Removing his Brand

 

 Out of all the over 300 legal cases and matters that your paid subscriptions have helped make possible, few have garnered more attention than our fights to remove Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center and to stop his $1.8 billion slush fund. Now both are finally happening — and that’s good news for our democracy.

Let’s start with the Kennedy Center, where this happened in the wee hours early on Saturday: A worker removes a letter from Donald Trump's name from the wall of the Kennedy Center on Saturday. (Cliff Owen/AP)

The removal of Trump’s name was thanks to our client, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), to my colleagues at Democracy Defenders Action, to our co-counsel Washington Litigation Group — and to your paid subscriptions, which help fuel my and my colleagues’ pro-democracy litigation.

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Of course, Trump being Trump, he and his cronies did it in the stupidest and most unlawful way. Throughout the 24 hours before the Friday midnight deadline, Trump & Co. kept trying and failing to get a stay of the order to remove his name. We responded to his desperate gambits with snap filings of our own and defeated him at both the trial and appellate level.

Then Trump blew past the court-ordered midnight Friday deadline in order to erect a scaffold and then hang a tarp, clearly so he could attempt to hide the removal of the letters. It was a literal cover-up! But, true to form, he botched the attempt to hide the removal, allowing photographers to capture an iconic image.

The scale of Trump’s corruption makes Richard Nixon look like a piker — and Trump’s bumbling makes the Watergate burglars look slick. As we noted in response to the regime’s midnight motion to get another 12 hours, “Defendants had two weeks to comply with the order, and only need an extension because of their inexcusable delay.”

Meanwhile, the whole pathetic display only heightened already strong public attention across the nation. Why do people care so much about this case? Trump’s name on that building defaced the memory of a beloved, fallen president. We don’t need more than that to be horrified.

But there is more. The Trump administration has featured the most outrageous corruption of any president in American history. Like the $1.8 billion slush fund (more in a minute about that), the Kennedy Center renaming is a corruption scandal. The naming rights to the building are literally priceless. Congress mandated the name, and by law that is sacrosanct. For Trump to violate that by putting his own name on the structure is yet another theft from the American people.

And the removal of the name is visible, tangible proof that Trump’s corruption and Trump himself can be stopped — that the rule of law still reigns in America and we can take back the institutions of our democracy. And if Trump thinks he’s just gonna leave the tarp there indefinitely to cover up his shame, we have plans for that, too...

-The Contrarian