#matt floca

Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:

A federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump cannot slap his own name on the Kennedy Center in a decision released on Friday.

The opinion follows the decision by the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, stacked with Trump appointees, to rename the memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy to include Trump’s name on Dec. 18, 2025. Trump’s name was added to the building the next day. Then in March, Trump announced on his social media site that the center would close to undergo large-scale renovations. The closure announcement, however, came after a raft of performers canceled shows and ticket sales plummeted in the wake of the boards’ actions. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, filed suit in December 2025 to challenge the board’s actions both renaming the center and closing it for two years. The decision released on Friday by Judge Christopher Cooper largely sided with Beatty’s challenge. “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” the decision by Judge Christopher Cooper states. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

As a result of the decision, Cooper ordered the board to “remove President Trump’s name from the institution’s title, as represented on the façade of the Center, any other physical or digital signage, and official materials.” Kennedy Center President Matt Floca attempted to preempt Cooper’s decision in a Tuesday filing to the court arguing that the removal Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center would leave the center “financially nonviable.” But Cooper dismissed Floca’s filing as “it lacks a factual basis and is grounded on Floca’s unsupported opinion alone.”

[...] “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND,’” Trump wrote, adding, “I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management.” In addition to blocking the Kennedy Center from bearing Trump’s name, Cooper’s decision declares that the board was “derelict in discharging the full range of its responsibilities to the Center” when it voted to close the center for two years, beginning on July 6, for repairs. Cooper also found that the board could not exclude ex officio members, like Beatty, from voting on these decisions.

In Beatty v. Trump, Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that Donald Trump’s renaming of the Kennedy Center and the two-year closure for “remodeling” were unlawful acts.

See Also:

The Guardian: US judge orders removal of Trump's name from Kennedy Center

AV Club: Judge rules Trump can't just slap his name on the Kennedy Center

Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

Ric Grenell, a close ally of President Donald Trump who took control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last year during an authoritarian leadership shake-up, is expected to step down Monday as the institution’s president, Axios reports. Grenell, who is gay, will transition out of the role but remain involved with the center as an unpaid consultant, according to the outlet. He is expected to be succeeded by Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of facilities operations.

Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

President Donald Trump’s pets on the Kennedy Center board voted Monday to let him close it for two years for some amorphous reconstruction. Trump openly lobbied the board right before the vote, really hammering home the fact that everything is just a corrupt mess these days.  Trump worked himself into a froth about the state of the center, fully inhabiting an imaginary world where it had been “let go to hell” and was “on the verge of collapse.”

In reality, the Kennedy Center underwent a renovation during Trump’s first term in 2019. The notion that in just seven years the building descended into near-collapse is an absurd lie—because Trump isn’t going to admit why he threw a temper tantrum to close one of the country’s premier performing arts venues.  First, Trump very much wants to turn Washington into a super-sized version of Mar-a-Lago, and he thinks of himself as a master builder—a man of unique talent and taste—so he’s going to take every opportunity to “renovate” buildings into gold-painted nightmares.  Equally at play is that Trump got very sad and mad that so many artists canceled performances after Trump illegally slapped his name on the building. Ric Grenell, who was saddled with running the center instead of getting the secretary of state job he wanted, oversaw an absolutely catastrophic collapse in ticket sales. 

Grenell had no experience to make him capable of running the center, but now he’s out—replaced by Matt Floca, an equally unqualified pick with a bachelor’s degree in construction management. Guess it doesn’t matter if he has any arts experience, since all he has to do is oversee Trump’s “renovation.”