On July 23, 2025, Bob Onder introduced a bill to take John F. Kennedy's name off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and replace it with Donald J. Trump's.

He called it the Make Entertainment Great Again Act. The MEGA Act.

This is not a joke someone made about him. It is the actual short title of an actual bill, filed by an actual member of Congress, and the case he made for it is in his own press release.

The argument, in his words

Onder's press office laid out the qualifications. We are quoting it in full because a summary would look like we were making it up:

"For more than 40 years, President Trump has been a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape. From books and television shows to board games, movies, and more; when it comes to the arts, President Trump's golden touch has captivated and entertained audiences for decades.

"He captured American and British audiences alike for more than a decade with his hit show, The Apprentice, which ran for 15 seasons, as well as its popular spinoff, The Celebrity Apprentice. As well as regularly appearing in other movies and television shows that would go on to be cultural icons such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. He is also the only President to have hosted Saturday Night Live. A program he's hosted not once, but twice!"

Board games. A cameo in Home Alone 2. Two SNL hosting gigs.

Onder added his own quote: "You would be hard pressed to find a more significant cultural icon in the past 40 years than President Trump," and "I cannot think of a more ubiquitous symbol of American exceptionalism in the arts, entertainment, and popular culture at large than President Trump."

The building he wants renamed is the national memorial to a president who was assassinated in office. Two months after Kennedy was killed, Congress passed a joint resolution renaming the National Cultural Center in his honor — Public Law 88-260, signed January 23, 1964. Congress wrote into that law that the center "shall be the sole national monument to his memory within the city of Washington and its environs."

Onder's bill is two sentences long. The first says the center "shall after the date of enactment of this Act be known and designated as the 'Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts.'" The second says every reference to the Kennedy Center "in any law, regulation, map, document, paper, or other record of the United States" now means the Trump Center. That's the whole bill: rename the building, then scrub the old name out of the federal record.

Where the bill went

Nowhere.

The MEGA Act was referred on July 24, 2025 to the House Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management. It has not moved since. As of today it has zero cosponsors — not one other member of the House has put their name on it.

Onder sits on that subcommittee himself.

So a member of Congress wrote a bill, sent it to his own subcommittee, and it has sat there for more than a year with no support from anyone. That's not legislating. That's a press release with a bill number attached.

The part that costs money

Buried in the same press release is a sentence worth reading twice:

"Rep. Onder voted for historic investments totaling $256.7 million to the John F. Kennedy Center, which were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. This includes $249.5 million that will go directly to providing funding for capital repairs and restoration along with significant investments in the operation, maintenance, and security of the Center."

That is Onder taking credit for putting a quarter of a billion dollars into a performing arts center in Washington, D.C. — in the same law that cut health coverage and food assistance for his constituents in Missouri.

The Joint Economic Committee estimates that 20,218 people in Missouri's 3rd District are projected to lose health coverage from the health care cuts Onder voted for — 10,700 losing Affordable Care Act coverage, 9,518 losing Medicaid. Meanwhile 19,263 households in the district count on SNAP to put food on the table, including 8,428 households with children and 7,820 with someone over 60.

Same bill. Twenty thousand people in his district lose their health coverage; the Kennedy Center gets $256.7 million; and Onder's follow-up idea is to put the president's name on the building.

Why this keeps happening

Onder isn't alone, and that's the point. Naming things after Trump has become a genre of legislation.

Seventeen Republicans have signed onto bills to rename Dulles International Airport after Trump — three of them added their names during the longest government shutdown in American history, while the air traffic controllers at that very airport were working for $0 paychecks. In Florida, Anna Paulina Luna filed a bill to carve Trump's face into Mount Rushmore eight days into his second term; eighteen months later it has zero cosponsors, zero action, and geologists say it was never physically possible.

These bills are not meant to pass. They're auditions. They cost a filing and a press release, they generate a friendly headline in conservative media, and they signal loyalty to one man.

What they cost the district is the thing that's harder to see: the hours, the staff time, and the legislative slot that went to renaming a concert hall instead of to the 20,218 people about to lose their insurance.

Onder is a physician. He spent about a decade in the Missouri legislature before this. He sits on the Judiciary, Education and Workforce, and Transportation and Infrastructure committees. He has the tools to do something about the coverage losses in his own district.

He used them to write the MEGA Act.

Source

"Congressman Onder Introduces the Make Entertainment Great Again (MEGA) Act", Office of Rep. Bob Onder, July 23, 2025. Bill status and cosponsor count from congress.gov. Photo: official congressional portrait.