Joyce Beatty

Just before dawn on a Saturday morning last month, a 76-year-old congresswoman arrived outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and got close enough to peek behind a white tarp with blue stripes covering its marble facade.

Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, was there to admire her own handiwork: the stripping of President Trump’s name from the building. A couple of weeks earlier, a judge had ordered the removal of the letters in response to a lawsuit Ms. Beatty filed contesting Mr. Trump’s move to stamp his own name on Washington’s premier performing arts center, named by Congress in honor of one of the nation’s most popular former presidents.

That gave Ms. Beatty, a Kennedy Center board member who is in her seventh term representing part of Columbus, Ohio, in Congress, the distinction of being one of the few people to have prevailed in a legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s efforts to remake Washington in his own image.