Rep. Joyce Beatty Asks Judge to Make ‘Crystal Clear’ Trump Cannot Demolish Kennedy Center in Wake of Viral Photo

When Getty photographer Brendan Smialowski captured a photo on Wednesday night of Air Force One after landing at Joint Base Andrews, outside Washington, D.C., it showed president Donald Trump in a red baseball cap reading a placard that seems to read “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.” This led to an emergency Thursday filing by Joyce Beatty, Democratic US Representative for Ohio’s Third Congressional District and an ex officio trustee of the Center, asking the federal judge in the ongoing Kennedy Center case “to make crystal clear that its order prohibits demolishing the structure.” On Wednesday, Trump said, “For me to go and fix it and subsidize it, I think the Trump administration should have recognition. If we don’t do that, it’s going to close and get ripped down.” “It goes without saying that demolishing the Kennedy Center’s main building would violate the Court’s preliminary injunction: Closure is both a prelude to and the necessary consequence of demolition,” says Beatty’s filing. “But out of an abundance of caution, Plaintiff also respectfully requests the Court to make crystal clear that its order prohibits demolishing the structure.” The filing points out that the court has enjoined Trump, named as a defendant, from shutting down the Center without board approval and without the court dissolving or modifying its earlier order. But the management closed down the building on Tuesday, the filing says, initially explaining the act as a result of a pulled fire alarm but later saying management was addressing “imminent life-safety risks.” Distrust of the administration regarding such dangers at the Center’s facility runs deep; earlier this month, Hands Off the Arts, an activist group opposed to Trump’s plans for the Center, called a video supposedly documenting rain-related damage “propaganda.” Tuesday’s closure came the same day that Cooper ruled that the Center could not inscribe “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” on the venue’s facade, though the institution’s board, stocked with Trump appointees, had voted in August to change the venue’s name to “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” in recognition of what the board characterized as the president’s philanthropic contributions. “A hearing is imperative,” writes Beatty’s filing, “to clarify what Defendants are doing.” A separate appeal also came this week, by a group of eight preservationist groups, who said in a public announcement that they have called for the Center’s leadership to step aside or for the court to take the drastic step of putting the cultural organization into receivership.