Bulwark Takes - Trump Slaps His Name on the Kennedy Center

Episode Date: December 20, 2025

JVL and Catherine Rampell take on the re-naming of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, as Donald Trump continues to put his name on anything he can, congress approval or not. Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/BULWARKTAKES. Promo Code BULWARKTAKES

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Go Orange at Booster Juice, Canadian-born, blending since 1999. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Catherine Rampel, and as we are sitting down to talk to you, the people, agents of the state are adding Donald Trump's name to the Kennedy Center, building. They are up there on a scaffolding on the facade, changing the name to the Donald J. Trump hyphen John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts or something. I, Catherine, I know we shouldn't be surprised that he liked to move on this so fast, but it did just happen like 12 hours ago. Yes, but he has been teasing it for weeks, months. I don't know. He clearly very desperately wants this great cultural institution named for him.

You know, I'm sure he's shocked that the board decided to do so, even though. Unanimously. I saw, I don't know if you noticed that. Sort of unanimously. Board members of the Kennedy Center voted unanimously to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. What's your reaction to that? Well, I was honored by this board as a very distinguished board, most distinguished people in the country.

And I was surprised by it. I was honored by it. Well, sort of. There was one participant, a lawmaker who I believe was on the board who said that her line was muted. So she was not allowed to vote against it. This is like North Korea unanimous. Yes, exactly, exactly. Excellent.

But yes, he's been wanting this for a long time. And of course, his press secretary had to weigh in and congratulate him. Caroline Levitt wrote on X a note of congratulations saying that she has just been in full. that the highly respected board of the Kennedy Center has decided to rename it after him. And at one point she says, congratulations to President Donald J. Trump. And likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy because this will be a truly great team long into the future. So I'm glad to hear that. No one tell her.

I'm glad to hear that Trump and President Kennedy are teaming up big, if true, as the kids say. Zombie JFK. Zombie JFK has given his blessing, according to Caroline Levin. And not only that will be participating somehow in the programming, I don't know, going on into the future. So the thing that I am stuck on, because I'm a silly, silly man, is that this isn't legal. So the Kennedy Center is created by an act of Congress. And there's a law that was signed with its name, just like,

there was an act of Congress creating the Department of Defense. And so there's a law saying that this thing is called the Department of Defense. And so to change that, you would have to pass a law. Now, that has not deterred Pete Hankseth and Donald Trump and everybody in the White House from talking about the Department of War. It hasn't deterred them from sending a guy up on a scaffolding to put his name on the facade of the Kennedy Center. It isn't legal. I saw somebody, maybe it was Chris Hayes. I said, like, you know, if you or I were to walk up to the Kennedy Center and just start, like, heading letters to the facade, we'd get arrested.

But that is what they're doing. They're breaking the law. Yeah, I live in New York where oftentimes you'll see people, like, amend the different subway signs, usually to create some funny juvenile alternative version of what subway lines you're going on. And it feels a little bit like that. But, look, is it legal? No. Is it the worst thing that this president has done? Probably also no, in the sense that there are a lot of other laws and maybe our founding document that he seems pretty keen on breaking all the time. And those are arguably of greater consequence. But I do take your point. This is upsetting and emblematic, I guess, of a much broader approach that this administration has. or just really seizing all of the parts of government and channeling them in the president's own name and interests.

Literally his name. Literally his name. I mean, you know, the Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America. It didn't become that. Like, everybody, this is what gets me. Everyone just agrees to go and pretend with him. It is like the stolen election of 2020. What's the harm if we just humor him this little bit more?

And so the play bill at the Kennedy Center will, say the Trump Kennedy Center and they will say it on the facade. Everybody will just pretend this is a thing that's real in the same way that they pretend that the Gulf of America, Gulf of America is a real thing or the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace or the Department of War. I guess, you know, I just sort of rebel against that and resound. I feel like, you know, we have laws. Laws are made up of words that have very strict meaning.

And if you can't enforce the little stuff, which is essentially painless, right? It would be painless to enforce the law on this. Then you're never going to enforce the big stuff because there are like real tradeoffs involved often in enforcing the laws on the big stuff. Right. Right. And this is part of a broader pattern of trying to co-op censor or change speech of various kinds, artistic expression. This is literally an artistic venue. But there's a lot of other things that this administration is doing to censor words that are used.

mean, just as an example, head start locations can no longer use the words women, Gulf of Mexico, or disability in how they describe themselves. The FBI has been compiling ways to track Antifa, which is basically code for any sort of wrong think, according to this administration, anything anti-Christianity, anti-capitalism, etc. So, you know, the Kennedy Center, in isolation, it's not that big of a deal. Even though you and I both love the arts, we talk about the arts all the time. It's very sad. The problem is it's part of this much broader pattern of trying to change cultural institutions and trying to change forms of expression, means of expression, the content of expression within this country. Problem is, it is not in isolation. This is happening in

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You are running out of time. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout terms and conditions apply. Yeah, and that's the thing. Like, these, if you just look historically, these sorts of cultural pieces of authoritarianism, they never happen in isolation. They're always part of a broad campaign, right? And this is, you and I talked about this earlier, like, this was the Soviet Union, you know, especially in the early days of Stalin when they were going through compiling lists of poets and composers who had like deviationist thoughts or devonationist music or poetry.

They were renaming cities, you know, to Stalingrad and what, I mean, normal regimes don't do this sort of thing. And the same way normal regimes don't go and knock down the east wing of the white. house without telling anybody, you know, like it's, they're inextricably linked, aren't they? Yeah, they absolutely are. And then the question is, what will be the enduring legacy of these efforts to change our institutions? I mean, the, whether we're talking about the, the literal infrastructure, places like the Kennedy Center or the East Wing, these, these physical brick and mortar locations or more abstract kinds of institutions like the institution of the Federal Reserve or the DOJ or anything else that he's also slapping his name or agenda on literally

or figuratively. And, you know, for something like the Kennedy Center, I suppose new president can come in and change it back. The East Wing is gone. Like you can't, you can't go back in time and change that. whatever comes out of this new construction project, presumably they could rebrand, right? I personally like the idea of calling the soon-to-be-constructed East Wing ballroom, the E. Jean Carroll Ballroom, for example. She's owed something at least of that magnitude. There are different

ways you could handle it. But some of these other institutions, you can't just quickly undo the damage and rebuild them. That's, it's not the same thing as like, you know, scraping off the gold lamay that Donald Trump has plastered all over a building. Yeah. I mean, in theory, you could change back some of the stuff in Washington, right? Although it's hard, right? The superficial stuff is easy.

The other stuff is hard. Hard to undo if you break down the wall between the Fed and the executive branch and the president. You make the Fed into a political body. Heart to undo that because you can undo it, but you've got to wait for the rest of the market to buy in and believe that it's permanent. And I just, I don't know that anybody's going to have the will to do it. And then when you get outside of the federal government, this is something Sarah and I talk about all the time, five minutes after Trump goes home to meet his lord, half of the high school football stadiums in America are going to be named after him. Right. You go down south into any red state and they're

going to name every fourth building they can find after him? I don't, maybe. I feel like if they were going to do that, they'd be doing it already. Maybe I'm wrong. But there's so many incentives right now to suck up to dear leader while he is still kicking. Well, no. See, this is my theory. My theory is the reason they do it after he's dead is to trigger their local opposition, right? It's not about if you are like the Carteret County School Board in North Carolina, you don't think that Donald Trump is going to notice you if you name the high school after him. But he dies and your local libs are all excited about it. You know that if you name the high school after him, it's going to drive them

insane. And so that can create political capital for you locally. Maybe. I don't know. I feel like this is requiring so much armchair psychoanalyzing somewhere down the line. Who knows what his legacy will be also by the time. He's gone. I will say, On a lighter note, I am somewhat looking forward to the programming that could come from a Trump-Kennedy Center. We know that he loves Andrew Lloyd-Weber. We're going to get a Starlight Express? Do you think we'll get a production of the Starlight Express? I don't know.

I mean, I'm guessing we'll have some more revivals of Phantom. Maybe we'll get a version of cats that's like, they're eating the cats. I don't know. I mean, there are a lot of bad puns here. A friend of mine actually came up with a list of some of the musical adaptations. I'll just read you some of them. Guy and Dolls, not a musical, but King Lear, L-E-E-R. As I like it, Othello is a very low IQ individual.

I barely remember Mama. So anyway, you can have some fun with all of that. Maybe we'll get some nice little parodies out of it. The other thing that I'm wondering about is whether the Kennedy Center or the new namesake of the Trump Kennedy Center will be subject to the stadium naming curse. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but there are a lot of these infamous examples of big venues whose naming rights were sold to some hubristic benefactor of various kinds that ultimately, or soon after, the naming rights came down actually, had a spectacular failure. So I'm thinking things like Enron Field, FTX Arena. There are a whole bunch of these.

And I do wonder if you will see Trump Kennedy Center be the omen of a spectacular failure of sorts for maybe Trump, maybe Kennedy. I mean, Kennedy is looking forward to all of that teamwork ahead. But you never know. Maybe this could portend something more dire. We won't get that lucky. All right. Catherine, thank you for sitting down with this. Guys, hit like, hit subscribe, follow the channel. We will be back very soon to talk about the next terrible thing that has happened because that's the world we live in. Good luck, America. Hold up. Are you pulling my beard? Booster juice has two new booster balls for the holidays this year. That's right, Santa. The eggnog booster ball and caramel pie booster ball are two new flavors to put some extra jingle.

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