South Park writer Toby Morton has revealed that he bought the domain names for the Trump Kennedy Center after correctly predicting that Trump would rename the building after himself.
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Morton revealed how the president’s moves earlier this year inspired him to take action.
"As soon as Trump began gutting the Kennedy Center board earlier this year, I thought, 'Yep, that name’s going on the building,'" Morton said. "The rest followed on schedule."
Morton hasn’t opened up about how he plans to use those domains, but he teased that "it’ll absolutely reflect the absurdity of the moment. Lots of surprises. Some things are truly hard to parody, though."
"The Kennedy Center has always been a cultural institution meant to outlast any one administration or personality," he continued. "It’s meant to honour culture, not ego. Once it was treated like personal branding, satire became unavoidable."
In February, President Trump was elected as chairman of the venue and announced his plans to change its programming and board of trustees. At the time, he claimed to reporters that he would get rid of the "woke" productions that take place at it. Then, earlier this month, the board voted to rename it from the Kennedy Center to the Trump Kennedy Center.
That renaming is also the reason why jazz musician Chuck Redd decided to cancel his annual Christmas Eve show at the venue. The longtime performer, who’d been playing at the center since 2006, said of the name changing, "When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert."
Trump Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell is now reortedly seeking $1 million in damages from Redd due to what he perceives to be a "political stunt."
"Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution," Grenell wrote in a letter.