The smallest man

Trump was ordered to take his illegally added name off the Kennedy Center. His response is to leave up an ugly tarp, like he’s covering up a meth lab on the outskirts of town, so that nobody can see Kennedy’s name either:

In the early hours of June 13, in an action that turned out to be news around the world, workers hung massive tarps from scaffolding across the front of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and under court order removed President Donald Trump’s name from the marble facade.

Or did they?

True, the center’s operations chief, Matt Floca, filed a sworn declaration with a federal court later that day saying that Trump’s name had been removed. And true, a New York Times photographer captured evidence through an opening in the tarp that the letter “A” came off. Another photographer recorded evidence of the demise of a “D.”

But in a downer denouement for Trump’s critics, a week later the tarps are still there, prompting some to wonder whether at least some of the letters are, too. As of Friday evening, there still was no visual evidence that the letters splashed across the building had been restored to “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Peering behind the tarps is impossible because they now lie tight against the building’s front.

“I don’t know if they took down the sign, because I can’t see it,” said Luna Woo, a violinist visiting from Portland, Oregon, as part of the National Symphony Orchestra’s Summer Music Institute. She and other young musicians in the program have been trying to see behind the tarps from a practice room overlooking them. No luck.

So when will the tarps come down?

A Kennedy Center spokesperson, Roma Daravi, emailed a terse response:

“The scaffolding and tarp will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels. Best, Public Relations.”

As with the reflecting pool (and unlike so much Trumpian pettiness and ineptitude) this is not particularly important itself, but it is an important metaphor for his personality and why his presidency has been such a catastrophe. And in politics, metaphor can matter.