Loading summary
Transcript13 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bulwark, joined by Culture editor Sonny Bunch, because we're going to talk again about the Kennedy center, which Trump decided to rename after himself and then take over and then shut down. And it has just been unshut down by a federal judge who says in a very long opinion that just dropped on this Friday afternoon, you can't do that. You can't just shut it down. You can't just take it over. You can't just slap your name on it, because guess what? There are laws for Sonny, it's good news, right? Good news. We like good news.
- [00:30]
B
Yeah, it's like the old Schoolhouse Rock video with the little sad little bill. And he's like, how do I become a law? And in today's America, Donald Trump just says something and it happens, and then a court says, no, you can't do that, and then it doesn't happen. It's amazing. The system that we have. This ruling covers several different things that Donald Trump was basically Donald Trump, let's be honest, is doing this. It's. There's a board, there's technically a board. There's. There are people in charge who aren't Donald Trump, but he's the one who's kind of forcing all this through the big one. And I think this is actually the most important of them. Set aside the, like, shutting down the Kennedy center to renovate it because there's some debate over how many renovations it needs and, you know, blah, blah, blah, and who has the authority to do it. Even, you know, theoretically, the board could shut it down for two, two years to do the renovations. But the judge says the board actually has to be consulted about this. You can't just rush it through. There has to be, like, actual thoughts,
- [01:27]
A
and you can't just kick off members of the board because you don't like them. Like, the people on the board are on the board. You can't just say they're not on the board because.
- [01:33]
B
Right. Right there and there, yeah, there was some debate over, well, these are, you know, not really members of the board. They're kind of ex. Ex nilo, whatever, whatever the legal term is. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a. I didn't go to. I didn't. I didn't go to law school to talk about movies. I went to movie school to talk about movies. The real, I think, important thing here is that the judge ordered one very specific thing to be done, and that is for Donald Trump's name to stop being used as the name of the Kennedy Center. If you go to the Kennedy center now, there is in slightly off font and slightly off kerning, a kerning, which is for those who aren't in the newspaper industry.
- [02:10]
A
Sonny, I hate to tell you, no one is in the newspaper industry anymore.
- [02:13]
B
Well, okay, the writing industry, the publishing industry. Oh, God, that's even worse. Kerning is the amount of space between letters and words, but it's all wrong. But if you go and look at the building, it has this wrong font and wrong size.
- [02:27]
A
It says the John F. Kennedy Cent for the Performing Arts. And then it looks like someone Photoshopped above it slightly wrong Donald Trump.
- [02:34]
B
And it literally looks like somebody did a bad Photoshop job. In person. I went there in person. I wrote a piece for us. Looking at the signage, I was like, that's not quite right. I think I sent it to our art designer at the time, Hannah Yost, the great Hannah Yost. And she, Like, I thought she was gonna have a stroke when she. When she saw it. But the judge said, you cannot. You cannot call it this. You cannot call it the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center. That. That's not allowed because there are laws. There actually was a law that established the funding for the Kennedy center, and it. It said that it is for. It is for the memorial of the president who was slain, John F. Kennedy, not Donald J. Trump. So the. The issue here, I think this. I think the judge is on a very strong legal footing here. I mean, I don't. Again, I'm not a lawyer. I haven't parsed through this ruling bit by bit. Maybe the. Maybe the planned shutdown goes through anyway after the board looks at it and, you know, decides that they have to cover up the real problem, which is that they can't book any acts.
- [03:42]
A
Well, yeah, this is going to be my question. Like, they. So the problem was all these acts, like Hamilton and all these performers, they were going to have come through, pulled out the Washington National Opera, relocated to, I think, George Washington University. Either. They've been at the Kennedy center for decades. And so they were like, oh, well, now we're going to shut down for two years for renovations. It was pretty clearly because they couldn't fill seats. But now, like, we're already halfway through 2026. The 2026, 2027 season for performances is coming up really soon. Are they going to be able to reopen? How are they going to schedule things so fast and sell tickets?
- [04:17]
B
That's a great question, Ben. That's a great question. And look, as we've seen, the Trump administration is great at programming, concerts. Look at this 250th anniversary of this 250th birthday party that we've got planned for the Great American State Fair, where we had wonderful acts like Milli Vanilli and cnc, Music Factory and Vanilla Ice and Morris Day in the Time, no Shade on Morris Day in the time, Martina McBride, etc. And they, like, all backed out. They were like, wait, we didn't realize that this was the Trump thing. This, we thought we were just going to another state fair. You know, this was, this is not what we were. We were signing up for. I don't know how they're going to book all of these shows. I don't know how they're going to fill the space and the time. But I did have an, I did have a great idea for a fundraiser. If the Kennedy center needs to raise some money, which it does. They do need money. That's a, that's a thing that the Kennedy center always needs. We could talk about one of the shady ways they were trying to raise it in a second, but you, if you just set up, if you just set up a bunch of risers on, in front of the building, you just set up some stands and you charge the folks who live in D.C. and Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland like, 20 bucks a ticket to come and watch them pull the Trump signage off of the Kennedy Center. You could raise a million bucks. You could raise a million bucks. It'd be easy. I like, that's easy money. You charge them 10 bucks for a glass of crappy white wine and they're there. Man, you could raise so much money doing this. It would be, it would be. It's. That's just money in the bag. People hated, people hated putting Donald Trump's name on the building. And this is the thing, right? Like, it's this weird compulsion to force Trump into everything, to force his name on everything, to force his presence on everything, to, you know, his, his ideal really is not to be president, it's to be a host on HGTV. He just wants to redecorate D.C. and like, I feel like that's a fair trade. I've joked about this before, but I really feel like it's a fair trade. If we gave Donald Trump remake DC on HGTV and asked him to stop being president, I think there's like a 60% chance he would take it. And, you know, that's a win, win for everyone, right?
- [06:21]
A
It would have to be a. You get to remake the nation's capital and not go to jail. That's the important part.
- [06:27]
B
Well, I don't know if we can make that deal. That. That might be a bridge too far.
- [06:31]
A
Yeah, that one might be tough. I do think you could sell tickets. I also, I think this judge in the ruling gave them a time frame. It's like two weeks. They have to take down the name. It was pretty fast. I assume that they're going to appeal. That's going to get stayed. Is it actually going to happen? But if the timing works out just right, I did see that the next no Kings rallies are scheduled for June 14, which is Trump's birthday. And those are always pretty big in D.C. so you could have people at the Kennedy center for the Nova.