President Donald Trump threw a “tantrum” and called her “dumb” after losing a legal battle — again — to inscribe his name on the Kennedy Center building, Rep. Joyce Beatty said on MS NOW’s “The Weeknight.”

Beatty, an ex-officio member of the center’s board of trustees, said Trump attacked her in a virtual board meeting Tuesday immediately after a federal judge blocked the president’s name from being inscribed on the main building of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and its campus from being renamed “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

“It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of it,” Beatty, D-Ohio, said of Trump’s reaction. “He went into name-calling, from 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.’”

“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 added.

The center’s board members, whom Trump hand-picked, voted Tuesday to close the performing arts center indefinitely after the judge’s ruling, citing financial and safety concerns. But Beatty, who brought the lawsuit that led to the federal judge’s Tuesday ruling, and other critics of the president have said that he and his allies are holding the center hostage by shuttering it unless the performing arts center can bear his name.

Trump added his name to the building last year, placing it before Kennedy’s name. Trump’s name was removed in June, and the board has been fighting to get it back on.

The center has been beset by declining ticket sales under new leadership during Trump’s second term. The Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra moved to other venues earlier this year. The board said the performing arts center is “on the brink of bankruptcy.”

In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump said the board voted to close the center for “Safety reasons, and so that it can begin the process of Reconstruction.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed what he said was a collapsing ceiling in a post on X on Monday.

Beatty said Trump invoked those safety concerns in their clash during the board meeting.

“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. We also have people who are starving. You’re doing this,’” she said.

In a statement to MS NOW on Tuesday night, White House spokesman Davis Ingle said: “For decades, Democrats let the Kennedy Center rot as water damage spread, infrastructure crumbled, and a national treasure fell apart under their watch. President Trump stepped up to save it.”

Beatty cast the meeting as the latest example of Trump’s attacks on his critics.

“If he doesn’t get what he wants, he literally comes on, and he’s hollering and screaming,” she said. “Anybody that does not side with him, he attacks them. He just picked the wrong person today.”

Renee Agostini contributed to this report.

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