Artists Celebrate Removal of Trump’s Name From Kennedy Center as a Step Forward

President Donald Trump’s name has been removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., after a judge ruled its addition was illegal. The Kennedy Center’s board, which was handpicked by Trump, voted to add Trump’s name to the center late last year. The battle over the Kennedy Center’s name comes during a broader push by Trump to overhaul the institution, which is closed for “renovations” amid mass cancellations by artists.

“We, the American people, have rarely been afforded the decency of a public conversation or process,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who was fired from his role as vice president and artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact initiative in March 2025. “There were no procedural protocols in the affixing of this person’s name on a national memorial, and so … this does feel like a small victory for the rule of law.”

The removal of Trump’s name “really does mean something. We have been fighting for it since it went up in December,” says Mallory Miller, who was fired from her job as assistant manager of dance programming at the Kennedy Center in August 2025. Miller is the co-founder of Hands Off the Arts, which has been rallying outside the Kennedy Center every week. “This is just the first step in rebuilding the trust that has been lost,” says Miller, pointing out that Trump “is still the boss” at the Kennedy Center and that workers at the center are still being fired.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We are today broadcasting from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Juan González is in Chicago.

President Trump’s name has been removed, letter by letter, from the exterior of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, following a judge’s order. But a massive tarp remains in place, covering up the center’s name without Trump. Workers removed Trump’s name at around 3 a.m. on Saturday. The Kennedy Center’s board, which was handpicked by Trump, voted to add Trump’s name to the center late last year, but Congress never approved the name change.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued the order to remove Trump’s name. Cooper wrote, quote, “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” unquote.

The battle over the Kennedy Center’s name comes amidst a broader push by Trump to overhaul the famed institution. In February, Trump announced plans to entirely close the Kennedy Center for two years, beginning in July, supposedly for renovations, but a judge has blocked the center’s closure. Before Trump announced the renovations, dozens of artists and organizations, including the San Francisco Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company, pulled out of performances after Trump appointed himself chair of the center.

We’re joined now by two former Kennedy Center programmers who were fired. Mallory Miller co-founded Hands Off the Arts from her job as assistant manager of dance programming at the Kennedy Center. And Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a renowned artist and playwright who was fired from his role as vice president and artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact initiative of March — he was fired in March 2025.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, let’s begin with you. Your response to the demand and the actual removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center, and the judge ruling it cannot be closed or renovated the way he had planned?

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: First of all, good morning, and thanks for having me. Thanks for having us.

I guess I would say that I have — I have lots of feelings. I have three primary responses. The first is intimate and visceral, the feeling of the reversal of a particular defilement of a national memorial and the striking of a person’s name who has contracted the American horizon, whether it’s the defunding of cancer research or the national parks or the Department of Education. Having that particular person’s name above a poet of a president like John F. Kennedy was an affront to us all, and reversing that decision is somewhat emboldening.

I would say my second reaction is more parliamentary. We, the American people, have rarely been afforded the decency of a public conversation or process. You know, you wake up one morning, and we’ve kidnapped a president in Venezuela. You wake up one morning, and we’re at war with Iran. There were no procedural protocols in the affixing of this person’s name on a national memorial. And so, you know, led by Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, this does feel like a small victory for the rule of law.

And then, I would say that my third response is more macroeconomic and conceptual. This is an institution that this past fiscal year was afforded $260 million by Congress. It’s a $250 million annual budget when functioning at its highest level. The retraction of that money from the national economy and from the cultural economy is really striking in and of itself. But there’s something that vibrates a little bit higher than that, and that is the economy of joy, the economy of inspiration, the courage economy. And artists are the primary architects of a post-fear economy. And so, when you remove the Kennedy Center as a centerpiece from the creative ecosystem in terms of that kind of capital — I’d be remiss to not mention the victory of the New York Knicks and the joy emanating from that city. Think about the economic fallout, or think about the economic repercussions of 10 million New Yorkers being happy at once. Now think about what it’s like when you leave a show, how many inspired people leave a performance of dance or a performance of theater, what radiates, what emanates out of that space. Artists are the architects of a post-fear economy. And hopefully this is part of the restoration of that jewel in the post-fear economy being reinstituted for the American public.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Marc, I wanted to ask you the importance — if you could talk about the importance of the Kennedy Center to artists and performers around the country, and also what its status is right now, with Trump claiming he wants to close it for two years, and yet a judge ordering it to be kept open? What is actually happening in terms of the Kennedy Center, and especially how do you see it over the next year or two?

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Well, the Kennedy Center is an important space as a living memorial to the nation’s 35th president. It is a memorial like the Washington Monument is a memorial, like so many of these national treasures. So, it continues to endure, I think, in that space, although it has now been politicized in a way that reverts it to a kind of marginal space, I think, in terms of the public imagination.

In terms of its space as a pillar for artists in the creative economy, the Kennedy Center is a North Star. The highest honor that we give in the United States for living performing artists are the Kennedy Honors. So, what is it that we aspire to? My belief is that even with all its conflicts, the aspiration of America is equity, and artists name that. They color that for all of us. So, the restoration of the space is extraordinarily important. Just as it’s important to have — you know, for a child to have maybe a grade to reach for, or an athlete to have a championship to reach for, a place at Kennedy Center, a place on the Kennedy Center stages, is one of those spaces, I think, in the American imagination and for an artist’s career trajectory.

At this point, curators tend to program years in advance, so it’s very rare that you pick up the phone and say, “Can you get on my stage on Friday?” You pick up the phone and say, “Can you get on my stage in the year 2028?” All of that infrastructure has been severely compromised. And I don’t know who the curatorial staff is at this point, and I’m not sure how we begin to restore the trust of the artist community to see the Kennedy Center as a place to come back to and inspire audiences locally, nationally and globally.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring in Mallory Miller to the conversation, co-founder of Hands Off the Arts. You were fired from your job as assistant manager of dance programming at the Kennedy Center in August of 2025. Your group’s been protesting weekly outside the Kennedy Center. Your reaction to the latest developments? And if you could talk about this mass purging that has occurred of people at the Kennedy Center?

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MALLORY MILLER: Yeah, and thank you again for having us. And thank you, Bamuthi, for sharing those thoughts. I could not agree with you more.

You know, Hands Off the Arts was out there on Friday. We’ve been out there every Friday, rallying and protesting the authoritarian overreach into arts and culture in our country at the Kennedy Center. And we were there on Friday, and it was — it was a thing of joy. We were so happy to see that name finally come down off the building. It really does mean something. We have been fighting for it since it went up in December.

But I want to be very clear that this is just the first step in rebuilding the trust that has been lost. The Kennedy Center has been impoverished by this administration and by the chairman, who is Donald Trump, and he is still the boss there. Yes, I was fired in August, and alongside of my dance programming colleagues, and many other people have been fired. But the firings are still happening. They’re still attacking the workers, recently firing the box office employees in a violation of their union contract.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to talk about some of the artists who have said no, and ask you, Mallory Miller, about Hands Off the Arts and your protests there at the Kennedy Center — Philip Glass; the Washington National Opera; Béla Fleck; Stephen Schwartz, composer of Wicked; the New York City Ballet; Renée Fleming; Martha Graham Dance Company. Hamilton, the hugely popular musical, was set to be staged at the Kennedy Center to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but after Trump was appointed chair, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, said the show would not engage with the institution while it is the Trump Kennedy Center. Interesting to see what will happen now. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, San Francisco Ballet. Let Freedom Ring, for the first time in 20 years, an annual concert celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, featuring artists like Aretha Franklin and Leslie Odom, was held not at the Kennedy Center, but at the Howard Theatre, a few miles away. And the Brentano Quartet with Hsin-Yun Huang. Very interesting lists of artists. One, do you think that Trump announced that they were going to be renovating the Kennedy Center, which is why they closed it, that it was really that so many artists had said no? There were not enough artists to be at the Kennedy Center. And what Hands Off the Arts is doing, Mallory?

MALLORY MILLER: I said “impoverished” before, and I think what I mean by that is both the financial side of things — I don’t know how the organization is still open right now, given everything that’s happened — but also the impoverishment of the arts. There are no arts right now at the Kennedy Center, or scant few. Millennium Stage, which is a program that used to be a part of the Social Impact department, is still running, and the National Symphony Orchestra is still playing, or they played their last concert last weekend, but there are not shows. And you are right to bring up all of those artists who have withdrawn their participation from the Kennedy Center as a result of this.

I have always believed that the community and the power of people here in Washington and across the country is a vital piece of the fight here for the Kennedy Center. And so, what Hands Off the Arts has been doing has been gathering that community. We have gathered hundreds of people for protests, including last week, including in December, and including the very day that Judge Cooper gave us his ruling. It was meant to be a vigil for John F. Kennedy’s memorial on the occasion of his 109th birthday, but it quickly turned into a celebration because of the great news about the stoppage of the closure and the idea that the name would finally come off the building. And we’re still gathering that community. We still have our Friday protests every single Friday at 6:30 p.m. at the steps of the Kennedy Center, and our campaign is to stop the closure and to save the jobs. And we need our community to show up and be in that space with us to prove our power to the board of trustees, to the president, and to continue to keep a spotlight on this issue.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask Marc Bamuthi Joseph — you were fired, as well, from your role as vice president and artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact initiative. Could you talk about that firing and the work that you were doing that was so vital to the Kennedy Center?

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah. We were among the first let go, which I kind of hold as a badge of honor, if I’m being honest. Our threat to the incoming regime was that we were doing impact investment work in the creative economy. You see shows. You see output. Many of us are very familiar with something when it hits the stage. But every one needs a process. Every one needs research and development, time, resources and infrastructure. And the Social Impact department, which was really centered around the idea that the 14th Amendment guarantees for all of us access to the impulse of creativity — you cannot be enfranchised as an American if you do not have access to inspiration.

So, how do we invest in that long term? My feeling, as the first vice president of Social Impact specifically, my feeling was that it was the Kennedy Center’s responsibility to create protocols and vectors for investment in artists, not when they’re on stages, but in the spaces beforehand, and to widen the cultural radius as expansively as possible to not only invest in local cultural organizations and cultural artists, but also to do work like the Cartography Project, which was an initiative that invested in Black composers all over the country who were given the mandate to create works of opera and symphony that were inspired by Black dignity. The Cartography Project was an initiative that literally mapped Black dignity from Houston to Seattle, from New Orleans to Ohio. That was one of more than 20 different programs. We had an annual budget exceeding $3 million that we invested in the infrastructure, in the constitutionally guaranteed infrastructure of creativity, and towards an equitable horizon across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Bamuthi, I want to get your response to these remarks by President Trump last year about the Kennedy Center.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center. We don’t need — some of the shows were terrible. They’re a disgrace that they were even put on. So, I’ll be there until such time as it gets to be running right.

AMY GOODMAN: “And we don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center.” A lot of jokes have been made showing pictures of President Trump falling asleep in all different places, including his Cabinet meetings. But, Bamuthi, your response, in these last 30 seconds?

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: We don’t need algae in the reflecting pool. What we do need is a Department of Education. What we do need are funds for cancer research. What we do need is our national parks open. And what we do need is a home for artists. Who authors the American imagination more than artists? I would much rather be awake in an inspired America than asleep at the wheel like this authoritarian president.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, we want to thank you for being with us, renowned artist and playwright, fired from his role as vice president and artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact initiative last year. And we want to thank Mallory Miller, also a programming officer at the Kennedy Center, fired last year, co-founder of now Hands Off the Arts.

That does it for our show. We are in Belfast, Northern Ireland, because tonight at the Queen’s Film Theatre at 6:30, the documentary about Democracy Now!, Steal This Story, Please!, will be the opening documentary at Docs Ireland.

Thanks so much to everyone here at Northern Visions TV, community TV for Belfast in Northern Ireland: Dave Hyndman and Dean Hagan and Dave Caskey and Jamie Finlay and Ciaran Ó Brolcháin, Eamonn Higgins, Shauna Lawson, Simon Gallagher, Geoff Williams and Alba Lynch.

I’ll be back on Thursday, headed to Vermont. We’ll be in Burlington at the Vermont International Film Festival, then on to Brattleboro and St. Johnsbury and Montpelier. Look forward to seeing folks in Vermont. I’m Amy Goodman in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with Juan González.

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