found that the president’s effort to rebrand the building after himself flew in the face of lawmakers’ original intent. He ordered that the 18 new letters added to the center’s white marble facade — which currently reads the “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” — be removed.
The order also temporarily blocked the center from beginning a two-year closure for renovations, drawing a scathing rebuke from Mr. Trump, who has made the institution a centerpiece of his effort to transform Washington’s cultural landscape.
Here’s what the ruling, the result of a lawsuit by a U.S. representative, may mean for the future of the Kennedy Center:
Congress must be consulted on any name change.
The judge’s decision — released on Kennedy’s birthday — boiled down to a straightforward application of the 1964 law.
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