WASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan spending package released Monday by House Speaker Mike Johnson includes $32 million for operating expenses at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts through Sept. 30, 2027, but the bill continues to refer to the venue as the “Kennedy Center,” despite a Trump-branded rebrand by the center’s board of trustees.
President Donald Trump may have his name on the building, but the spending language keeps the Kennedy Center name, according to the AP report.
The center’s board of trustees voted in December to rebrand the venue by adding Trump’s name to Kennedy’s on the exterior of the building and on the website. The Kennedy Center said the vote recognized Trump’s work to revitalize an institution Trump had criticized as being too liberal-leaning.
Since Trump took over the center, the AP report said, numerous artists have canceled appearances, ticket sales and attendance have fallen, and viewership for December’s broadcast of the Kennedy Center Honors program was down by about 35% compared with the 2024 show.
The conflict traces to federal law. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Congress passed a law the following year naming the center as a living memorial to the Democrat, the AP report said.
That law, the report said, explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior. The report said the board’s December vote is the subject of a lawsuit in federal court.
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