So the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts is now the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. If it seems strange that a sitting president would create his own memorial antemortem, it’s perhaps even stranger that his team wasn’t prescient enough to secure the web domain.
A former South Park writer and voice-over artist was. Toby Morton predicted that the current US president would rename the art centre and registered the domain names trumpkennedycenter.org and trumpkennedycenter.com back in August. A holding page is now live, and it’s already satirsing the official logo design.
It’s becoming hard to tell satire from reality. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was created in 1964 as a ‘living memorial’ to JFK after his assassination. Yet White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced in a social media post on 18 December that the institution’s board had voted to rename the venue, adding Donald’s name.
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“Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur,” she wrote at the time. A work crew added the words “The Donald J. Trump and” to the existing sign on the building’s facade the next day.
Trumpkennedycenter.org currently lists ‘The Epstein Dancers’ as a coming event (Image credit: Toby Morton)
Toby had seen the move coming over four months earlier following Donald’s decision to dismiss the Kennedy Center’s previous board and appointing himself chairman. “I thought, ‘Yep, that name’s going on the building,’ ” Toby told the Washington Post. “The rest followed on schedule.”
“The Kennedy Center has always been a cultural institution meant to outlast any one administration or personality.” He added. “It’s meant to honor culture, not ego. Once it was treated like personal branding, satire became unavoidable.”
The official Trump Kennedy Center logo design and a parody version (the parody version is the bottom design) (Image credit: The Trump Kennedy Center / Toby Morton)
The official logo for the renamed Trump Kennedy Center retains the same design as it did with the previous name, showing a representation of the physical building’s architecture with its distinctive vertical columns overlooking the Potomac River in Washington, DC.
The parody logo adapts this motif to turn the columns into bars, making the design look like jail cells with people inside. It also adds redacted text as a tagline with a reference to a ’13‑year‑old girl’, satirising Donald Trump’s rebranding and his handling of the Epstein files.
The website declares the centre to be a “national institution devoted to power and loyalty.”