After court-ordered deadline passes Friday, workers finally remove president's name from performing arts venue's exterior

Workers began the process of removing Donald Trump’s name from the exterior of the Kennedy Center on Saturday morning, hours after a court-ordered deadline to complete the work by Friday passed.

Thousands of people tuned into various livestreams showing the exterior of the Washington, D.C. performing arts venue on Friday, only to watch workers spend hours constructing a scaffolding and not removing the Trump name.

The work continued Saturday morning with workers unfurling a large curtain to obscure the actual removal of the “Donald J. Trump” from the building’s exterior; a livestream outside the Kennedy Center showed dozens of people walking past the building, unaware of what was happening on the other side of the facade-wide tarp.

Matthew Floca, the Kennedy Center’s chief operating officer and executive director, confirmed in a court filing Saturday that work crews had removed “all physical signage” from the building and grounds “that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any individual besides President Kennedy.” However, the tarp remained in place Saturday hours after the “physical signage” had been removed.

In late May, a federal judge ruled that the Kennedy Center board violated the law when it added the president’s name to the performing arts venue; the court also blocked the venue from temporarily closing its doors this summer to renovate.

The law establishing the center “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,” U.S. District Judge Casey Cooper wrote in his opinion, adding, “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

Cooper’s opinion ruled that officials are required to remove any of the signage at the Kennedy Center that bears Trump’s name within two weeks. Additionally, the website must be updated to remove references to the “Trump Kennedy Center” name and also any references to “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

The Kennedy Center board and the Justice Department unsuccessfully appealed Cooper’s ruling, but those efforts were denied, resulting in Friday’s deadline to remove Trump’s name from the exterior; mentions of the “Trump-Kennedy Center” have already been scrubbed from its own website.