A federal judge told the President of the United States no on the same building-naming question twice this year, and instead of accepting it like anyone else would have to, he got on a call with a sitting member of Congress and told her she was dumb.
Quick timeline, because it matters here. Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board voted to put his name on the building and its grounds. Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who sits on that board, sued, saying she’d been muted and steamrolled during the vote. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sided with her in May: the board doesn’t get to rename a building Congress created without Congress’s blessing. Trump tried again anyway. In September, Cooper blocked him a second time.
That’s not a hot take from either side of the aisle. That’s a federal judge reading the same statute twice and landing on the same answer both times.
So how did the President handle losing the same argument twice in the same courtroom? On the board’s next call, he reportedly called Beatty an “obstructionist” and told her she was “dumb.” Then, just to make sure the point landed, he added: “I think you’re incompetent.” He also threatened to personally hold her responsible if a piece of the ceiling ever fell on someone, given how run-down the place has gotten on his watch. Beatty’s reply, in her own words: “I know you’re incompetent” — right before reminding him he’s racked up more bankruptcies than anyone else on that call. She called it the most unprofessional thing she’s witnessed in the role. I don’t doubt her.
Then the story took a turn I genuinely didn’t see coming. That same board voted to close the building for two years and spend $257 million renovating it, most of that money coming out of a congressional reconciliation package Congress had already approved. On its own, fine by me — old building, real infrastructure problems, that’s the kind of shared public spending I have zero issue with. Except then Trump said the quiet part out loud: without “recognition,” his word, the building “ends up being ripped down.” His own Justice Department backed him up, warning that donors would walk and there’d be no funding left to actually rebuild the place if the naming fight doesn’t break his way.
Sit with that for a second. Public money, for a building the public already owns, dangled over whether one guy gets his name on the outside of it.
Even JFK’s own family piled on. Kerry Kennedy called Beatty “a national hero” for not backing down, and Jack Schlossberg took his own swing, framing his grandfather’s actual legacy as the thing built to last here, no name change required.
I don’t care what you think about this guy’s politics generally. Losing in court doesn’t entitle you to call the person who beat you dumb and incompetent on a recorded call, and it definitely doesn’t entitle you to threaten a public building’s funding until you get a plaque. A judge has now said no twice. At some point that’s supposed to be the end of it, even for someone who’s spent his whole life acting like the rules are for other people.
Two cents: if you need a hostage situation to get your name on a wall, you didn’t earn the wall.
Photo: “Kennedy Center at Sunset” by Steve (Washington, D.C., USA) via Wikimedia Commons / Openverse, licensed CC BY-SA.