Trump’s DOJ claims Kennedy Center will fall into ‘financial ruin’ without his name on the building

Donald Trump’s administration claims the Kennedy Center stands to lose “hundreds of millions” of dollars without his name attached to the building, which the Department of Justice says should be renamed in the president’s honor after he “donated his time, energy and unparalleled Construction talents” to renovating the venue.

The Justice Department is appealing a federal court order requiring the venue to remove Trump’s name from the building’s facade, which is still covered in scaffolding and a white tarp that hides the empty space where his name appeared.

The administration has argued that stripping the president’s name from a performing arts institution named after President John F. Kennedy would send it into “financial ruin.”

“Many donors and companies, who have given, or will be giving, millions of dollars to the Center were only willing to do so with the name ‘Trump’ on the Building,” lawyers wrote Tuesday.

The Justice Department claims Trump raised $258 million from Congress and “hundreds of millions more in pledges and donations from Patriotic private donors” to renovate the building.

The “financial harms” from a court order that blocks the president’s attempts to rename the building after himself “will never be recovered, and the hundreds of millions in gifts will have to be immediately returned, or not received by the Center,” according to the filing.

In May, Washington, D.C., District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that Congress made it “crystal clear” that the building is only to be named after the assassinated former president, “and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial” based on a “unilateral say-so.”

The Kennedy Center had until June 12 to strip the president’s name from the building, but construction crews in hard hats and neon green high-vis vests only started to assemble scaffolding to reach the letters that afternoon.

A midnight deadline came and went without any letters removed from the building.

Cooper and a panel of appeals court judges denied the administration’s 11th-hour attempts to keep Trump’s name on the facade, and workers began adding a tarp to the towering scaffolding shortly after 1 a.m..

Workers eventually began removing letters at 3 a.m. June 13.

But the scaffolding and tarp are still in place, and Judge Cooper wants to know why. Last week, the judge ordered the Kennedy Center to “indicate the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding” by July 31.

In their emergency appeal to stop the work last month, lawyers for the Kennedy Center’s Trump-appointed board argued for the first time that the president’s name is integral to the venue’s financial future.

“Without the name ‘Trump’ on the Building, our fundraising will not only come to a halt, but any and all monies raised or committed would be obligated to be returned, refunded, or terminated,” they wrote.

Lawyers for the board argued that its bylaws now stated that donations to the center are conditioned on the name “remaining unchanged” and keeping Trump’s name on the facade.

The center’s executive director Charles Matthew Floca also argued that the institution’s funding is inextricably linked to the president.

“President Trump’s fundraising on behalf of the Center is exemplified by the tens of millions of dollars already raised,” Floca wrote in a statement to the court last month. “Further, the President has committed to raise $150 billion on its behalf from private donors over the next two years.”

If his name is taken off the building, “that vital fundraising connection will be severed, causing irreparable harm and fundamentally destabilizing the Center’s development efforts, severely impairing its trust-fund artistic programming, and rendering the continuation of ongoing trust-funded operations financially nonviable,” according to Floca.

Last week, Judge Cooper denied the Trump administration’s attempt to pause proceedings while the legal battle continues.

“Now we will be able to move to discovery and get to the bottom of Trump’s corrupt, failed attempt to seize this national treasure,” said Norm Eisen with Democracy Defenders Action and Nathaniel Zelinsky with Washington Litigation Group, counsel for Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, who filed the lawsuit against the administration’s efforts.