Stephen Portnoy
speaker
122 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4d ago
Stephen Portnoy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
twice now, Mike.
Okay.
The name was on the side of the building after a vote in December of last year by the Board of Trustees that it should be called the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center.
Right.
Well, Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in May of this year that Congress created the Kennedy Center as a lasting living memorial to John F. Kennedy.
that only Congress can change the name of it.
And so Trump's name had to come down.
You saw the tarp and the scaffolding.
They took the name down, but the tarp's still up.
And then over the summer, last month, the board voted again to honor the president a different way, saying, all right, well, it'll be the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump and possibly endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.
Well, on Tuesday of this week, Judge Cooper said that too violates the law, a law dating back to the 1980s, which says that there can't be any other memorials at the Kennedy Center other than to John F. Kennedy in the public areas.
That resulted in the president reacting by saying that if he doesn't get his way on this, if the appeal is rejected by the D.C.
Circuit and ultimately by the Supreme Court, well, then the renovation won't take place at all.
future.
There's been a conversation here in D.C., Mike, of the whole thing being torn down because the president, as he flew to North Carolina on Wednesday night, was asked by our colleague Karen Travers why this is so important to him.
You have the president saying that the whole building may have to be ripped down.
And on Wednesday night, as he was arriving back in Washington...
A photographer for Agence France-Presse, a very talented photographer named Brendan Smilasky, noticed that the president was looking at a poster board-sized photo of what appeared to be the Kennedy Center in ruins.
And the headline of the poster said, Kennedy Center demolished.
So yesterday, there was a flurry of court filings.
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