Jacquelyn Martin/AP
New signage being unveiled in Washington, D.C., after the building was renamed The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts, December 2025.
This space is usually devoted to the collision of sports and politics. But right now, I can’t pull my mind away from the sudden renaming of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to the Trump-Kennedy Center.
I can see why people outside of the D.C. area might choose to ignore the news or roll their eyes at this pathetically narcissistic move. “It’s just Trump being Trump,” they might say, “a lifelong jerk once again trolling people who care about the parts of life he neither understands nor supports.” I get it. The rest of the country is facing rising costs, the cloud of war, and precarious employment to fret about at the kitchen table. Even some of my political friends outside the DMV (D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area) believe there are more important and threatening aspects of the regime’s agenda to worry about. These folks certainly understand this rebranding as part of Donald Trump’s fascist approach to governance, but surely there are other fascist things—U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents marauding through our cities, for example—that demand our attention.
I’ll grant all of that. But I’m also mourning what the Kennedy Center was, and what it is becoming. My current emotional state over this is an acceleration of the sadness that began when Trump gutted the Kennedy Center board in February 2025 in order to install his collection of white supremacist vulgarians. That moment was the beginning of the end of an institution that meant a great deal to the city, my family, and me.
I suspect that people outside of Washington, D.C., aren’t aware of all the programming this institution has given this town. There have been countless youth events and so much hip hop—including Nas with the National Symphony Orchestra and Rakim for teenagers—that one would never see anywhere else. The center has hosted an incredible lineup of music and comedy events produced by programmers who were willing to be edgy and to platform traditionally marginalized voices. The LGBTQ+ performers and groups, which are now canceled, raised the roof and changed the space.
The old Kennedy Center wasn’t perfect, but it was unique in its efforts to bridge hip hop, drama, poetry, and comedy culture for those systemically denied its beauty. It made efforts to show how live performance in a world of artificial intelligence can capture one’s imagination and change lives.
On a personal level, it was where my once terminally shy fourteen-year-old daughter, now twenty-one, read a poem in front of 200 people as part of a youth poetry slam. It’s where I filled in for the late Howard Zinn at a Voices of a People’s History event packed with teenagers who lost it when Lupe Fiasco performed a spoken-word version of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” It’s where I saw comedian W. Kamau Bell just days after Trump took office, when he took the paint off the walls and the faces of the new MAGA board. It’s where I didn’t see the great musician Rhiannon Giddens because she canceled her show in protest. (And she’s not the only one who’s canceled.)
Now it’s not called the Kennedy Center anymore. It’s just another one of Trump’s shitty buildings, an eyesore I’ll go out of my way to avoid unless there’s a protest against whichever fascist sympathizer Trump chooses to honor next.
My rage at Trump for desecrating such a sacred space will never be sated. I grew up in New York City, and have known and despised this person for forty years. Still, I will never quite comprehend how someone, no matter how rich, could have such a bottomless appetite for being an egomaniacal jackass.
Trump’s level of narcissism almost invokes pity. But it’s a tragedy that the rest of the country has to bear the brunt of his insatiable need to see his own name in lights. I look forward to one day tearing down that gaudy sign that now adorns the Trump-Kennedy Center and seeing it reopen based on principles of inclusion instead of hatred. I look forward to the Chuck Brown Center for the Performing Arts. It’s a world worth fighting for.