On December 18, 2025, The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts became The Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

This happened in three steps. In 2025, Trump:  

1. Purged most of the board that governs the institution; 
2. Replaced its members with Right-wing ideologues and sycophants; and
3. Installed himself as the new chairman.

Specifically, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on X: “I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.”

Donald Trump

This totally ignored three vital truths:

First, in 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established a commission for a new public auditorium to showcase the performing arts in the nation’s capital. It was to be called The National Cultural Center. 

Second, in January, 1964, two months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law legislation renaming the Center as a “living memorial” in his honor: The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. 

Third, adding Trump’s name to the Center legally would require a similar act of Congress—which has not occurred. Without that, putting Trump’s name on the building is the equivalent of a graffiti vandal spray-painting his name on the Center. 

On May 29, 2026, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C., ruled that Trump’s name was illegally added to the Center: “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

And he ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the building within two weeks—by June 12, two days before Trump’s 80th birthday.

When artists and audiences—outraged by the takeover—had boycotted the Center, an embarrassed Trump ordered its closure, claiming a two-year repair renovation was necessary.

The judge addressed that as well in his ruling: The Kennedy Center board’s March 16 vote to close the facility was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained” without regard for its legal obligations.

Trump’s response on X: “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND.” 

He claimed he was backing away from his proposed renovation and returning control of the arts institution to Congress.

In seeking to remake the arts in his own image, Trump is following in the footsteps of propaganda-obsessed tyrants like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler, for example, installed himself as the arbiter of culture in Nazi Germany.

In Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Frederic Spotts argues that Hitler saw the world corrupted by “evils” he must first destroy so he could re-create it to conform to his artistic ideals.

Hitler considered himself an unappreciated artist. At 18, he had applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but was rejected twice. 

If he had a friend, it was the architect Albert Speer, with whom he felt an artistic kinship.

Even as the Third Reich collapsed, Hitler found time to pore over architectural models he intended to turn into gigantic buildings.

This did not prevent him, however, from issuing his “Nero Order” for the destruction of all German agriculture, industry, ships, communications, roads, food stuffs, mines, bridges, stores and utility plants.

Only Speer’s courageous intervention prevented this from happening.

In Hitler’s Germany, culture was not only the end to power but the means of achieving it. His artistry—expressed in spectacles, festivities, parades, rallies and political dramas, as well as in architecture, painting and music—destroyed any sense of individuality and linked the German people with his own drives.

Like Hitler, Trump sees himself as an unrecognized artist. Of the 515 entities he owns, 268 of them—52%—bear his last name. He often refers to his properties as “the swankiest,” “the most beautiful.”

Upon his return to the Presidency in 2025, he turned his “artistic” gifts on the White House. On June 9, contractors began paving over the grass of the White House Rose Garden with stone tiles to create a patio.

Again like Hitler, Trump believes that “bigger is better” in architecture. 

On July 31, 2025, the Trump administration announced that a 90,000 square feet addition would be made to the White House to incorporate a 650-person capacity ballroom. In October, Trump ordered the demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing to clear space for it. 

The estimated cost has ballooned from $200 million to $400 million.

Trump has repeatedly pushed to enlarge the ballroom—from a 90,000-square-feet addition capable of seating 650 guests to one that can seat, first, 999 guests and then to 1,000 guests at formal dinners.

Tyrants always hail such projects as “gifts for the nation.” In reality, they are self-glorifying monuments to the dictator’s own ego.