Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty revealed the absurd personal threats she faced from President Donald Trump during his Kennedy Center meltdown.
Beatty, 76, told MS NOW’s The Weeknight that Trump, 80, “threw a tantrum” during a call with the Kennedy Center’s board on Tuesday after a federal judge ruled that he couldn’t plaster his name on the historic performing arts center.
“It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of,” the Democratic congresswoman, an ex officio board member, told the panel. “He went into name-calling—everything from trying to say that I was an obstructionist, I was dumb. He said, ‘I think you’re incompetent.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re incompetent.’”
“But I was not going to let him call me awful things,” she continued. “He said he was going to hold me responsible if something fell out of the ceiling and killed someone. And I told him, I said, ‘You’re already killing people. We’re at war.’”
Beatty described how the president bragged about how great he was at developing and claimed she had “never done anything.” The congresswoman said she reminded him that he had “more bankruptcies than anybody in the room.”
“It really went there,” she recounted. “I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me.”
The Ohio rep said the board had moved forward with a decision to close the Kennedy Center, but not immediately, as Trump had claimed on social media. The $17 million he claimed to have poured into the Kennedy Center was also not mentioned.
“Last time I checked, it was the taxpayers’ money that we voted on out of our congressional budget,” she said. “So, he didn’t win. He didn’t get his vanity project. He didn’t get his name on it for the second time, so now he’s attacking folks.”
Beatty explained that the $257 million Congress gave the Kennedy Center for renovations was “still sitting there,” and that Trump’s claims of needing to fund it to keep it “afloat” were untrue.
“If he doesn’t get what he wants, he literally comes on, and he’s hollering and screaming. And it doesn’t matter if it’s the judge or his family, anybody that does not side with him, he attacks them,” she said.
A source familiar with the call described it to CNN as “f—ing crazy.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Beatty appeared on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins later Tuesday evening, reiterating her earlier points and describing Trump’s behavior as “very immature.”
The Ohio congresswoman sits on the Kennedy Center board that Trump, its chair, filled with his allies. Among the members the president appointed are Second Lady Usha Vance, musician Lee Greenwood, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Beatty’s lawsuit kicked off a legal battle that resulted in U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruling Tuesday that Trump’s name could not be displayed on the building.
Trump, pleased at the board’s vote to close the venue but not at the federal judge’s ruling, threatened to block the center’s renovation unless the ruling was overturned.
“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” he wrote on Truth Social, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”
