During the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, while he was devastating American society with mass deportations and shredding the global economic order with arbitrary tariffs, he also found the time to make himself chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.—the first time a president has ever assumed that position. Trump’s newly chosen board of directors probably have no legal authority over the name of the center, which was declared by Congress in 1964 to be a memorial to JFK. But on December 18, 2025, they voted anyway to rename the institution as The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and added the new designation to the exterior of the building. The living president has thus claimed the Center as a memorial to himself.     On January 9, 2026, the Washington National Opera, which has been performing at the Center for decades, announced that it would be departing immediately.…