The Kennedy Center Is a Metaphor for De-Trumpification

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.No event at the Kennedy Center in recent months has drawn as much anticipation in Washington as the removal of President Trump’s name from the building’s facade. The date and time of the performance are not yet public, but residents and reporters are on alert to watch workers pull down the letters that were hastily added in December, when the institution was ungrammatically rechristened “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”Already, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reported last week, Trump’s name has been removed from the center’s website, as well as from “email signatures, email communications, letterhead, website, brochures, promotional materials, press releases, signs, references in contracts, MOUs, and other agreements.” These are signs of the center moving to comply with a judge’s ruling late last month that ordered it to revert to its statutory name.The re-renaming is a welcome win for the rule of law, but the precarious path ahead for the Kennedy Center is a useful metaphor for the United States in the Trump era as a whole. Removing Trump’s name is the easy part—a discrete step that a judge can straightforwardly mandate—but repairing the damage will be a much longer and more difficult process, assuming it’s possible at all.Trump remains in charge of the Kennedy Center, which means he could continue to wreak havoc, but he’s also threatened to just walk away, which would leave the center hollowed out and rudderless. Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the center’s board had not been given sufficient information to approve the two-year closure announced in March, but, he added, “this Court is not to substitute its judgment for the Board’s as to whether a temporary but long-term closure is, all things considered, a good i