Opinion: Trump Wanted to Be Center Stage at the Kennedy Center. Now Everything’s Going Off Script

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters Chicken Little made quite the mess by shouting that the sky was falling when it wasn’t. (Fake news.) TACO Trump , meanwhile, is causing a similar scene even when accurately reporting on Truth Social that a piece of the Kennedy Center’s ceiling fell into the building’s grand foyer earlier this month.

Well, except for the part where the president breathlessly claimed that many people could have been killed.

More broadly, Trump’s allies are united in saying we told you so: the Kennedy Center can’t survive without Trump taking over the renovation project… and installing his name on the outside of the building at the same time, naturally.

It’s a terrible crossroads for Center supporters.

Do you accept the poison pill or let the building lapse into further disrepair? A protest is planned for Friday early evening for supporters to link arms and encircle the building .

“If there are enough people, we will try to ‘hug’ the Kennedy Center,” a Kennedy Center usher wrote in a neighborhood group chain in promotion of the event.

Perhaps Trump will need a hug himself.

Amid a flurry of histrionics and back-and-forth developments on Tuesday, the same D.C.District Court judge who had in May ordered Trump’s name removed from the Center dealt the president another defeat, reiterating his earlier ruling that Trump needs Congress to go along with him to approve any re-naming or branding plans.

“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing ,” he wrote.

Trump went on social media to assail the judge as “very hostile and conflicted” and declared the Kennedy Center in a “virtual state of collapse” and “destined to doom.” Earlier, he had a temper tantrum when he called into a virtual meeting of the Center’s board, telling Ohio Rep.

Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio member who got the lawsuit over the center’s ownership started, “I think you’re incompetent.” (Beatty didn’t miss a beat, responding “I KNOW you’re incompetent.”) As painful as it is to say, the demise of the once premier art and cultural center may now be at hand with or without Trump. (Although, it’s fair to say, in no small part thanks to his big ego.) Its slow slide into disrepair was set in motion in February of last year when Trump abruptly fired all the institution’s trustees, upending decades of bipartisanship to install loyalists in their place.

He also named himself chairman of the board.

It was less a spotlight turn than a huge turnoff.

Artists didn’t want to come.