Toby Morton, a comedian and former writer for South Park and Mad TV, saw the writing on the wall, as it were. Last August, months before President Donald Trump began floating the idea of renaming The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in his own honor, Morton made a couple prescient purchases.
Morton bought the domain names “trumpkennedycenter.org” and “trumpkennedycenter.com.” Earlier this month, the center’s Trump-appointed board announced that his name would be added to the arts organization, with workers subsequently installing lettering to the Washington D.C. building to read “The Donald Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, Morton said he decided to purchase the domain names after Trump “began gutting the Kennedy Center board earlier this year.”
Watch on Deadline
“I thought, Yep, that name’s going on the building,” Morton said in the interview. “The rest followed on schedule.” Morton had previously bought domain names domain names associated with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Nancy Mace and Sen. Chuck Schumer, using them to create parody accounts.
Asked how he’ll use the Trump-Kennedy domain names, Morton, who wrote for South Park from 2001 to 2003 and Mad TV from 2006-2007 and whose Instagram page identifies him as a “Creator of Anti-Fascist Websites”, said, the Trump sites will “absolutely reflect the absurdity of the moment. Lots of surprises. Some things are truly hard to parody, though.”
The renaming – which legal experts and Trump critics suggest is in violation of a 1964 law signed by President Lyndon Johnson designating the arts institution as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – has drawn considerable backlash. In the wake of the installation of the Trump name on the building, the American College Theatre Festival ended a 58-year partnership with the center, a noted jazz musician canceled a Christmas Eve Kennedy Center concert that had been a tradition for more than 20 years, and Congresswoman Joyce Beatty (D-OH) filed a lawsuit insisting the board vote to change the name is null and void.
“The Kennedy Center has always been a cultural institution meant to outlast any one administration or personality,” Morton, who owns about 50 various domain names typically purchased for about $15 to $30, told the Post. “It’s meant to honor culture, not ego. Once it was treated like personal branding, satire became unavoidable.”