Trump’s vanity project snowballing into full-blown 'constitutional crisis'

President Donald Trump’s efforts to put his name on the Kennedy Center have so far been quashed by a series of judicial orders, but as he becomes increasingly desperate to defy the courts, the situation is poised to tip into a full-blown constitutional crisis. This is according to a new report by the Washingtonian, which declared on Friday, “If Trump demolishes the Kennedy Center, we have problems.”

As the Washingtonian explains, Trump has spent months trying to have his name added to the Kennedy Center by any means possible. After the courts made it clear that it can’t be done without congressional approval, Trump issued a threat: put my name on the building or I’ll tear it down. Then on Thursday, after it became clear that he intended to follow through on that promise, the court issued an order barring him from demolishing the center without giving 30 days' notice. And here is where the crisis looms, as many have suggested that Trump may send in bulldozers anyway.

“In this situation, tearing down the Kennedy Center would be 100 percent illegal,” notes the Washingtonian. “It would be a direct and flagrant violation of an order by a federal judge.” And even if Trump did give notice, he wouldn’t be able to proceed until a judge determined the plan was legal. According to the Washingtonian, “There are several reasons to think that they wouldn’t be. For one, the Kennedy Center’s founding statute, as laid out by Congress, authorizes the board to construct and maintain the building — but it does not authorize trustees to unilaterally tear it down. Georgetown Law professor David Super, an expert in administrative law, says that in order for a Kennedy Center demolition to be lawful, Congress would have to modify the statute. So far, it has not.”

“Second,” writes the Washingtonian, “demolishing the Kennedy Center would seem to be an eye-popping fiduciary breach. Members of the Kennedy Center’s board have a legal obligation to act responsibly and in the institution’s best interest. The Trump administration would probably argue that the building is in such terrible disrepair that it makes more sense to tear it down than to fix it—but the court already has evidence to the contrary (consultant reports, renovation plans) and Congress has already appropriated the money for repairs. It would be very hard, in this context, to demonstrate that tearing down the Kennedy Center benefits the institution.”

If Trump defied the order, explains the Washingtonian, “Then he and everyone who helped him do it — from the leadership of the Kennedy Center to the operators of the bulldozers — could be held in contempt of court.” But according to Super, a contempt hearing would take time, during which the building would likely be torn down. As the Washingtonian elaborates, “If the Trump administration starts bulldozing the Kennedy Center, he believes they’re likely to finish the job. ‘Once they start, they’ve already decided that they’re going to disregard the judge, and disregarding two judicial orders does not really have different legal consequences from disregarding one.’ In other words, once they’ve begun demolition, then they’ve probably decided that they don’t care about contempt. ‘At the end of the day,’ Marotta says, if Trump really wants to tear down the Kennedy Center, ‘there’s only so much that lawyers can do.’”

While there are a number of potential consequences for defying the court, it is uncertain that any would be applied. Presumably, U.S. Marshals would be tasked with jailing relevant offenders for contempt, but there’s one “significant wrinkle” in that: “The US Marshals Service is an executive branch agency, and if the head of the executive branch—the President—ordered the Marshals not to enforce a court order, then we’d be in fairly treacherous constitutional waters.”

This, explains the Washingtonian, “would be a classic constitutional crisis.” What’s more, “violating a court order about the Kennedy Center, Super says, could open the floodgates to all kinds of other illegal actions — like violating court orders on mail-in voting, or tariffs, or the independence of the Federal Reserve. The crisis, as Super puts it, would be that ‘the courts have stopped mattering and everything’s on the table. They can do anything they want.’”