Caffeinated Politics

Every day we have ample reasons to disagree with Donald Trump and his administration. From the quagmire of his making in the Middle East, to his attempt at election manipulation via the postal service, to (and please forgive me for writing this fact) the FBI updating its hiring guidelines to remove juvenile bestiality-related conduct as an automatic, absolute disqualifier from service. Countless examples show why we find it necessary to reject what is churned up almost hourly in Washington. But when it comes to being embarrassed and almost needing to look away and divert our senses, nothing comes close to the attack on the national institution of a slain American president.

It should not need to be written, but apparently many in our land have forgotten. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., was designated as a living memorial to pay tribute to President Kennedy following his ghastly assassination in 1963. The idea actually began before his death. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Cultural Center Act to create a national stage for the arts. President Lyndon Johnson signed a congressional bill renaming it in Kennedy’s honor. The center opened its doors to the public in 1971, serving both as a world-class performing arts venue and the nation’s official “living memorial” to the slain president.

Donald Trump has done everything he can to ruin, defame, and undermine this institution. It is the unseemliest and most gross example of his bizarre actions since taking office in January 2025, and I understand that statement is tough to make given the compiled list of absurdities.

We know Trump is uncouth and sadly, much of the Republican Party has come to accept his behavior. But there is that other large segment of the nation that looks at what Trump is doing to the Kennedy Center and sees it as totally callous. It makes me wonder if Trump was raised without even the faintest whisper of reverence. How could anyone willfully and joyfully and gleefully undermine a living tribute to a young president assassinated in the prime of his promising presidential term?

The drive to place Trump’s name on the memorial for Kennedy required a federal judge today to again block the board of the Kennedy Center (selected by Trump) from inscribing the name of Donald Trump on the performing arts center’s main building to honor him and from renaming the center’s campus after Trump.

Ohio Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, an ex officio member of the center’s board who sought the order, said in a statement, “Trump is holding the Kennedy Center hostage unless he can put his name on this sacred memorial.”

“The Court just rejected this proposal for the second time,” Beatty said. “This unlawfulness is as breathtaking as it is wrong, and it needs to stop.”

I simply cannot fathom how Trump or his sycophants do not grasp that the Kennedy Center is not just a building. It is a national recognition that our nation once lost its leader to violence and vowed to remember him with beauty rather than bitterness. In every sense, it is a civic shrine.

So for Trump to seek the diminishing of its place in our nation is nothing short of deplorable. His obsessive narcissistic grandiosity shows how weak and small and insecure he is. His treatment of the Center, a place he treats as just another slab of real estate, is blatantly indecent.

James and I spent 10 days in Washington before Trump destroyed so much, and the awe never diminishes for places such as Arlington, the Lincoln Memorial, and, let me add, the quiet stretch of the Potomac where the Kennedy Center sits, glowing at dusk like votive candles. These places are not meant to be repurposed for ego and vanity. They are meant to remind us that actual leadership, at its best, is about service to the nation. Not self‑promotion or seeking out branding opportunities.

Trump would do well to read some books about the weight of history and our better angels.