The Kennedy Center told a federal court its tarp is needed for water testing, but Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) says the real motive is to "hide their embarrassment."
The claim came Tuesday in a joint status report filed in U.S. District Court, where U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper had ordered the center to explain why a tarp has covered its facade for more than two months.
Beatty, a Democratic congresswoman, Kennedy Center board member, and the plaintiff who sued to block Trump's takeover of the center, says the tarp is doing something else entirely — blocking the public from seeing that President John F. Kennedy's name has been restored to the building.
"Water testing and structural repairs to the roof overhang of the Center's front portico require the use of a scaffolding system, including a protective covering — a tarp — around that scaffolding," Department of Justice attorneys told the court on the center's behalf.
"The soffits are some twenty feet or more above the scaffolding," Beatty's lawyers fired back in the same filing.
The center had not erected scaffolding anywhere else on the building in months, her attorneys noted — only the section covering the facade's name.
"Defendants tellingly have not done so for months, leaving only the Center's iconic name obscured — a strong indication that this structure has nothing to do with the roof and is, instead, meant to defy a return to the status quo," Beatty's lawyers wrote.
"Courts are 'not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,'" her attorneys added, quoting the Supreme Court.
The tarp's origins trace to February 2025, when President Donald Trump fired the Kennedy Center's bipartisan board, installed loyalists — including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and aide Dan Scavino — and elected himself chairman.
In December 2025, that board voted unanimously to rename the center after Trump, and workers added his name to the facade the very next day.
In May 2026, Cooper ruled the renaming unlawful, finding that only Congress can change the center's name, and blocked a planned two-year shutdown he called "ill-informed" and "seemingly preordained."
Workers removed Trump's name in a predawn operation on June 13, according to Beatty's lawyers — and hung a tarp that has never come down.
On August 13, with the tarp still up, the board voted to put Trump's name back in a new form, which Beatty's attorneys called a "breathtaking act of defiance."
The resolution calls for carving "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" below Kennedy's name on the facade, and renaming the surrounding plaza after Trump, DOJ attorneys disclosed in the filing.
A related fundraising fund, which claws back donations if Trump's name is ever removed, amounted to a "contemptuous poison pill," Beatty's lawyers charged.
The same August 13 meeting also approved a two-year full closure of the center, based on what Beatty's attorneys described as a two-slide presentation provided to board members just 48 hours before the vote.
"This case reeks of that kind of bad faith, improper motive, and formalism without consideration," Beatty's lawyers wrote.