(WASHINGTON) — Tuesday’s meeting of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ board will now focus exclusively on the “necessary closure” of the center, and not on additional ways to honor President Donald Trump, the Trump administration said in an overnight federal court filing.
In their late-night court filing, Justice Department lawyers included an email sent to the board at 7 p.m. Monday by Kennedy Center official Joe LaFauci, indicating that a separate draft resolution proposing ten new ways to honor Trump would not be considered, and that the board “stands by” its earlier vote to recognize the president.
LaFauci in his email said the update to Tuesday’s agenda was due “to the recently exacerbated structural emergencies” at the center, the court filing said.
Late on Monday night, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick separately posted security video of a partial ceiling collapse that occurred during a rainstorm earlier this month. The video shows a chunk of debris crashing onto an empty red carpet.
“If a performance had been underway, patrons could have been killed,” Lutnick said in his post on social media. “People cannot be allowed to go into this building any longer.”
The center voted in December to add Trump’s name on the outside of the building before a federal judge, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, ordered its removal in May.
The board voted 23-3 last month on a resolution to close the facility for two years as part of a $285 million renovation plan, according to a court filing. The board, members of which were largely appointed by Trump, also voted to add Trump’s name back onto the Kennedy Center building as many as two more times, according to the filing.
While Congress already appropriated $257 million for the project, the board has argued that Trump would raise another $100 million for the center.
The board as it voted last month said it would re-add Trump’s name to the building as the man who “renovated and restored” the center, adding, if a fundraising goal is hit, that it had been endowed by the “Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”
But Cooper is currently weighing whether that would violate a statute prohibiting additional memorials at D.C.’s only memorial to former President John F. Kennedy. Cooper is set to hold a 10 a.m. ET scheduling conference on the future plans for the center and the board is preparing to meet privately at 12:30 p.m. ET.
Trustees are expected to vote on Tuesday afternoon on a measure declaring the Kennedy Center’s main building “unsafe for continued occupancy,” and ordering that it be “closed to patrons forthwith.”
Cooper is also positioned to eventually decide whether the board can move forward with its latest plans to close the center, plans that have taken on new urgency following the ceiling collapse and the new claim of center officials that the entity is quickly running out of money to remain operational.
An attorney for Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who has filed a lawsuit challenging the planned closure and renaming, praised the decision not to move forward with another resolution honoring the president.
“Trump & cronies back down on HALF of the crazy,” lawyer Norm Eisen wrote on social media on Tuesday. But Eisen added that the plan to immediately close the center amounts to “foolishness” that he said Beatty’s legal team will fight.
Programming at the Kennedy Center, which normally funds its operations, effectively ended in early July. Ticket sales had reportedly been dropping off for months prior, following the board’s vote last December to rename the facility. Cooper ruled that move unlawful in May.
Despite Congress-approve funding that’s already on the table, center officials last weekend again underscored the need to honor Trump so that he might be enticed to lead additional efforts at raising money and oversee the renovation.
“The Board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the Center,” read the text of a draft resolution that is — according to LaFauci — no longer up for consideration today.
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