Comedian and writer Toby Morton, who has worked on shows including South Park and Mad TV, said he moved months in advance to secure web domain names he believed Donald Trump or his allies might want, then used them to publish satirical content after the Kennedy Center’s leadership voted to add Trump’s name to the institution.
Morton told The Washington Post that he bought both trumpkennedycenter.org and trumpkennedycenter.com in August after concluding that Trump’s reshaping of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was likely to culminate in a name change. “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, according to Entertainment Weekly, which summarised his comments and quoted him directly. “The rest followed on schedule.”
The purchase came before the Kennedy Center board voted in mid-December to rename the institution “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” according to reporting and commentary around the board’s action. In the days after the vote, new signage reflecting the combined name appeared at the Washington venue, reinforcing the decision and intensifying political and cultural backlash.
The White House framed the change as a straightforward recognition of Trump’s role in the institution’s direction. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the board voted “unanimously” to rename the centre, adding that it was “because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” according to Entertainment Weekly’s account.
Morton’s response was to put the domains to use immediately as a form of protest comedy, a tactic he has used repeatedly in political trolling, buying names that public figures might seek and turning them into satirical or activist pages. In this case, his pages were designed to mock the new “Trump-Kennedy Center” branding and to draw attention to the board changes that preceded it.
The episode unfolded against a wider dispute over governance at the Kennedy Center, which is a nationally prominent performing arts venue established by Congress and traditionally associated with the late President John F. Kennedy. Trump’s critics have argued that the board shake-up and renaming effort amount to politicisation of a cultural institution, while supporters have defended the move as within the board’s authority and consistent with Trump’s influence over the organisation.
Some of the most pointed objections came from figures connected to the Kennedy family. Maria Shriver described the decision in stark terms, according to accounts of her remarks, as the debate over whether the board could or should attach Trump’s name to the venue escalated beyond Washington arts circles and into a broader political fight.
The board’s vote and the appearance of updated signage also triggered renewed scrutiny of how the decision was taken and who participated. Reporting and statements cited by multiple outlets described objections from Democratic lawmakers who serve as ex officio members of the Kennedy Center board, including concerns about the process and whether the decision should be left to the board rather than Congress. Some critics argued that the facility’s identity, tied to a memorial for Kennedy, should not be altered for contemporary political reasons.
In the middle of that clash, Morton’s domain grab became a viral subplot. It provided an unusually concrete illustration of how quickly political and cultural decisions in Washington can produce online opportunism, parody, and backlash, with activists and comedians exploiting the same branding logic that public institutions and political movements rely on.
Morton’s comments suggested that, from his perspective, the name change was not a surprise but the predictable outcome of earlier moves by Trump and allies to reshape the Kennedy Center. His remark that “the rest followed on schedule” cast the board vote and the physical rebranding as the final step in a sequence he believed was set in motion when Trump began pushing for changes at the institution.
The dispute has also landed in a period of heightened tension for the centre’s programming and public image. The Kennedy Center, a major stage for classical music, theatre, dance and popular entertainment, depends heavily on philanthropy and ticket sales, and it has often tried to remain above party politics even as it hosts high-profile national events. The renaming decision, and the very public argument it sparked, raised questions about whether the institution’s identity can remain stable under overt political branding, particularly when the new name ties the centre to a living political figure with strong partisan associations.
For the White House, the argument has been that the board acted properly and that Trump’s involvement was beneficial. Leavitt’s statement, as reported, framed the move as recognition of Trump’s impact on preserving the facility. Critics have countered that whatever work was done on the building or institution does not justify altering a national memorial dedicated to Kennedy, and that any such change should be handled through a broader public process, including congressional involvement where appropriate.
Morton’s trolling, though comic in intent, has been treated by many observers as part of a wider pattern of digital resistance. By capturing domains tied to a political branding push, he prevented them from being used as official promotional real estate and instead turned them into a vehicle for criticism. That tactic has become more common in an era when political identity is expressed through instantly recognisable names, URLs, and social media shorthand, and when the fight over a public institution’s name can become a fight over the first page of Google results.
While Morton’s websites do not change the board’s decision, the episode has ensured that the renaming fight will be accompanied by parody and protest, not just legal or political debate, as the Kennedy Center navigates the consequences of attaching Trump’s name to one of America’s best-known cultural venues.
