The Chiseler

The Once and Future Kennedy Center will be great again.

Donald Trump refused to concede defeat in 2020. This ended the American tradition of the losing presidential candidate verifying the honest election results with a televised concession speech.

In 2021, Trump triggered a mob attack on the Capitol, the center of our democratic government, endangering the lives of senators and members of Congress, including his own vice president.

Now, in 2025, he jammed aside the name of John F. Kennedy to chisel his name onto this country’s center for the performing arts, the renowned Kennedy Center.

As an American who came to this city in 1971 after two years in the Peace Corps, who witnessed this country’s trip to the Moon, and watched the Kennedy brothers get this country and the world through the Cuban Missile Crisis, I profoundly condemn each of Donald Trump’s attacks on this city and its heroic President Kennedy.

Trump’s actions are a desecration of our Democracy and those to whom they have honored. He can chisel his name into our history, but a chiseler is all he will be.

I am confident of two wonderful facts:

This man will be gone from the White House, just as he was in January of 2021, come January 2029. We will waste little time, given his departure, returning the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to its rightful name.

Along with the Gulf of America, the Department of War will no longer darken our daily news.

Along with the Trump shuttles, the Trump gambling palaces, the embarrassing Trump University, and the Trump sneakers, the chiseled name of the “Trump Center” will have perished from this earth.

The once-and-future Kennedy Center will be rejoined to Washington and the American people.