By Bob Gaydos 

Trump tried to steal the name and reputation of JFK.

   Donald Trump is addicted to the Name Game. He loves nothing more than slapping his name on anything, especially things not even remotely connected with his talents or abilities or accomplishments, all of which are virtually non-existent.

  He has made a career of building monuments to his ego by constructing or buying buildings, golf courses, casinos — an airline — and gilding them with tacky gold everywhere before driving most of them into bankruptcy.

  There was Trump University and the Trump charitable foundation, both phony money-grabbing schemes which he was ordered to shut down and repay those he bilked. 

 He also sells the rights to use his name for those foolish enough to want to put it on their buildings. He even managed to bankrupt the historic Plaza Hotel in New York City for Pete’s sake and sully its reputation by gilding it with cheap gold and slapping his name on it before selling it for an $83 million loss.

    It seems he’s not very good at the game. The latest, perhaps most satisfying, example of Trump losing the game came on May 29, the birthday of John F. Kennedy.

     In what I refuse to believe was a coincidence, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper took the occasion of the late president’s birthday to order Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The judge said Congress had created the memorial and only Congress could change the name. Trump had no authority to put his name above Kennedy’s on one of the nation’s premier and most revered institutions.

    The judge also said Trump couldn’t just shut the center down for “repairs” because no one was going there since Trump’s new appointed board took over and top performers were refusing to appear there.

    The Kennedy family took its turn at the game also, honoring JFK’s memory on his birthday by presenting the annual Profile in Courage awards to Jerome Powell, outgoing chair of the Federal Reserve and the People of the Twin Cities of Minnesota.

    Powell was honored for protecting the independence and stability of the Federal Reserve against a constant  stream of threats and personal insults from Trump. The people of the Twin Cities were honored for risking their lives through peaceful resistance against an onslaught of ICE enforcement agents sent there as part of Trump’s war against America.

     The awards were presented at the JFK Library and are named in honor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Profiles in Courage,” authored by Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, his speech writer. Kennedy’s wartime heroics were detailed in the book, “PT 109.”

     Trump’s name on a library would be a joke and any book with his name on it was not about heroism and was written entirely by someone else who doesn’t brag about identifying a camel on a cognitive test.

    All in all, May 29 turned out to be a really bad game day for an insecure little man who likes nothing more than the sound of his own name. Well-played, Judge Cooper and Kennedy clan.