John F. Kennedy’s niece and grandson ripped into Donald Trump after the president threw a tantrum during a Kennedy Center board meeting.
Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, hailed Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, 76, as a “national hero” after the Ohio congresswoman successfully challenged the Trump-controlled board’s effort to put the president’s name on the building.
“@RepBeatty is a national hero. She has fiercely and courageously stood up for the Kennedy Center, for the arts, for Uncle Jack’s memory, for this country’s history, and most importantly, for the law, time and time again,” Kennedy said on X.
“We will not be bullied into silence or submission. Thank you, Rep. Beatty. We are all so grateful for your leadership.”
Beatty’s lawsuit resulted Tuesday in U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper blocking Trump, 80, from plastering his name on the historic performing arts center without congressional approval.
“Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” he wrote. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
Trump tore into Beatty during a call with the Kennedy Center board, which he chairs. A source familiar with the call described it to CNN as “f---ing crazy.”
Beatty told MS NOW Trump “went into a tantrum.”
“It was the most unprofessional thing I have ever witnessed or been a part of,” she told The Weeknight. “He went into name-calling—everything from trying to say that I was an obstructionist, I was dumb. He said, ‘I think you’re incompetent.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re incompetent.’”
“I was not going to let him call me awful things,” Beatty continued. “He said he was going to hold me responsible if something fell out of the ceiling and killed someone. And I told him, I said, ‘You’re already killing people. We’re at war.’”
When Trump bragged about his record as a developer and claimed Beatty had “never done anything,” the congresswoman said she reminded him that he had “more bankruptcies than anybody in the room.”
“It really went there,” Beatty said. “I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me.”
The confrontation came before the Kennedy Center board voted to close the venue for renovations, citing “hazardous” conditions. Trump later wrote on Truth Social that the building would close “immediately,” although Beatty said the board had not voted for an immediate shutdown.
Trump also threatened in a Truth Social post to block the center’s renovation unless Cooper’s ruling was overturned.
“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump wrote, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”
Beatty said the $257 million Congress allocated for renovations was “still sitting there.”
“Last time I checked, it was the taxpayers’ money that we voted on out of our congressional budget,” she said. “So, he didn’t win. He didn’t get his vanity project. He didn’t get his name on it for the second time, so now he’s attacking folks.”
JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg weighed in, saying President Kennedy “recognized the connection between progress in the arts and in public policy,” during his presidency.
“He understood — the age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And when JFK was president, he elevated the arts as no president ever had (with the help of the First Lady),” he wrote in a post on Instagram.
JFK “invited artists from across the free world — black and white, Hispanic and Asian — to perform at the White House (Like the Staple Singers, Pablo Cassals, and then 6-year-old Yoyo Ma).”
“My grandfather used free expression as a weapon in the fight for civil rights at home and freedom abroad,” he added.
Schlossberg also posted a statement on X from the Kennedy Center: “JFK’s legacy is unbreakable — the moon, the Civil Rights Act, Cuban Missile Crisis and the arts. Trump is a broken band in nose dive decline.”
The White House defended Trump, accusing Democrats of allowing the Kennedy Center to deteriorate.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement: “For decades, Democrats let the Kennedy Center rot as water damage spread, infrastructure crumbled, and a national treasure fell apart under their watch. President Trump stepped up to save it, and Trump-deranged Dumocrats like Joyce Beatty oppose anything that celebrates the greatness of our country because they put America Last.”
