Kennedy Center filing 'dunks' on Trump over small crowd sizes

A court filing Friday documented the wreckage of President Donald Trump's Kennedy Center vanity project — highlighting fleeing artists, cratering ticket sales, and an Honors broadcast nobody watched.

The midnight deadline to scrub Trump's name from the Kennedy Center was still ticking Friday. Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex officio board member — meaning she holds her seat by virtue of her congressional position, not a Trump appointment — had just fired back at Trump's lawyers, who'd asked the judge to freeze his own order.

The numbers in Beatty's filing claimed after the renaming, "many artists canceled upcoming performances," and ticket sales "experienced a precipitous drop as compared to prior years, as did viewership of the Kennedy Center Honors broadcast." CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane posted on X that the filing "dunks on the name change itself and 'crowd size.'"

The 94-page ruling that led to the deadline cited a Wall Street Journal analysis that found ticket sales plunged 70% in a single week after the renaming, compared with the prior three years.

For days, it looked like Trump's team was waving the white flag. Workers slapped new stickers with the original Kennedy Center name onto buses parked outside. The website dropped Trump's name. Staff got a memo telling them to scrub it from email signatures immediately — CNN reported the website was already clean by June 8.

Then Trump himself joined a virtual board meeting Thursday night, and the board voted to fight back, according to the New York Times. Their lawyers raced a last-minute motion to court — essentially asking the judge to hit pause on his own order — arguing that removing the name would be "wasteful" and "incredibly confusing for the public."

Beatty's filing shot back. "'It should go without saying that the Court can, and should, reject out of hand Defendants' rather silly suggestion that enforcing the law would be 'incredibly confusing for the public."

Beatty's lawyers also argued in the filing that the Trump administration "waited two weeks and within hours of the deadline" before asking for emergency relief — proof, they say, that no real harm is at stake. The whole move, they wrote, is a "frivolous" eleventh-hour gambit.

If the judge says no, Trump's lawyers could take the fight to a federal appeals court.