The head of the Kennedy Center, Matt Floca, insists they’re only closing “for a week,” to make repairs.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, currently in court with the Kennedy Center board of which she’s a non voting member, wants assurances.
In the center of this chaos is Donald Trump’s sick obsession to put his name on the building and wipe out the Kennedy legacy.
In a new court filing today, Beatty asks Judge Christopher Cooper to make it clear Donald Trump cannot demolish the theater.
She has reason to worry. Trump is famous for violating orders 40 plus years ago in New York and knocking down the Bonwit Teller department store in the middle of the night. More recently, he surreptitiously destroyed the East Wing of the White House to build his unsanctioned ballroom.
The new motion cites the emergency shut down of the Center.
“This directly contravenes the Court’s preliminary injunction. It is a recipe for Defendants extending their shutdown forever and closing the Kennedy Center for the next two years—the very thing this Court said they could not do without its permission. Finally, Defendants cannot point to any new meaningful information or true exigency to justify this sudden shutdown. Instead, they merely say that Mr. Floca reviewed the existing evidence—including prior building plans—and decided a closure was necessary. This was not permissible under the Court’s order.”
Tomorrow evening at 6:30 PM, a group called Hands Around the Kennedy Center will form a human chain on the property to call attention to the building’s perilous status.
They say, “With the future still very much uncertain, now more than ever, the Center needs you to stand up for freedom of expression and against authoritarian overreach into arts and culture institutions.”
At this point, they may have to camp out there for the winter.
Meantime, PS, the likelihood of Kennedy Center Honors this December is diminishing quickly. Even if Trump decided to stage the event somewhere else in Washington, who in their right mind would accept the Honor now?
