A white and blue tarp now covers the spot where President Trump’s name had been affixed to the Kennedy Center’s facade for the past six months — and the unwind extends well beyond the building. In a court filing Saturday morning, the Kennedy Center confirmed it has also wiped the president’s name from its official website, letterhead and staff email signatures, complying with a federal judge’s order to restore the institution’s original name.
The compliance certification was signed by Matt Floca, the Center’s executive director and chief operating officer. It comes hours after work crews began pulling the lettering off the building’s portico early Saturday, after thunderstorms forced a brief delay in meeting the federal court’s removal deadline.
The two-page declaration lists the steps the Center has taken: removing the portico signage; scrubbing references to the “Trump Kennedy Center” from the website; withdrawing the trademark application; and stripping the president’s name from “employees’ email signatures, employees’ email communications, letterhead, brochures, promotional materials, press releases, signs, contracts, memoranda of understanding, and any other agreements to which the Center or its Board is a party.” The Center also issued new employee identification cards to remove any references to Trump.
Workers install tarps on the scaffolding at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
(AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
Workers hang the tarp.
(AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
A protester hoists his sign outside the Kennedy Center.
(AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
The unwind was ordered by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, who ruled on May 29 that Trump’s name had been illegally added to the institution last December. Cooper wrote in his 94-page opinion that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.” The Trump-appointed board of trustees had voted to rename the venue “The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” at a December meeting in which the renaming was added to the agenda at the last minute.
The Trump administration appealed the order. An appeals court denied the request for a delay on Friday, and a separate judge denied the government’s bid for a 12-hour extension before granting a partial extension to noon Saturday because of the storms.
In a Truth Social post late last month, Trump called Cooper “a Barack Hussein Obama Judge” and warned that if anything happened to Washington, the judge “will be held responsible for the Death and Destruction caused to our Country.” He also attacked Cooper’s wife, attorney Amy Jeffress, claiming she had a “total Conflict of Interest” because of her prior work at the Justice Department and as personal counsel to former President Joe Biden.
Trump separately announced he was walking away from the institution entirely.
“I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN,” he wrote.
The president had personally led the rebranding push after taking office in January 2025. He named himself chair of the board in February, replaced the institution’s president, and in February 2026 announced the center would close for two years for what he called “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” — a plan Cooper also blocked in the May ruling, finding the board had not properly considered alternatives. Cooper made clear his order did not bar the Center from conducting needed repairs and said the board could still close the venue if it followed a more deliberate process.
