President Trump’s handpicked board of the Kennedy Center alienated artists and angered members of the Kennedy family by slapping the 47th president’s name on the living memorial to the nation’s 35th president — but a comedy writer whose credits include “South Park” and “Mad TV” may just have the last laugh.
Toby Morton said he saw the writing on the wall in August and proactively purchased the domain names “trumpkennedycenter.org” and “trumpkennedycenter.com” in anticipation of Trump’s move. He said he was tipped off when Trump “began gutting the Kennedy Center board earlier this year” and by the president’s hints that he might try to make it a monument to himself.
“I thought, yep, that name’s going on the building,” Morton told the Washington Post.
Morton, who describes himself on Instagram as a “Creator of Anti-Fascist Websites,” has previously purchased domain names associated with the likes of Reps. Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene to create parody accounts. When asked if he plans to use the Trump Kennedy Center websites in a similar way, he said they’ll “absolutely reflect the absurdity of the moment.”
“The Kennedy Center has always been a cultural institution meant to outlast any one administration or personality,” Morton told the Post. “It’s meant to honor culture, not ego. Once it was treated like personal branding, satire became unavoidable.”
The Kennedy Center still operates under the domain name kennedy-center.org, though the top of its homepage refers to the building as the Trump Kennedy Center. But Trump faces legal changes in actually renaming the building, which was formally dubbed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by an Act of Congress in 1964 after JFK was assassinated.
Trump’s hands-on approach to the Kennedy Center has been met with consequences.
On Wednesday, jazz drummer Chuck Redd canceled the Christmas Eve show he’s been playing there for nearly 20 years after Trump’s team literally added the current president’s name to the building’s facade. On Friday, Trump-appointed Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell fired off an angry letter to Redd, threatening to sue him for $1 million over his “abrupt cancellation.”
After Trump took it upon himself to host the annual Kennedy Center Honors earlier this month, preliminary ratings for the event’s Tuesday broadcast on CBS reportedly showed the ceremony was viewed by “its smallest ever audience.”
With News Wire Services
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