Hours before the vote, a district court ruled against the Board’s latest effort to add President Donald Trump’s name back to the building—this time, in recognition of his purported role in the planned renovations. The closure decision also came one day after leadership claimed that the cultural center was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Read More: All the Things Trump Has Put His Name and Face on as President
A copy of the resolution to close the building was also filed in court Monday as part of ongoing litigation to keep Trump’s name off the front portico. It said that the Virginia-based firm Delta Consulting Group performed an independent assessment in August and found that the Kennedy Center was in an escalating state of disrepair.
The claim, however, has been disputed by Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex officio Kennedy Center Board member who first brought a lawsuit against Trump for his attempted rebrand in December 2025 and subsequently challenged multiple prior motions to close the Center. Beatty’s lawyers argued that Delta Consulting Group had “expressly disclaimed providing any such opinion.”
When asked about the closure, a Kennedy Center spokesperson pointed TIME to a statement given by Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s Vice President of Public Relations, in the aftermath of the falling ceiling plaster incident. She called the incident “another example of the urgent need to close for renovation and revitalization.”
The closure is just the latest episode in the Trump-related turmoil that has afflicted the storied arts center located on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.
In February 2025, he dismissed all Board members appointed by former President Joe Biden and replaced them with his own appointees. The newly formed Board then unanimously named him its Chairman.
Soon after, Trump dissolved the Center’s Social Impact division. The move came amid broader Trump Administration efforts to roll back diversity initiatives at federally supported cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, which closed its diversity office following his executive orders.
“I turned down plenty. They were too woke. I had a couple of ‘wokesters,’” Trump told reporters in August.
Kennedy Center leadership warns of bankruptcy
On Tuesday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down the Board’s latest attempt to add the President’s name to the front of the Kennedy Center.
Cooper ordered the signage removed, and the lettering came down in June.
However, when the D.C. Circuit denied the stay on July 8, it said the defendants had provided no evidence of financial harm.
The Board argued that the proposed changes did not constitute an institutional name change and therefore complied with the earlier ruling.
“Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing ‘renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump’ on the main building or renaming the campus the ‘President Donald J. Trump Plaza,’” the court order said. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing.”
In response to the ruling, Beatty’s co-counsel Norm Eisen posted a statement on X saying, “2 times the court has told Trump the same thing: You are not above the law. Legal sanity has once again prevailed over Trump’s vanity. This is a victory for the memory of Pres. Kennedy & our nation.”
However, Joe LaFauci, the Vice President of Board Relations, informed the Board overnight Monday that, “[d]ue to the recently exacerbated structural emergencies,” the Tuesday meeting “is now focused exclusively on the necessary closure of the Center,” according to ABC News.
That proposal also made explicit how closely the Board had linked the naming fight to the Center’s financial future.
“The Board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the Center,” the resolution said.
Charlotte Canning, a professor and theater historian at the University of Texas at Austin, believes that the claims were part of a bold if desperate strategy to force the courts to allow the inscription to go forward.
The path to Tuesday’s immediate closure decision has involved repeated attempts at intervention from both the court and the Board.
After considering full, partial, and phased closure options, the Board again approved a two-year closure on Aug. 13. While budgetary constraints were a factor in the decision, the Board was looking at a set of financial conditions entirely separate from the compromised operating budget.
The two-year closure puts the Kennedy Center within that established timeline. Renovations were projected at approximately $257 million, matching the allocated taxpayer funding.
Canning questions the two-year renovation plan, saying that while the almost-60-year-old building likely requires maintenance and renovations on a regular basis, current assessments of its condition seem like hyperbole—especially when it comes to matters of life and death.
“It’s all a part of this bamboozling plan to create a dire situation and then swoop in as the savior,” Canning says.
“Pay up or the Kennedy Center closes, & the price is Trump’s name on the building,” Eisen wrote Monday on X, commenting on the information that had been given to the Board.
Previously, the Washington Post reported in October 2025 that ticket sales for the three largest of nine performance spaces had fallen to their lowest level in years.
The spokesperson said that assets and income were actually “up significantly” for fiscal year 2025. The institution is behind on filing its Form 990 for that fiscal year, and did not provide supplementary documentation to that effect.
“It's nonsense,” Hackney says.
He wrote on Tuesday that the government offered “no proof that current or future donations hinge on President Trump’s name being on the building” and “no competent evidence that removing the Trump name would prevent the Center from fulfilling its artistic mission, as it has done for the last sixty years.”
“Large-scale institutions like this book well over a year out. So it means that starting at the beginning of 2025, when they would have been booking for now and the future, they weren't,” she says. “In fact, what they were doing instead was having to deal with cancellations.”
“Any claims that the Kennedy Center is in financial trouble, I believe,” she says, “but they're all problems of their own manufacturing.”
What comes next for the embattled Kennedy Center
Even as that legal fight continues, however, the closure will not halt all of the Kennedy Center’s activities.
The center also said that it will still be “maintaining educational outreach to the community” and that it will continue presenting the Kennedy Center Honors and awarding the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor—even if those events take place offsite.
donor base, and patrons, that a two-year closure of the main building will not unduly affect
Those programs may preserve some continuity, but reopening the main building will present a different challenge. Canning says that much of the damage to the Center’s reputation has already been done.
Because ticket sales are an important source of revenue, Canning says financial recovery after a prolonged closure will take time. That recovery will also depend on rehiring staff and rebuilding the programming calendar.
“It's very easy to destroy something—that can be done in literally a year,” Canning adds. “Rebuilding is much, much, much more difficult.”
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