Donald Trump may be remaking the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into a pool of his self-reflection, but a writer for South Park, the TV series that better reflects the obsessions and tendencies of the administration than any political pundit, has purchased the rights to trumpkennedycenter.org.
Toby Morton, a TV writer and producer who has worked on the long-running and joyfully offensive sitcom, said he purchased the domain in August after predicting the president would change the name from the Kennedy Center to the Trump Kennedy Center after he installed himself as chair and stocked the board with loyalists.
The name change has brought turbulence to the institution, with several performers abruptly pulling out of scheduled concerts in protest. The name change itself is being challenged in the courts.
In an email to the New York Times, Morton said that for the past five years he’d been “grabbing domains tied to politicians and authoritarian figures and turning them into blunt, often uncomfortable reflections of what they actually represent”.
“I’ve been doing this kind of work for years now, building sites that mirror and expose political power by using its own language against it,” he added.
Visitors to trumpkennedycenter.org find an announcement for a show by the “Epstein dancers” and not a schedule for the center’s line-up of classical music, jazz, theater and ballet.
“Beginning January 2026, TrumpKennedyCenter.org enters a new era of devotion, unity and inherited authority,” a message on the website says. “We exist to preserve what must endure, to honor what must not be questioned, and to gather those who understand that greatness is not chosen, it is recognized.”
The real website, kennedy-center.org, is identified as the “Trump Kennedy Center”, but the web address itself is not altered.
Morton is not alone in looking to make fun. A group of British satirists has acquired trump-kennedycenter.org at about the same time, and it is advertising its own brand of deranged comedy misinformation.
“Saucy Jeff – a Rock’n’Roll Musical,” the website advertises, calling it a “new adaptation of the St Hubbins/Smalls-penned rock opera Saucy Jack, [which] brings this musical about friendship and sex crimes right up to date in the new location of Little Saint James, featuring Jeffrey Epstein as the protagonist.”
Comedy, more than outrage, has often proved to be a better counter to political lunacy. South Park made its comedy bones parodying the excesses of woke culture.
But during the second Trump term it has switched firmly to parodying Trump, who in recent episodes has been expecting a baby with a cartoon Satan who thinks the new White House ballroom is going to be a creche.
South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker explained last year that the Trump administration was inescapable. “It’s not that we got all political,” Parker told the New York Times. “It’s that politics became pop culture.”
Morton told the outlet that his view of the Trump Kennedy center name change was that it was an art in itself, perhaps in the same way that Lenin’s tomb in Red Square is better than any piece of installation art could hope to be.
“It’s almost performance art in itself,” Morton told the outlet. “The irony of someone who has openly mocked artists, dismissed culture and shown nothing but contempt for the arts now positioning himself as their steward is kind of breathtaking.”
