WASHINGTON (AP) — The Kennedy Center on Friday quickly added Donald Trump's name to the performing arts center Congress designated as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy, a day after the center's board of trustees voted to make the change.
Blue tarps were hung in front of the building to obscure workers on scaffolding as they executed the transformation. Hours later it had a new name: The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
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New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, is unveiled on the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, is unveiled on the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts, is unveiled on the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Tarps are installed in front of the sign on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Tarps are installed in front of the sign on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
A worker drills holes near letters being installed above the signage on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
A worker drills holes near letters being installed above the signage on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Tarps are installed in front of the sign on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
The board of trustees, handpicked by Trump, voted unanimously Thursday to add his name to what was enshrined as a living memorial to the Democratic president. Trump, a Republican, also is the board's chairman. The Kennedy Center said the vote recognized Trump's work to revitalize the institution.
Critics of the vote, including Democratic members of Congress who are ex-officio board members, as well as some historians, insist that only Congress can change the name.
“The Kennedy Center was named by law. To change the name would require a revision of that 1964 law,” Ray Smock, a former House historian, said in an email. “The Kennedy Center board is not a lawmaking entity. Congress makes laws.”
Congress named the performing arts center as a living memorial to Kennedy in 1964, the year after he was assassinated. The law explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person's name on the building's exterior.
Some Kennedy family members oppose the renaming. Kerry Kennedy, a niece of John F. Kennedy, said in a social post on X that she will remove Trump's name herself when his term ends.
“Three years and one month from today, I’m going to grab a pickax and pull those letters off that building, but I’m going to need help holding the ladder. Are you in?” she wrote on a photo of the center's new name. “Applying for my carpenter’s card today, so it’ll be a union job!!!”
The Kennedy Center is the latest building in Washington to have Trump's name added to it. The U.S. Institute of Peace was recently renamed after him.
The Kennedy Center did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday.
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AP National Writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, is unveiled on the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, is unveiled on the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts, is unveiled on the Kennedy Center, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Tarps are installed in front of the sign on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Tarps are installed in front of the sign on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
A worker drills holes near letters being installed above the signage on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
A worker drills holes near letters being installed above the signage on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Tarps are installed in front of the sign on the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military pressed ahead Saturday in a frantic search for a missing pilot after Iran shot down an American warplane, as Iran called on people to turn the pilot in, promising a reward.
The plane, identified by Iran as a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle, was one of two attacked on Friday, with one service member rescued and at least one missing. It was the first time the United States lost aircraft in Iranian territory during the war, now in its sixth week, and could mark a new turning point in the campaign.
The conflict, launched by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28, has rippled across the region. It has so far killed thousands, upended global markets, cut off key shipping routes, spiked fuel prices and shows no signs of slowing as Iran responds to U.S. and Israeli airstrikes with attacks across the region. Missile and drone strikes continued Saturday with an apparent Iranian drone damaging the headquarters of the U.S. tech giant Oracle in Dubai.
The downing of the military planes came just two days after President Donald Trump said in a national address that the U.S. has “beaten and completely decimated Iran” and was “going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast.” The U.S. and Israel had boasted recently that Iran's air defenses were decimated.
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon released public information about the downed planes.
In an email from the Pentagon obtained by The Associated Press, meanwhile, the military said it received notification of “an aircraft being shot down” in the Middle East, without providing more details.
A U.S. crew member from that plane was rescued. But the Pentagon also notified the House Armed Services Committee that the status of a second service member on the fighter jet was not known. A U.S. military search-and-rescue operation continued Saturday.
In a brief telephone interview with NBC News, Trump declined to discuss the search-and-rescue efforts but said what happened would not affect negotiations with Iran.
Separately, Iranian state media said a U.S. A-10 attack aircraft crashed in the Persian Gulf after being struck by Iranian defense forces.
A U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military situation said it was not clear if the aircraft crashed or was shot down or whether Iran was involved. Neither the status of the crew nor exactly where it went down was immediately known.
An anchor on a TV channel affiliated with Iranian state television urged residents to hand over any “enemy pilot” to the police.
Throughout the war, Iran has made a series of claims about shooting down piloted enemy aircraft that turned out not to be true. Friday was the first time the Iranian public was urged to look for a downed pilot.
Iranian state media said in a post on the social platform X its military shot down a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle. The aircraft is a variation of the Air Force fighter jet that carries a pilot and a weapons system officer.
An apparent Iranian drone damaged the Dubai headquarters of the American tech giant Oracle on Saturday after Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard threatened the firm.
The attack targeted the headquarters, which sits along Dubai’s main Sheikh Zayed Road highway. Footage obtained by The Associated Press from outside the United Arab Emirates showed damage to the building. A large hole could be seen in the building’s southwestern corner, with the “e” in “Oracle” on a neon sign damaged.
The sheikhdom’s Dubai Media Office, which speaks for its government, said a “minor incident caused by debris from an aerial interception that fell on the facade of the Oracle building in Dubai Internet City," adding there were no injuries.
Oracle, based in Austin, Texas, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Guard has accused some of America’s largest tech companies of being involved in “terrorist espionage” operations against the Islamic Republic and said they were legitimate targets.
Earlier Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon Web Services facilities in both the UAE and Bahrain.
World leaders, meanwhile, have struggled to end Iran’s stranglehold on the waterway, which has had far-reaching consequences for the global economy and has proved to be its greatest strategic advantage in the war.
The U.N. Security Council is expected to take up the matter Saturday.
Trump has vacillated on America’s role in the strait, alternately threatening Iran if it does not open the strait and telling other nations to “go get your own oil.” On Friday, he said in a post on social media: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE.”
More than 1,900 people have been killed in Iran since the war began. In a review released Friday, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a U.S.-based group, said it found that civilian casualties were clustered around strikes on security and state-linked sites “rather than indiscriminate bombardment” of urban areas.
More than two dozen people have died in Gulf Arab states and the occupied West Bank, 19 have been reported dead in Israel and 13 U.S. service members have been killed. In Lebanon, over 1,300 people have been killed and more than 1 million displaced. Ten Israeli soldiers have also died there.
Mednick reported from Tel Aviv, Israel. Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Sylvie Corbet in Paris, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut, Tong-hyung Kim in Seoul, South Korea, and Will Weissert, Michelle L. Price, Lisa Mascaro and Ben Finley in Washington contributed.
Israeli security forces and rescue teams inspect a site struck by an Iranian missile in Petah Tikva, Israel,Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
A boy who fled with his family following Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon sits inside the van they are using as shelter in Sidon, Lebanon, Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Iraqi women hold a portrait of Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, during a protest against U.S. and Israeli attacks on multiple cities across Iran, in the Shi'ite district of Kazimiyah in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, April 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
A woman checks a destroyed house that was hit in an Israeli airstrike in Saksakiyeh village, south Lebanon, Friday, April 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A bridge struck by U.S. airstrikes on Thursday is seen in the town of Karaj, west of Tehran, Iran, Friday, April 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
