Name-Changer Gets the Boot from JFK Memorial Center - Part One

A June 14, 2026, New York Times’ report captioned “Trump at 80: A President ‘Really Uncomfortable’ With Aging,” had the hopelessly and the pathologically narcissistic and egomaniacal President Donald John Trump bitterly huffing about the predominantly lilywhite American media’s repulsive tendency of constantly putting him in an execrably unflattering light. But, of course, for those of us avid media sleuths and World Cup-addicted students and sedulous observers of the so-called Mainstream American Political Culture, this supposedly nefarious and lackluster and clearly unwanted media spotlighting of Mr. Trump has been absolutely not in any way unseemly tendentious or flagrantly gratuitous.

This visibly fast-aging albeit physically agile and, some might even say, robust and verbally and rhetorically profuse, if also intellectually flaccid, verging on acute denseness, by the lights of his most ardent critics and observers, was in reality never agile or cognitively disciplined and politically progressive in his youth. And this writer pretty much may be quite aptly deemed to have a credible handle on what he is talking about, having been almost uninterruptedly resident in New York City, where the Queensborough, New York City-born Mr. Trump has also been steadily resident, for the most part, over at least the last four decades and been a tabloid fixture of polarizing infamy or notoriety.

As a young man, and some critics and observers inordinately given to colorful hyperbolic language would even say that “the dapper and the dashing” Mr. Trump, hereabouts widely and commonly known as “The Donald,” was never really savvy and/or forward-looking as a key or major entrepreneur in the manner that he fervidly and earnestly prefers to be envisaged these days. The six-foot-three burly man with tangled hair that appears to be angrily railing against the rest of nature, and who just turned 80 years old just a couple of days ago, as of the date of the original composition of this news feature, is also visibly a bit overweight.

Innumerable news stories and media reports describe Mr. Trump as a hot-headed man who has ruinously been living a profligate lifestyle on the high end, as it were, as neatly distinguished from what may be traditionally termed as upper-class existence, that resulted in this sometime gambling casino proprietor of Atlantic City, New Jersey, allegedly bankrupting or running dozens of his otherwise lucrative ventures incredibly and scandalously aground, at least by the lights of the estranged and authoritative likes of Mr. George Conway, the one-time Trump legal adviser, if memory serves Yours Truly accurately, who is presently running for a US Congressional Seat from Downtown Manhattan, New York City, in hopes of positively and constructively unleashing his “Epic Fury” and/or his “Midnight Hammer” on The Donald for the greater benefit and the socioeconomic comfort of the proverbial average New Yorker.

And by the way, not very long ago, Candidate Conway, whose former wife, KellyAnn Conway, was a Senior Staffer in the First Trump Administration, 2017 to 2021, authored a quite authoritative biography on the man, at least according to several media accounts and reviews, as well as by the author’s own accounts in several televised discussions on the book, in which Mr. Conway called his subject a brash bully and a brat with little talent and surfeit quantity of ill-will who was, nonetheless, inimitably gifted with a talent for talking a good game to his financiers, creditors and and investment partners and patrons who The Donald almost invariably ended up sticking up, to a person, with empty money bags or totally empty bank vaults.

But for his good-gaming talking skills and flair, the 2026 failed Democratic US Congressional Candidate from the Chelsea Area of Downtown, New York City, or Manhattan Borough, to be exact, is cocksure that the now-President Donald John Trump may very well have ended up serving a long prison term with hard labor in an Upstate, New York, penitentiary or elsewhere in one of the states of the Union where Mr. Trump’s business enterprises had either fared wobbly or failed miserably in the past. “He has this great and inimitable flair for talking his scammed multiple investors into forking up more money to enable him engage in more likely-to-royally-fail ventures than almost anybody else in the country,” the Trump biographer once told the host of a Cable News Network (CNN) talking-heads program. He did not use the exact same words as those quoted above, but Mr. Conway surely and strikingly conveyed a message that inescapably and unmistakably reflected the same sentiment.

It is, however, very doubtful that Mr. Trump would have ended up exactly where Mr. Conway supposes him to have very well ended up, being that the just-turned 80-year-old putative baron of the Miami Beach-based sprawling Mar-a-Largo Estate is the only legitimately President in the 250 years of Modern America’s founding, with 34 Criminal Convictions as part of his career or professional profile, to have had himself comfortably holed up at The White House for two nonconsecutive terms in office.

But, of course, as usual, that is not the real topic or subject that inspired the composition of the present column, as the caption of our present conversation clearly and unmistakably indicates; which has to do with the morally auspicious and the euphorically inexpressible fact that the decision by a District of Columbia (DC) Federal District Judge to have the name of a career scofflaw Mr. Trump immediately and summarily removed from the edifice of the congressionally sanctioned and globally renowned John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, located in our nation’s capital of Washington, DC, originally erected or established in the tragic wake of the brutal and the criminally suspicious assassination of the 35th President of the United States of America, on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

On the latter date, the man who recently attempted so flagrantly and morally reprehensibly and blasphemously desecrate the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Center was barely 16 years old. For many of us ordinary American citizens, though, Judge Christopher Cooper’s most opportune and emotionally and psychologically therapeutic decision or order to have Mr. Trump’s name “clinically” decoupled from the very-well-loved and, many would even say, adored African American Civil Rights-minded President Kennedy could not have come at a better time in the runup to the 250-Year Anniversary of the Independence of the United States of America, on July 4, 1776, from Britain’s Colonial Imperialism.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]