President Donald Trump’s name came off the Kennedy Center in the dead of night Saturday. More than 60 hours later, almost no one has seen it gone. Around 3 a.m. Saturday, a 14-member crew pried the 18 letters “The Donald J. Trump and” off the building’s exterior, after a thrumming crowd of more than 200 chanting “Take it down!” had dwindled to a dozen or so die-hards. Then, the workers climbed down and left — without removing the scaffolding they’d erected or the massive tarps they’d draped over it. Security guards have flanked the barricaded scaffolding ever since.

Laura Bligh, 66, continued her weeks-long vigil to see the restored Kennedy Center signage. A lifelong Washington-area resident, Bligh has spent a week-and-a-half planted outside the center waiting to see Trump’s name come down. After watching AI-generated videos and misdated photos purporting to show a restored facade, she wants to lay eyes on it and send verification to friends. “Seeing is believing,” she said. Bligh said she is not troubled by the damage the Trump letters might have left. “We are going to have some beautiful battle scars here on this building,” she said. “Our head is bloody, but unbowed.” Around noon, Suzanne Spiekerman, 67, sat watch on the fourth day of a trip from Foster City, California, to visit her brother. It was a coincidence that her stay overlapped with Friday’s deadline. That afternoon, Spiekerman came down, joined a watch-party crowd and watched scaffolding going up. But she, like all the others, left without satisfaction.

The Kennedy Center declined to answer questions on the record about when it planned to remove the tarp and scaffolding. Now, some visitors are reading political meanings into the cover-up. Pamela Iden, visiting from near Flint, Michigan, watched a live stream of the Kennedy Center drama that unfolded Friday. When she and her husband had free time on Monday, they hopped on a Metro train to the Foggy Bottom station and walked to the center, expecting to find what they see as a happy ending to that drama. Like everyone else, they found a tarp instead. For Iden, the grievance ran deeper than the covering, which she described as the last gasp of a sore loser. The building was dedicated to John F. Kennedy, she said, not to a sitting president who decided it would carry his name instead. Iden saw the still-shrouded signage as a snub. The center had technically complied — the order required only that the name come down, and Executive Director Matt Floca attested in court that it had. But to Iden, leaving the tarp sent an unspoken message: If Trump’s name couldn’t be seen, no name would be. “He’s thumbing his nose at the court, he’s thumbing his nose at the people,” she said. (The White House has disputed that the court orders were a defeat for the president.) Carmen Chávez put it less gently. The 52-year-old Miamian had never set foot in the Kennedy Center and wouldn’t have come while it bore Trump’s name. Now she had walked over from her hotel on her one free day. To her, the tarp was Trump in miniature — the work of a man, she said, “so egocentric” he’d brand his name on a national monument against the public’s will. She, too, left without achieving her goal but struck a note of optimism that she might later in the week. “I hope this gets taken down in the next couple of days, so I can come back and see it,” she said.

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