Last week, in a moment of spontaneous joy and exuberance, the board of the Kennedy Center in Washington voted on a change to the building’s name. One allegedly unanimous decision later, the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was born. The Center’s administrators, showing remarkable foresight, were ready to put the decision into action immediately: barely 24 hours later, workers were already busy adding Trump’s name to the building’s façade.
The Center’s website also already reflects the name change—but quibblers might note that the site’s actual domain does not. It remains “kennedy-center.org”. There’s a reason for this: the domains “trumpkennedycenter.org” and “trumpkennedycenter.com” are already taken. They’re owned by comedian and scriptwriter Toby Morton, who has written for South Park and Mad TV. In his downtime, Morton has made a habit of acquiring official-sounding domains for satirical purposes: he already owns around 50 such sites, including nancymace26.com (“I don’t legislate, I litigate grudges”) and mtg2026.org (“Building a whiter tomorrow!”).
Morton told the Washington Post that he has something similar planned for these domains: “[They will] absolutely reflect the absurdity of the moment,” he promised. In a moment of clairvoyance, he purchased them earlier this year after Trump announced that he was firing the Center’s entire board. (“We will soon announce a new Board,” the President wrote on Truth Social at the time, adding that the new board would feature “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!”)
“As soon as Trump began gutting the … board earlier this year,” Morton said, “I thought, ‘Yep, that name’s going on the building.’” And while he certainly wasn’t alone in predicting that the amazing Chairman’s ego would demand formal recognition, Morton’s key insight was that even Trump’s hand-picked board wouldn’t quite have the gumption to totally replace Kennedy’s name. Instead, they settled on the equivalent of one of those double-barreled surnames that serve to kick the question of nomenclature down the road for another generation.
The awkward new moniker is already subject to legal challenge, so it’s unclear whether it will outlast Trump’s tenure in the White House, but in the short term, it seems to be here to stay. You’d think this would be good news for Morton, if no one else—but for now, neither trumpkennedycenter.org nor trumpkennedycenter.com displays any content. The comedian is apparently running up against the same problem as many other writers today: it’s awfully difficult to satirize an era in which every day already feels like living in The Onion. “Some things,” he concluded ruefully, “are truly hard to parody.”
English (US) ·