Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) sparked strong internet reactions when on Tuesday she recounted a heated exchange she had with President Donald Trump.

While on MS Now’s “The Weeknight,” Beatty described the moment Trump lost the legal battle to put his name on the Kennedy Center.

“Let me just make it simple: It was the most unprofessional thing that I have ever witnessed or been a part of,” Beatty said. “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,’” Beatty continued. “I was not going to let him call me awful things.”

Beatty, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees since 2019, attended Tuesday morning’s virtual board meeting, where the board voted to close the center, citing its “dire” financial and structural shape.

The vote came about half an hour after a federal judge rejected the board’s latest attempt to add Trump’s name to the building, which the Trump administration has already appealed. Trump has repeatedly said he will shut down all renovations unless his name is attached to the memorial for late President John F. Kennedy. In a Truth Social post Tuesday night, Trump claimed that he funneled $17 million into the Kennedy Center “to keep it afloat.”

“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 said. “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.”

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In a separate interview with CNN, Beatty told host Kaitlan Collins that she believed Trump “made it personal” against her because her name is on the lawsuit to stop him from renaming the Kennedy Center.

“I think it would be unthinkable for someone to hear a president using the language he used,” Beatty told Collins. “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.”

Beatty has publicly challenged Trump’s attempts to get his name on the Kennedy Center, and said in a statement issued on Tuesday that the president is “holding the Kennedy Center hostage unless he can put his name on this sacred memorial.” Beatty’s team did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

“For decades, Democrats let the Kennedy Center rot as water damage spread, infrastructure crumbled, and a national treasure fell apart under their watch,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told HuffPost. “President Trump did what Democrats wouldn’t by finally committing the resources and the leadership needed to restore the Kennedy Center and make it the finest performing arts facility in the world.”

Personal attacks in professional settings “isn’t new,” particularly against women of color, Nadia Brown, a professor of government and chair of the women’s and gender studies program at Georgetown University, told HuffPost.

“What makes this different here is that, although she’s a congresswoman [and] Trump is the president, they’re in a different context: They’re serving on a board together,” Brown said. “The power hierarchy exists, but not in the same way as it exists when he’s the president of the United States, and she’s one of 435 members of the U.S. House.”

Brown said Trump’s outburst struck her as even more surprising in this context. Board members, she said, are expected to work toward a shared goal, and when they don’t, the fallout is usually private.

“If there are people that have blowups … they typically go away or they [get] put off the board or decide not to run again, but not in this public fashion,” Brown said. “This is pretty eye-opening here.”

Brown said the reaction to Beatty’s story isn’t universal, though. It’s landing the hardest with people who were “eager for Democrats to push back” and knew Beatty’s lines (such as “you have more bankruptcies than anyone in the room”) were true. People less familiar with the Kennedy Center dispute, she said, “might have other thoughts about this,” while those already “waiting for Democrats to respond” and are aware of the dynamics at play “are able to move past” any reflexive judgment of Beatty’s tone.

This reflexive judgment, Brown said, is what Beatty may have been navigating by going on MS Now and CNN later that night to tell her story herself.

Brown traced the trope of angry Black women back to slavery, with Michelle Wallace’s 1979 book putting the phenomenon into explicit terms. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins later explained why the trope still endures, Brown said, because anger expressed by Black women is rarely read as “justified or righteous emotion” — which can make it easy to dismiss.

“This is from Black women [in] Congress to the Black woman that is working at the grocery store,” Brown said. “Black women writ large have this stereotype.”

Brown said Beatty’s decision to discuss the exchange publicly, including with MS Now and CNN, may reflect an awareness of this risk and an attempt to frame the moment on Beatty’s terms, “getting ahead of … the Trump machine.”

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