Workers finished taking down the gold letters under plastic sheeting early Saturday, after the court rejected a last minute administration request to pause the removal.
A federal judge has ordered workers to take Trump's name off the Kennedy Center, and the legal authority behind that order is a 1964 statute that made the performing arts venue a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Because Congress, not the president, controls the building's name, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper found last month that the addition was unlawful, and he gave the administration until Friday, June 12, 2026 to remove it, according to a BBC report on the court-ordered removal.
By early Saturday morning, crews were on the facade under plastic sheeting, finishing the job that a thunderstorm had interrupted the night before. The gold letters had hung on the building for months, ever since the president had the center's board install them and then appoint himself chairman. Onlookers on Friday evening chanted "take it down" as scaffolding went up, the same BBC dispatch reported, with CBS reporting from the scene and Reuters photographs documenting the work.
The Trump administration made a last-minute attempt to pause the order pending appeal, arguing that putting the name back later would be more disruptive than leaving it on. Cooper rejected that request, and the U.S. Court of Appeals declined to intervene, so the removal went forward on the judge's deadline. The administration told the court it was worried about "confusion" if the appeals court later reversed the decision; the judge treated the legal finding, not the optics, as the controlling question.
The statute at the center of the dispute is the one Congress passed in 1964 to dedicate the performing arts center as a memorial to Kennedy. That designation, which has been reaffirmed in subsequent funding and oversight, is what gives a federal court the authority to say that renaming the structure required legislative action, not a board vote at the direction of a sitting president. The center is, by law, a memorial to a different president, and that civic identity is what the ruling protects.
The removal is also entangled with a second legal defeat for the administration. Cooper also blocked the center's planned two-year closure for renovations, which the White House had framed as a necessary upgrade but which the judge treated as part of the same improper rebranding effort. Keeping the building open for performances is now part of what the court has ordered, even as the letters come down.
The fight does not end with the scaffolding. The appeals court allowed removal to proceed while the case continues, so the name could return as a legal question even after the physical letters are gone. If the administration prevails on appeal, the facade could be changed again. For now, the statute stands: the Kennedy Center is a memorial set aside by Congress for a different president, and a federal judge has said that fact is binding on a current one.