President Donald Trump speaks during the unveiling of the Kennedy Center Honors nominees at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Aug. 13, 2025.
The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, commonly known as the Kennedy Center, will be renamed the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.
The prestigious Washington cultural center’s board of trustees, who were appointed by President Donald Trump in February, “have just voted unanimously” on the name change, Leavitt said in an X post.
They did so “because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” Leavitt said.
“Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur,” she said.
The move may face challenges, however: U.S. code states that no new “memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.”
To change that would require Congress, NBC News reported in July. House Republicans have already introduced at least one bill to rename the center in Trump’s honor.
“The Kennedy Center is a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law,” said former Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy III, a grandnephew of former President Kennedy, on X.
“It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial, no matter what anyone says,” he wrote.
Leavitt’s depiction of a center that has been saved “not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation” contrasts with reporting from multiple news outlets that ticket sales and staffing both have sharply declined this year.
The New York Times reported last month that internal figures showed ticket sales during a typical week in October down by about 50% from the same period a year earlier.
The Washington Post, which analyzed sales data from early September through Oct. 19, found an “across-the-board drop-off” in ticket sales for the center’s three largest performance spaces.
Weeks after taking office, Trump named himself chairman of the Kennedy Center and terminated a slew of existing board members, saying they “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”
He signaled in October that the name change was forthcoming.
In a Truth Social post, Trump shared pictures of a newly painted colonnade on the outside of the building below a caption praising “the new TRUMP KENNEDY, whoops, I mean, KENNEDY CENTER, columns.”
He nevertheless said later Thursday that he was “surprised” by the board’s decision.
“I was honored by it. You know, we’re saving the building,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
The center was not initially named after Kennedy.
It was created in 1958, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation to “provide for a National Cultural Center” in Washington.
In 1962, Eisenhower’s successor, Kennedy, and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy led a $30 million fundraising campaign to build the center.
Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. Two months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed a law renaming the center in honor of the slain president.
Trump has used the Kennedy Center extensively during the first year of his second presidential term.
He attended a board meeting there in March, claiming the building was in “tremendous disrepair.” In June, he and first lady Melania Trump appeared for the opening night of the musical “Les Miserables.”
This month, Trump took the unusual step of hosting the Kennedy Center Honors, where actors Sylvester Stallone and Michael Crawford, and musicians including Gloria Gaynor, George Strait and the members of ’80s rock band Kiss, were saluted.
Trump also attended the FIFA World Cup drawing at the center, where he was awarded the soccer organization’s newly created “peace prize.”
