What Courage Costs

He will not let the building be repaired unless his name goes on it.

That is not a characterization. It is his own sentence, posted on September 15, 2026: the renovation “cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” and if the ruling goes against him and the Supreme Court does not reverse it, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place” (Truth Social, 2026). To reporters the next day he was more explicit. “For me to get involved, and to take on long term, and to carry it, I think the Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” he said. “Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down” (AP, 2026).

Congress has already appropriated $257 million for exactly those repairs (OBBBA, 2025). The money exists. The engineers have scoped the work. The only thing standing between the National Symphony Orchestra and its own hall is a sign.

I have written about this fight before, and argued then that he is not deranged but deliberate, that the objective is coherent and small (The Name Over the Door). I want to make a narrower argument now, because the broader one has been made and won. This is not an essay about whether he can do it. It is an essay about whether he should be honored there even if he could.

He should not. And the reason is not that he is a bad man, which is uninteresting and unprovable. The reason is that there is a standard, it is written in the statute, and the nation’s forty-seventh president has measured himself against it in public and failed at every point. The standard has a name in the statute and a body of evidence in a book, and I propose to hold him to both.

What the building actually is

Start with what Congress built, because the common framing gets it backwards.

The Kennedy Center is not a performing arts center that happens to be named for a president. It is a presidential memorial that happens to house an orchestra. The statute that created it says so in language that admits no ambiguity. The Board’s duty is to administer the Center “as the National Center for the Performing Arts, a living memorial to John Fitzgerald Kennedy” (20 U.S.C. § 76h(a)(1)). Congress designated it in 1964 as “the sole national memorial to the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy within the city of Washington and its environs” (20 U.S.C. § 76q). And in 1983, it added the provision that has decided every round of this fight: “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” (20 U.S.C. § 76j(b)(1)).

Read those three together and the building’s legal character is not complicated. The memorial is the institution. The name is the memorial. There is no wall, no plaque, no plinth, and no plaza that is neutral ground available for someone else’s inscription, because Congress took the position that a memorial to one man is a memorial to one man.

Judge Christopher Cooper said it in four words. In May he held that the statute requires the Center “must be named for, and is meant to honor, President Kennedy alone,” and that its “public spaces honor President Kennedy and President Kennedy alone.” In September, enforcing that order against three new inscriptions, he put the same conclusion more bluntly: “Alone means alone” (Memorandum Opinion, 2026; Memorandum Opinion, 2026a). And then, when the board tried again, “Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing” (Memorandum Opinion, 2026a).

The government’s lawyers argued that a renovation inscription is a “recognition,” a “plaque,” a “testimonial,” an “acknowledgment,” anything but a memorial. The judge was unimpressed. He pointed out that the words at issue were “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump,” and that the past participles denote completed action, and that the whole point is to help people remember a person and an event. Which is what a memorial is. “Linguistic gymnastics,” he wrote, “cannot extricate the Kennedy Center’s Board from an operative judicial order” (Memorandum Opinion, 2026a).

So the law is settled, and I am not going to pretend it is at risk. What interests me is the second question, the one the lawyers cannot answer: granted that Congress reserved this memorial for one man, was it right to? And is the man now demanding admission the kind of man who would have merited a chapter in the book that made the name worth putting on the building?

The book, and the price

John F. Kennedy won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Profiles in Courage, a book about eight senators who defied their parties, their constituents, or their presidents, and paid for it (Pulitzer, 1957). It opens with a definition and it never improves on it. Courage, he wrote, is what a senator shows at the moment of decision, when every escape route has closed.

He may want more time for his decision. He may believe there is something to be said for both sides. He may feel that a slight amendment could remove all difficulties. But when that roll is called he cannot hide, he cannot equivocate, he cannot delay.

That is the test. Not the speech, not the press conference, not the threat. The vote, with your name on it, at the cost of your career.

And the second sentence of the book tells you what the eight had in common. Kennedy says he wrote about “the risks to their careers, the unpopularity of their courses, the defamation of their characters, and sometimes, but sadly only sometimes, the vindication of their reputations and their principles.” Then he says the thing that makes this essay possible: “A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or reward that quality in its chosen leaders today. And in fact we have forgotten” (Profiles in Courage, ch. I).

Look at what each of them paid.

John Quincy Adams broke with the Federalist Party to support Jefferson’s embargo, a measure ruinous to the shipping state that elected him. Massachusetts did not merely decline to reelect him. The legislature elected his successor nine months early, mid-term, as a formal act of censure, and Adams resigned. “Most completely,” he wrote his mother, “was I deserted by my friends, in Boston and in the state legislature” (Miller Center, 2026).

Daniel Webster gave the Seventh of March speech in 1850, supporting the Compromise of 1850 and the strengthened Fugitive Slave Act that came with it, and lost New England entirely. Theodore Parker said no living man had “done so much to debauch the conscience of the nation.” Horace Mann called him “a fallen star.” Massachusetts answered by sending Charles Sumner, an abolitionist, to the seat Webster had made his own (Senate, 2026a).

Thomas Hart Benton refused to obey the pro-slavery instructions of the Missouri legislature, fought them rather than comply, was stripped of every committee assignment but one, and lost the Senate seat he had held for thirty years.

Sam Houston spoke and voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854, the lone dissenting voice that mattered. The Texas legislature condemned his position by 73 to 3. It refused to reelect him, and in 1861, when he declined to swear loyalty to the Confederacy, it removed him from office (TSHA, 2026).

Edmund G. Ross, one of seven Republicans who voted to acquit Andrew Johnson in 1868, was burned in effigy by the veterans of his own Civil War regiment. The Pottawatomie Gazette wrote that “compared with [Ross], Judas was a saint and Benedict Arnold a patriot.” He lost his bid for a full term in 1871 and never held elected office again (Kansas Historical Society, 2026).

Lucius Lamar gave the Senate eulogy for Charles Sumner, the abolitionist he had spent his life opposing, in an act of deliberate reconciliation, and then voted against free silver when his own Mississippi constituents wanted it.

George W. Norris broke the autocratic power of Speaker Joseph Cannon in 1910 by moving to strip the Speaker of his control over the Rules Committee. The resolution carried 182 to 160 and cost him every favor the Republican leadership had extended him. “I would rather go down to my political grave with a clear conscience,” he said, “than ride in the chariot of victory” (Profiles in Courage, ch. VIII).

Robert A. Taft stood up in 1946, six days after the Nuremberg executions, and called the trials victor’s justice under ex post facto law: “the hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record, which we shall long regret” (Taft, 2026).

Eight men, eight careers, six of them destroyed. Adams resigned. Webster lost his base. Benton lost his seat. Houston was removed. Norris was stripped of patronage. Ross was ruined. That is the ledger. In every case the cost is the office itself, and in every case they paid it.

The uncomfortable part

Now the honest part, because an essay that uses these men as saints will not survive a reader’s search, and it should not.

Edmund Ross is the most contested figure in the book. David Stewart’s study of the Johnson impeachment concludes that the acquittal votes “were purchased with political deals, patronage promises, and even cash,” and that Ross had a personal patronage stake in keeping Benjamin Wade out of the presidency (Stewart, 2009). A House investigation later found no proof of bribery, which is the caveat that must travel with the accusation. But even on the most generous reading, Ross is not a clean hero. The Kansas Historical Society, whose own pages carry the story, now quotes a historian who calls him “a weak person” and “a profile in cowardice.”

Lucius Lamar is worse. He wrote Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession. He defended the Klan in Congress. In 1875 he organized the Mississippi Plan, which used violence and economic pressure to keep Black voters from the polls. The state’s own historical society says his legacy is “tainted today by his active role in the reestablishment of White supremacy” (Mississippi Historical Society, 2026). And Kennedy’s account of Reconstruction, built on Dunning School historians, maligned the one Mississippi governor who actually championed Black suffrage, Adelbert Ames, and never corrected it (Virtue, 2023).

The standard itself has a hole in it, and it is Kennedy’s own. In December 1954, when the Senate finally moved to condemn Joseph McCarthy by 67 to 22, the only senator not on record was John F. Kennedy. He was hospitalized for back surgery and never said how he would have voted. But the absence is not the whole story. For four years Kennedy had declined to criticize McCarthy at all, and when Arthur Schlesinger asked him why, he answered that half his voters in Massachusetts looked on the man as a hero (Senate, 2026b).

Think about that against his own book. Here is the man who wrote that a senator “cannot hide, he cannot equivocate, he cannot delay,” and who described, in the same chapter, the senator who has “developed the habit of sincerely reaching conclusions inevitably in accordance with popular opinion.” Kennedy’s surgery was real. The political caution around McCarthy was not, and he knew it, which is probably why he wrote the book.

So I am not arguing that the eight were saints, and I am not arguing that the man who wrote about them met his own standard. I am arguing something narrower, and I think it is the thing that actually matters.

What distinguishes every man in that book is not virtue. It is that they paid.

Ross may have been a scoundrel. He still lost everything. Lamar may have been a white supremacist. He still broke with Mississippi on silver. The price is what makes them legible as political actors rather than as positions. Whatever mixture of conscience and calculation moved them, each of them put his career on the table and watched it go.

That is the ledger Trump has never entered. And that is the argument.

The man who will not pay

The record of the last twenty months is not a record of a man taking costly positions. It is a record of a man pricing them.

In February, the administration asked Senator Chuck Schumer to name Dulles International Airport and Penn Station after the president, in exchange for releasing federal funds already appropriated for a rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey. A source close to Schumer described the response: “there is nothing to trade.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand put it better. “These naming rights aren’t tradable as part of any negotiations, and neither is the dignity of New Yorkers” (NBC News, 2026). The White House did not deny it.

At the United States Institute of Peace, the name went up in silver lettering in December, bolted to a building whose own architects designed it, in the government’s words, to be “symbolic of USIP’s independent mission.” When lawyers worried that lettering can be removed, the government moved to make it permanent. “Unsatisfied with the relative impermanence of external lettering,” the former leadership’s emergency motion reads, “Appellants apparently now intend to carve President Trump’s name into the façade of USIP’s privately owned headquarters building while this litigation is pending” (USIP v. Jackson, 2026).

At the White House, he tore down the East Wing to build himself a ballroom, having told reporters in July it “won’t interfere with the current building” and would “pay total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” The ballroom is now slated at 90,000 square feet, nearly twice the size of the White House residence, at a cost that has risen from $200 million to $300 million (USA Today, 2025). He broke the promise because nothing made him keep it. The President’s own residence is exempt from the historic preservation review that would have slowed anyone else.

And at the Kennedy Center, the demand has a number attached and a court has tested it. The board proposed an inscription reading “endowed by The Trump Kennedy Center Fund,” to be installed once the fund reached $100 million. The judge declined to enjoin it, because it was not yet ripe, and explained why: “the Fund has raised nothing yet” (Memorandum Opinion, 2026a). The government’s own lawyers told the court the fund had not started raising money.

Sit with that. A man who has spent twenty months demanding to be memorialized on a building could not raise a hundred million dollars to pay for the privilege, so he set the threshold lower and demanded the inscription anyway. The money he says he raised to “keep it afloat” is $17 million, and the country’s major papers have not authenticated the figure (Deadline, 2026). Against the $100 million he promised, that is seventeen percent of the smaller number.

The judge also dealt with the argument that the money depends on the name, which is the entire case for adding it. There is “no proof that current or future donations hinge on President Trump’s name being on the building,” Cooper wrote, and “no competent evidence that removing the Trump name would prevent the Center from fulfilling its artistic mission, as it has done for the last sixty years” (Memorandum Opinion, 2026). The record pointed the other way: the renaming coincided with a collapse in revenue, artists cancelling, and an opera company ending a fifty-year residency.

Then Cooper wrote the sentence that should end this argument permanently. “The Court may not license a violation of those authorities under threat that some unidentified donors will withhold their largesse if the Board is not allowed to have its way. It can even less reward a decision by Board members, including the Chair, to curb the Center’s fundraising efforts because they cannot abide statutory restrictions on displaying his name” (Memorandum Opinion, 2026a).

Read that slowly. The court found that the fundraising did not stall despite the name. It stalled because of the name.

What the eight would say

I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to put words in dead men’s mouths, and that is a cheap move. But the comparison can be made without ventriloquism. It is a comparison of ledgers.

Adams lost his seat for a trade embargo. Houston lost his for a bill about whether Kansas would be free. Ross lost his for a vote that decided whether a president would be removed. Norris lost his patronage for a procedural motion about who chaired a committee. Taft lost a nomination, possibly, for saying the wrong thing about a trial.

Set against that the man who asked for an inscription on someone else’s memorial in exchange for spending someone else’s money on a building he had closed.

There is a line in the book’s tenth chapter, in the passage on John Peter Altgeld, where Kennedy quotes Vachel Lindsay: “To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name.” It is the sharpest sentence in the volume, and it is the one the current occupant of the White House would find least intelligible. Every project of the last two years runs on the opposite premise. The East Wing is not about a ballroom. The arch is not about America. The name on the Kennedy Center is not about the Kennedy Center. It is about a man who looked at a city full of monuments to other people and concluded that the problem was the other people.

And the eight are the proof that the other people earned it. There is a reason Kennedy’s own name is on that building, and it is not that he was a great artist or a great fundraiser. It is that he wrote a book about what it costs to be right when being right is expensive, and then in 1963, when it finally got expensive for him, he sent the civil rights bill to Congress knowing he would split his own party (Miller Center, 2026a).

Which brings me to the last thing I know about how Kennedy handled commemoration, because it is the exact inversion of what is happening now.

In 1959, three years after writing Profiles in Courage, Kennedy chaired the Senate committee that selected the first five members of the Senate’s own hall of fame. The Senate Historical Office’s account of that committee is worth reading in full, because it describes a man wrestling with precisely the question now before the country. Should they honor legislative accomplishment, or should they also recognize what the committee called “courageous negation”? What do you do with the senators who failed to pass anything, and by failing, opened the road for a later generation? The committee settled on judging candidates “for acts of statesmanship transcending party and State lines.” And then it adopted a rule: it would not recommend anyone unless all five members agreed (Senate, 2026c).

Unanimity, for an honor. A five-member committee, unable to agree on Nebraska’s George Norris, left him out rather than override a single objection. Norris was one of Kennedy’s own eight. He had written a chapter about the man, and he still would not force the honor through over one dissenting colleague.

That is what the process of being remembered in marble looked like when it was done by people who understood what it was for. Compare it to a board chaired by the person seeking the honor, voting 25 to 3 on a closed building, and passing a resolution listing ten alternative inscription texts to be placed on the exterior in case the first one did not satisfy him (Board Resolution, 2026).

Why this matters more than the building

I do not want to end on the building, because the building is a symptom and the country has a disease.

The argument I am making is not that Donald Trump should be denied a plaque. It is that the plaque is a claim about what the country honors, and that claims of that kind are the raw material of self-government. A republic tells its children what it values by what it puts on the wall. When Kennedy opened Profiles in Courage by saying the nation had “forgotten the quality of courage” that once brought such men to public life, and that a nation that forgets will not demand or reward that quality in its leaders, he was describing a mechanism, not a mood. A country that cannot tell the difference between the men who paid and the man who charged will stop producing the men who pay.

That is not a prediction about this president. It is a description of what the statute was written to prevent. In 1983, Congress looked at the Kennedy Center and decided that no one else’s name would go on it. That decision was not about Donald Trump, who was thirty-seven years old and building towers. It was about the principle that a memorial to one man is not a venue, and that the country should not be able to auction access to its own history.

The Congress that wrote those words is the Congress still holding the line. The law holds because a congresswoman kept her ex officio seat and would not sit down, and a judge with a lifetime appointment wrote down what the statute said, twice, and a court of appeals declined twice to disturb it. Those are institutions working exactly as designed, and it is worth saying plainly that they are working.

But institutions are downstream of the people who staff them, and the reason those three held is that they had something the eight had, which is a willingness to be unpopular for a while. Beatty has been on that board since 2019. She could have resigned any time in the last two years. She stayed, and she voted no, and she sued. That is a small paragraph in a long story, and it is the whole story.

Adams was alone and paid. Houston was condemned 73 to 3 and paid. Ross was burned in effigy and paid. None of them knew whether the country would vindicate them. Most of them were never vindicated at all. The one thing they had in common was that they acted as though the country was worth the price, and accepted that the price was theirs to pay.

The man who wants his name on their memorial has never paid the price for anything. He has charged it. He has charged it to a shuttered orchestra, to a state that got its airport named after him or got nothing, to a peace institute whose name was bolted on and is now to be carved into the stone. He will not pay it, because he has never needed to, and the country has been too polite to insist.

The statute insists. That is what it is for. And the eight are the reason we can say, without argument, without qualification, and without apology, that his name does not belong there.

Not “not yet.” Not “not until the courts finish.” Not “not this way.”

Not at all. He is not the kind of man that building was built to remember, and the country still knows what that kind looks like, because somebody wrote it down.

Sources

• 20 U.S.C. § 76h. Board of Trustees; “a living memorial to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
• 20 U.S.C. § 76j. Duties of the Board; § 76j(b)(1) prohibition on additional memorials.
• 20 U.S.C. § 76q. “Sole national memorial to the late John F. Kennedy within the city of Washington and environs.”
• Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage. Harper & Brothers, 1956. Full text of the first edition: fadedpage.com.
• The Pulitzer Prizes. “1957 Pulitzer Prizes,” winner in Biography: pulitzer.org. Independently corroborated by the JFK Library, which describes Profiles in Courage as “President Kennedy’s 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book”: jfklibrary.org.
• Beatty v. Trump, Memorandum Opinion, 834 F. Supp. 3d 41 (D.D.C. May 29, 2026): courthousenews.com.
• Beatty v. Trump, Memorandum Opinion and Order, No. 25-cv-4480 (D.D.C. Sept. 15, 2026): courtlistener.com.
• One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Pub. L. No. 119-21, § 60025, 139 Stat. 72, 157 (2025).
• Board Resolution. (2026, August 13). Exhibit B to ECF 75-2. Beatty v. Trump.
• Truth Social. (2026, September 15). @realDonaldTrump.
• AP. (2026, September 16). Fencing goes up around the main Kennedy Center building.
• Deadline. (2026, September 16). Kennedy Center to close.
• NBC News. (2026, February 5). Trump asked for Dulles and Penn Station to be named after him.
• United States Institute of Peace v. Jackson, No. 25-5185 (D.C. Cir. Sept. 17, 2026), Emergency Motion: courtlistener.com.
• USA Today. (2025, October 23). Trump White House East Wing demolition explained.
• Stewart, David O. Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy. Simon & Schuster, 2009. Excerpt: davidostewart.com.
• Kansas Historical Society. “Edmund G. Ross”: kansashistory.gov.
• Mississippi Historical Society. “Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar,” by William Rogers: mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov.
• Virtue, Jordan. “How John F. Kennedy Fell for the Lost Cause.” The Atlantic, December 2023: theatlantic.com.
• Texas State Historical Association. “Houston, Sam,” by Thomas H. Kreneck: tshaonline.org.
• Miller Center, University of Virginia. “John Quincy Adams: Life Before the Presidency,” by Margaret A. Hogan: millercenter.org.
• Miller Center, University of Virginia. “John F. Kennedy: Domestic Affairs”: millercenter.org.
• U.S. Senate. (2026a). “Speech Costs Senator His Seat” (Webster, Seventh of March): senate.gov.
• U.S. Senate. (2026b). “Joseph R. McCarthy Censure Case” and the censure table, condemning McCarthy 67 to 22 on December 2, 1954: senate.gov.
• U.S. Senate Historical Office. (2026c). “The Famous Five” (the 1959 committee chaired by Senator Kennedy): senate.gov.
• Taft, Robert A. “Equal Justice Under Law,” Kenyon College, October 5, 1946. Quotation and context: Wikipedia, Robert A. Taft.

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