50,000 People Watching Livestream of Workers Preparing to Strip Trump’s Name from Kennedy Center

If (as we’d argue) modern American life has begun to increasingly feel like a series of symbolic or metaphorical gestures thinly stretched over a substrate of perpetual, roiling harm—or maybe like we’re all just living in a history textbook chapter titled, like “The Collapse Of Everything”—then here’s one that might actually make for a fun little sidebar or drily written photo caption in the margins: MS Now is running a livestream of construction workers doing their jobs at the building that is currently declaring itself, in defiance of both good taste and good grammar, to be The Donald J. Trump And The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts, but which (pending court order and permissive weather) will be stripped, later today, of the first five words of that name. All these guys are doing right now is assembling scaffolding in front of people—kind of like the world’s most blue-collar Cirque du Soleil act—but that isn’t stopping people from tuning in, with 45,000 people currently watching this tiny bit of historical schadenfreude play out.



The saga of Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center has been a minor, but ongoing, part of his second presidency, as getting his name slathered on (and people installed in) the country’s preeminent cultural center was a minor obsession of Trump from before he even got back into office. You could read this fixation as a representation of the American Right’s war to seize control of the levers of American culture, something that’s also cropped up in the administration’s multi-pronged attack on various media organizations through its control of the FCC. But it also dovetails pretty nicely with Trump’s simple but desperate need to see his name in big letters while famous people tell him that he’s good; when it comes to the intersection between vanity and authoritarianism, the current POTUS is a real “Por qué no los dos?” kind of guy.

The Kennedy Center board (which Trump hand-picked to run the Center after purging its previous heads, one of several ways he violated written rules and norms in order to get his name glued to this thing) filed a last-minute appeal to block the removal, which was ordered last month by district judge Christopher Cooper. (Who wrote, in a 94-page opinion, that naming rights for the Center rest solely with Congress.) But The Guardian reports that the move has now been blocked.

And so the people watch, both in-person and online, as the scaffolding goes up, the sounds of hammer-on-metal serving as a sort of perverse anti-ASMR. When last we checked, the viewcount was up to 58,000; god knows how high it’ll get once the first hammer hits the first letter. It might only be a symbolic gesture, but sometimes symbolism can feel pretty goddamned good.

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