'Take it down!' Crowd electric as workers tear Trump's name off Kennedy Center

Workers were tearing President Donald Trump's name off the Kennedy Center on Friday as onlookers nearby chanted and cheered.

Thousands tuned in on livestreams from ABC 7, WUSA9, Reuters, Fox 10, the Associated Press, Forbes, and MS NOW to watch it happen in real time. A crowd assembled outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as workers erected scaffolding on the façade. A judge had killed the Trump board's last-ditch legal attempt to stop the removal just hours earlier, leaving a midnight deadline intact.

Then the chanting started.

"Take it down!" — 15 times in a row. The crowd exploded into applause and cheers.

About a minute passed.

"Take it down!" — 11 more times. More cheering. Someone hollered "Woo!" The energy didn't drop.

After another minute, there were nine more chants, more applause, more whoops, more noise — the whole thing playing out over roughly 2-1/2 minutes of pure crowd electricity.

The backstory: Trump's handpicked board illegally slapped his name onto the center's marble façade in December 2025, a federal judge ruled, because only Congress gets to change the name of a building named by Congress. When that ruling first came down in May, Kerry Kennedy — a niece of President John F. Kennedy — declared she might not need the pickaxe she'd famously vowed to grab once Trump left office.

As of publication, the scaffolding is up, and workers were on site — but the letters haven't fully come down yet. The clock runs out at midnight.