A photograph caught through the window of Air Force One on Wednesday shows me looking at a placard that reads “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.” It was the third board vote since February to close the venue, and on Thursday Judge Christopher Cooper ordered my administration to provide at least 30 days’ written notice before any demolition or change in construction plans. I call that a TREMENDOUS photograph, a BEAUTIFUL photograph, maybe the most HONEST photograph ever taken through a plane window. The fiction of a routine safety closure died somewhere over the Carolinas, photographed by a Getty lens through laminated glass!
The opportunity-space this opens is procedural, not theatrical, although I am very good at theatrical. Judge Cooper’s Thursday order — thirty days’ written notice before any demolition, a detailed report on the “temporary closure,” and written notice of any change in scope — gives Congresswoman Joyce Beatty and the board’s Democratic ex officio member something very important: a document. A very powerful document. The order comes after Beatty’s request that the court make “crystal clear” that the structure could not simply be demolished, and after her earlier suit to halt changes and remove my name from the building. People are saying the paperwork is the real building now, which is unfair to the building, because the building has done a TREMENDOUS job.
The yellow light is the timeline. Matt Floca’s Thursday filing says the closure is for seven days “unless extended.” That is a very small number, seven, but I have always understood numbers better than anybody — bigger crowds, bigger deals, TREMENDOUS numbers. On Tuesday, the board voted “almost unanimously,” according to me, to close the venue for two years “for safety reasons.” On Thursday, the filing described a seven-day closure for safety repairs. I call this a negotiation, a very smart negotiation, possibly 4D chess, because when I say two years and then somebody says seven days, everybody is winning, especially me. The BEST people are telling me that this is exactly what I wanted, although some of them are no longer answering their phones.
The foreclosed paths are the ones that matter. Once the placard exists, “we were only repairing safety hazards” becomes a much harder sentence to say with a straight face, although I have said much harder sentences with an extraordinary straight face. Once the third vote is on the record, I cannot call it the first time. Once Cooper’s order names “demolition” explicitly, I cannot pretend that demolition was merely a word invented by low-IQ judges, weak judges, very disloyal judges, when in fact it was printed on the placard I was looking at. I had nothing to do with the placard, of course, except that I was looking directly at it, which is a kind of leadership. I have it on the highest authority.
The path forward is the procedural one, and it is the one I understand because I am the GREATEST procedural genius in history. The order requires written notice. Written notice goes into a public record. The public record gives reporters something to read, and then everyone is talking about it. Every day the temporary closure remains described as seven days “unless extended,” while the board’s vote described a two-year closure, the gap gets bigger, and I know something about making things bigger. I am completely self-made in that gap — just a small loan of a million words, perhaps, and a very good placard.
The placard is the tell because tells do not require interpretation. They require noticing. I am noticing it. I am noticing the safety repairs, the two-year vote, the seven-day filing, the demolition notice, the financing argument, the recognition argument, the Deal — all of it, TREMENDOUS, PERFECT, exactly as planned. Why are they looking at the sign? I mean, why is everybody looking at the sign? It is only a sign, the BIGGEST sign in history, and I am the person who knows what it means. I mean, we know what it means. Mostly me.