President Donald Trump’s saga of interference with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts continues — and legal expert and former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance is left absolutely stunned.
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The president’s hand-picked board tried to add his name to the building, only to be blocked by a federal judge. What has happened since then, wrote Vance for her Substack, is a tightrope of actions that stop just short of outright defying the court’s orders.
“The administration has acted in bad faith on this one, stretching the court’s patience thin,” she wrote.
A new federal court order points out that “The administration flirted with defying a court order when it delayed the removal of Trump’s name after the first court order. It then draped the front of the building in an apparent childish move akin to Trump announcing that if his name couldn’t be there, no one else’s would be visible. But there was absolutely no justification for Trump’s more recent efforts to get the Board to return his name to the front of the Center after the Judge had already entered an injunction.”
If Trump had gone ahead with this scheme, Vance wrote, “it would have been flagrant defiance of a court order.”
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As of now, the Kennedy Center is shut down despite court orders to the contrary, a federal judge is demanding an explanation after a forklift was seen striking the building, and Trump now appears to be entertaining the idea of tearing down the building entirely, despite no congressional authorization to do so.
Given Trump did the same thing to the East Wing of the White House, Vance argued, this possibility cannot be ruled out.
“Tuesday, after the Court’s decision, Trump posted on Truth Social, making it sound like the Kennedy Center is falling apart,” she wrote. “It is an older building, and it always needs some work. Just because Trump happens to be in the White House when repairs are done doesn’t mean his name belongs on it” — and while Congress authorized $250 million for Trump’s desired upgrades, they didn’t authorize him to shutter or demolish the building if he can’t put his name on it.
“You may not have had a constitutional crisis over the naming of the Kennedy Center on your bingo card for this year, but here we are.,” Vance concluded. “Any of the actions Trump seems to be contemplating here would run afoul of the court’s order.”
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