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Named for the murdered president, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, constructed of unique materials donated from nations around the world to honor the fallen man for whom it is named, may soon be nothing more than a pile of rubble, destroyed to slake the thirst for aggrandizement of a weak and vain buffoon.

Shortly after assuming the office of President of the United States, Trump, among the numerous illegal actions he has taken, renamed the Kennedy Center, adding his own name to sully and spoil the memorial to a president whose popularity burned so brightly that the narcissistic idiot found such injuries intolerable. The Center’s name, however, is set by law (not that the law has ever restrained this administration), and his illegal renaming was challenged. The courts, in an unusual move for this administration, upheld the law and ordered the offending text removed. Perhaps it was removed, perhaps it wasn’t; we shan’t know, because, with a toddler’s tantrum, a scaffold and blind were erected hiding the name from view.

Now talk has turned to the Center being in “terrible” shape and in dire need of massive restoration, restoration that requires Trump’s name to be permanently affixed to the Center as its savior. It is a move that the courts have again said he has no legal authority to make, and the administration has responded with not-very-veiled threats that the Center is in such a condition that, if not restored, it would require its destruction. As with the East Wing of the White House, Trump is likely to move fast and have the deed done before anyone could use the glacially slow wheels of the legal system to stop him.

In response to this, some voices from the resistance who hold Kennedy and the Center in quite high regard are advising us to let the petulant child have his way, to put the fool’s name on the Center, and to take it back off once he has been consigned to the trash heap of history. They implore us to do this to save the Center.

NO.

I have reasons why I think that this would be a terrible mistake. First, if you pay a blackmailer, you will always pay. Giving in only empowers him, and that must not be done. Second, if it is a bluff, then calling it forces him to reveal the bluff, which wounds him politically. Third, if it is not a bluff and he does destroy the beloved memorial to a slain president, then you hang that shit around the neck of every Republican for a generation. It becomes one more tool in de-Trumpifying the GOP, and one that would accelerate the process.

Stand firm. Either he backs down and sabotages his own standing in doing so, or he mortally wounds the GOP with his actions. In either case standing on principle ultimately accrues to the benefit of democracy.