Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) detailed a heated exchange she had with President Donald Trump on Tuesday after he lost a legal battle to put his name on the Kennedy Center, saying she confronted him after he spiraled into a “tantrum.”
“I mean, let me just make it simple. It was the most unprofessional thing that I have ever witnessed or been a part of it,” Beatty said on Tuesday night’s airing of MS NOW’s “The Weeknight.”
“He went into name-calling, from everything from trying to say that I was an obstructionist, I was dumb,” the Democrat continued. “He said: ‘I think you’re incompetent.’ And I said: ‘I know you’re incompetent.’”
“I was not going to let him call me awful things,” Beatty said.
The Ohio lawmaker, who was designated by Congress to serve on the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, told the MS NOW hosts that Trump attacked her during a virtual board meeting on Tuesday over renovations to the venue, which Trump has said will not happen unless his name is attached to the memorial for slain President John F. Kennedy.
One source familiar with the interaction told CNN, “It was fucking crazy.”
“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,’” Beatty told the MS NOW hosts.
“And then he wanted to talk about how great he was with developing, and he didn’t know anything about me, but I had never done anything. This was the biggest thing I had done. So I reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room,” she added.
Watch Beatty describe Trump’s “tantrum” below:
In a statement to HuffPost, the White House claimed that “For decades, Democrats let the Kennedy Center rot as water damage spread, infrastructure crumbled, and a national treasure fell apart under their watch,” adding that Trump will “restore the Kennedy Center and make it the finest performing arts facility in the world.”
Four Democrats and six Republicans, including Trump during his first term, have been in office since the Kennedy Center opened in 1971.
The Kennedy Center’s board, now full of the president’s allies, voted on Tuesday to close the venue. Trump wrote on Truth Social that the board voted “almost unanimously” to close the center “immediately,” claiming it is in a “virtual state of collapse.”
But in a separate interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Beatty disputed the president’s claim that the center will close immediately. The lawmaker said she did not vote to close the center and that other board members “did not vote for the language that he is putting up on Truth Social.”
Watch Beatty’s conversation with Kaitlan Collins below:
Beatty told Collins she believes Trump “made it personal” during their call on Tuesday because her name is on the lawsuit to stop him from renaming the center. “He picked the wrong person,” she said.
“I think it would be unthinkable for someone to hear a president using the language that he used,” Beatty said. “He threw a tantrum. It was like an immature child. I wouldn’t even want to put this on a child. It was just being very — in my opinion — very immature, shouting, calling names.”
“I was disappointed, but I was not going to let him get away with bullying, bullying me, because that’s what he does. He tries to intimidate people,” the lawmaker said. “He tries to bully them because he didn’t get his way, because he wanted this to be his vanity project.”