Trump, After Restoring Mount McKinley, Faces Push To Rename a Memorial to JFK in 47th President’s Honor

Congressman Robert Onder, Republican of Missouri, wants to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in President Trump’s honor. Mr. Trump is quiet on the proposal, but it runs contrary to his rationale for restoring the name of another martyred predecessor, President McKinley, to North America’s tallest mountain. “I cannot think,” Dr. Onder said after introducing his Make Entertainment Great Again Act, “of a more ubiquitous symbol of American exceptionalism in the arts, entertainment, and popular culture at large than President Trump.” He cited the president’s show, “The Apprentice,” and cameos in productions like “Home Alone 2.”Dr. Onder said that Mr. Trump has been “a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape.” He praised him for “working to preserve the integrity of the fine arts by ending woke programming and rebalancing the Kennedy Center’s $234 million budget, which had normalized operating in the red.”That might be a strong case for branding, say, a President Tyler Theater. Yet the Kennedy Center pays tribute to an assassinated commander-in-chief. In February, Mr. Trump named himself the center’s chairman. After finding it in “tremendous disrepair” in March, he resolved to “fix it up,” saying it was “really emblematic of our country.”After Kennedy’s 1963 death, everything from schools and Florida’s Cape Canaveral to New York’s Idlewild Airport was rebranded in his honor. Two months after his death, the Kennedy Center states on its website, “Congress passed, and President Lyndon Johnson signed, legislation renaming the National Cultural Center … as a ‘living memorial.’” The Kennedy Center praises JFK as a “lifelong supporter and advocate of the arts” who steered “public discourse toward what he called ‘our contribution to the human spirit.’” It’s how Americans like to remember presidents who die violent deaths: aspirational figures that embody ideals beyond partisanship.On Monday, Kennedy’s niece, Maria Shriver, called Dr. Onder’s bill “insane” on X. “It makes my blood boil,” she wrote. “It’s so ridiculous, so petty, so small minded. Truly, what is this about? It’s always about something. ‘Let’s get rid of the Rose Garden. Let’s rename the Kennedy Center.’ What’s next?”Ms. Shriver’s objections echoed Mr. Trump’s about the removal of Confederate monuments in his first term. “You can’t change history,” he posted on X in August 2017, “but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee. Stonewall Jackson. Who’s next, Washington, Jefferson?” Many Confederate monuments were erected to insult Black Americans. Others were conceived in a spirit of reconciliation to ensure that the South didn’t “rise again.” Having stated blanket opposition to rewriting history, Mr. Trump will face a challenge backing Dr. Onder’s bill to create the Trump Center.When Mr. Trump restored McKinley’s name to the Alaskan peak in January, he honored a man who served all four years in Union blue and advanced the Freedmen’s cause. In 1897, William Dickey had christened the 20,000-foot summit in The New York Sun after the Ohio governor secured the Republican presidential nomination. America made Mount McKinley’s name permanent in 1917. “It would not be too much to suggest,” this columnist wrote in December, “that the Sun named the mountain.” Alaskans, however, preferred Denali. President Obama wiped one of his predecessors off the map in 2015 without informing his family.McKinley’s great-great nephew, Masse McKinley, president of the Society of Presidential Descendants, backed the reversion. “I applaud” Mr. Trump’s action, he told the Sun in January, “remembering McKinley’s contributions to this country … to honor and commemorate the memory” of the 25th president.Although named before McKinley’s assassination, the mountain became a memorial after his passing. The same is the case for Garfield, New Jersey, christened for President Garfield before his assassination in 1881. Erasing those designations can’t be seen as anything other than an insult.Memorials to America’s four slain presidents are secular shrines. Be it a mountain, school, or center for the arts, they defy assassins by giving those they killed a measure of immortality. They are living memorials to what America lost and a reminder of a shared duty to carry on in the best spirit of their memories.____________Correction: 20,000 feet is the height of Mt. McKinley. An earlier version misstated the height.

Trump, After Restoring Mount McKinley, Faces Push To Rename a Memorial to JFK in 47th President’s Honor

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