Donald Trump’s Planned Kennedy Center Closure Causes Chaos

On the night of July 4th, as the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States is commemorated, there will be a modest gathering at the Kennedy Center, its rooftop terrace offering sweeping views of the fireworks on the National Mall.

While Donald Trump’s intent is for this event to be celebratory, it’s also to mark the center’s pending closure three days later. Ever since he took over the arts institution just weeks into his second term, Trump has cast himself as its savior, and its closure as a necessary step to renovate and revive the facility.

Many others including past board members, members of Congress and veterans of the institution see it as something else: An excuse that masks 18 months of chaos under the Trump team’s leadership, leading to an audience and artist exodus, and now, with the closure, a very uncertain future.

At stake is not just the ability of the Kennedy Center to ramp up with a slate of programming post-renovations, but to retain or rebuild a donor and audience base that is already going elsewhere. And there is a question of what happens to the event that gives the center an annual nationwide audience, the Kennedy Center Honors, and how it will continue in the interim and on what platform, given that its rights deal with CBS has expired.

The future of the center is at the heart of a lawsuit brought by one of its ex officio board members, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who is seeking a court order to halt the planned closure and reverse one of the most notorious actions of the Trump-controlled board: Adding his name to what was established as a memorial to John F. Kennedy, a year after his assassination.

“Congress never authorized this vanity project, which is a sacred memorial to a fallen president,” Beatty said recently.

What few argue is that the center does need repair. On the banks of the Potomac, it has been particularly vulnerable to water damage. It is also old. The modernist, Edward Durell Stone-designed complex opened in 1971, with Leonard Bernstein premiering his new work, Mass. The center became the home of the Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra in addition to hosting ballet, touring Broadway shows, experimental theater and comedy among other fare.

To hear Trump talk about it, after years of neglect, the center was on the verge of collapsing, not just financially but physically, until he saved it.

While the center undoubtedly had a long list of deferred maintenance, the prevailing thought among center veterans had been that it could be done in phases and while the complex remained open. As disruptive as that would be, it would at least retain the continuity of audience and donor support.

The Trump management has “taken a ‘shoot first, ask later’ approach to a national institution that deserves, as it is statutorily entitled to, particular care,” a group of former Kennedy Center board members and presidential arts appointees said in a court filing in Beatty’s case. They accused the center of a “failure to plan” that “leaves hostages to fortune.”

The previous center management outlined capital maintenance needs in four capital maintenance  reports from 2021 to 2024. But all of them anticipated the work being done without the full-scale closure of the complex, as Beatty noted.

Moreover, the center all but closed during Covid, and like other arts institutions, it has taken years to recover, the former board members said.

They warned that the break in continuity will leave the center to “start from scratch” in drawing audiences and cultivating donors. And given Trump’s surprise February announcement that the center would close, after reopening the center would have to reestablish trust with artists “if performers refuse to commit to an institution that has treated their schedules so capriciously.”

A center spokesperson said in response, “Staffing decisions support the broader move toward a successful closure for renovations. A comprehensive plan is underway to include the needs for a grand re-opening.”

A federal judge is currently weighing Beatty’s motion to block the closure, as well as another lawsuit filed by the D.C. Preservation League and other groups, on the grounds that the center failed to conduct proper review and secure required approvals. The center denies that such greenlights are needed, while pushing back on Beatty’s claim that the complex may suffer the same fate as the White House East Wing, which is to say it would be torn down.

In the meantime, as the closure approaches, unions are protesting layoffs, including the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which filed an unfair labor practice charge against the center over the termination of employees in the instant charge and group sales and subscription departments, even though two months remain before it shuts down. The center has not yet commented. Some union members have expressed fears that the closure would ultimately degrade union representation, pointing to comments made by Trump and the person Trump appointed to serve as president, Richard Grenell.  “At the Trump-Kennedy Center, we have 19 unions. It’s incredibly expensive to go and put on performances,” Grenell told PBS earlier this year.

In his first weeks in office, Trump fired Biden’s appointees, ensuring that the board was dominated by his supporters who voted him in as chairman, something no other president had done. As the most powerful man in the world grappled with geopolitical crises and domestic economic turbulence, he would also have a hand in programming a lineup of fare and determining the right shade of white for the center’s columns.

Trump’s takeover meant the ousting of David Rubenstein, a billionaire benefactor who has showered money not just on the center but also dozens of D.C. monuments and historic sites, as well as the immediate exit of president Deborah Rutter, who had already announced plans to step down later in the year.

In her place was Grenell, who had served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence. He’s also a partisan firebrand, combative toward the media and steadfastly loyal to Trump. Grenell defended the takeover, and touted the fundraising over the past year, claiming in a PBS interview that it was $130 million in 10 months. He also sought for each performance to be “revenue neutral,” a feat that arts veterans say doesn’t account for the realities of performance funding.

“We cannot have unpopular programming that doesn’t pay the bills,” Grenell told PBS.

As polarizing as Grenell was, some veterans say his criticisms reflected fears of structural deficits and financial hurdles that are not altogether uncommon for performing arts organizations. Pre-Trump takeover, the center had already been going through cost-cutting, while the economics of the opera and the symphony have for years been a challenge.

What the new Trump team didn’t seem to account for though was the backlash. In the months after the Trump takeover, Hamilton canceled a planned run, along with other artists and shows, while the coming months would see ticket sales decline.

As famous as the center is, its audience base is concentrated in Washington D.C., Maryland and northern Virginia, which make up some of the most anti-Trump areas of the country: 90% of district voters cast their ballot for Kamala Harris in 2024. That base also was hit hardest when Trump’s administration, led by Elon Musk, implemented widespread Department of Government Efficiency cuts early in the term.

Soon reports spread that large swaths of seats were going unfilled, tickets were being given away to volunteers, and season ticket holders were not renewing. The center’s DOJ attorneys didn’t dispute a fact laid out in Beatty’s lawsuit: Nearly half the tickets were going unsold, the worst since 2018, except during the Covid year of 2020.

That ticket figure was before the board voted in December to put Trump’s name on the institution, a move that was treated as a mere joke just weeks earlier. The rationale was the board’s view that the president had saved the center, albeit the renovations are being financed by a $257 million fund passed by Congress as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The day after the meeting, the letters on the building’s facade were changed to “The Donald J. Trump And The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts.”

The furor was immediate: Kennedy family members protested, and even Erick Erickson, the conservative commentator, wrote that the move had the feel of a “third-world African kleptocracy.”

Grenell and the center’s spokeswoman, Roma Daravi, defended it.

“Adding the Chairman’s name to the institution creates a truly bipartisan future for America’s cultural center,” Daravi wrote on X.

Instead of symbolizing cross-party cooperation, adding Trump’s name only made it more polarizing.

It led to another round of artist cancellations. That included Philip Glass, who scuttled a new symphony, Lincoln, that was to premiere in June. Another artist, the jazz musician Chuck Redd, was threatened with a lawsuit by Grenell after he backed out of a Christmas Eve concert, something that hardly helped artist relations.

Daravi blamed “leftist activists” for pushing artists to cancel, but sources say that behind the scenes, there was a scarcity of marquee programming for the new season approaching.

“There were no shows,” as one center official at the time put it. The turning point, the source said, was the name change. “Symbolically, that was the threshold.”

In response, the center maintained that “productions and companies were booked for after the closure date,” and their legal team is working on “amicable agreements” and to “reschedule when possible.”

In the meantime, Trump was fixated on the plans for renovation. He would receive weekly updates from Matthew Floca, who had been vice president of operations and, after Grenell’s departure in March, was picked to lead the institution as executive director. According to court documents, Floca recommended that the center close for two years.

“Unlike a commercial theater, the center’s mandate is to provide a premier national stage; providing a ‘compromised’ experience amidst dust, structure-borne noise, and erratic climate control is inconsistent with my executive duty and would injure the institution’s global reputation,” Floca said in a court document. He reiterated the urgency when he recently testified at a court hearing, pointing to, among other things, soffit panels hanging above the terrace, supported by rusted cables. One failed shortly after he started at the center two years ago, Floca said.

The list of renovations is extensive: Some $47 million will be spent on infrastructure, including waterproofing, garage and structural repairs; another $67 million will be used to update public spaces, including the front-of-house area, restrooms and a relocation of the box office; and $48.5 million will go to updating the performance venues. Another $78.2 million is slated for safety and building systems.

Taken by surprise by the closure, the National Symphony Orchestra has been scrambling for alternate venues around D.C. The Washington National Opera, at the center since its inception, had already announced plans to leave even before the closure was announced. It has been performing at the nearby Lisner Auditorium and other venues, including one in Baltimore.

“The audiences felt this, I think, incredible burden that everything was about us or them, about the two parties, whereas we have always been an apolitical building, an apolitical arts institution,” Francesca Zambello, artistic director of the Washington National Opera, told PBS News.

Also looking for a new venue will be the Kennedy Center Honors. The event will be renamed the Trump Kennedy Center Honors and continue during the closure in an alternate location, Grenell said in an interview in February with WTOP radio. It’s unclear where the television rights, estimated at around $8 million per year under the CBS agreement, will land. Before he departed the center, Grenell had said that there was interest from multiple outlets.

One of the final events will be the Mark Twain Prize, on June 28 — this year honoring Bill Maher. The event typically draws a heavy list of A-list comics and entertainers, but it’s unclear whether it will get that type of lineup this time.

For now, with Trump’s name attached, the center has become a symbol of his turbulent presidency, and what happens next will likely be part of his legacy.

In March, Jane Fonda and other celebrities protested on a street outside the center. Among them was Joan Baez, a past honoree.

“I considered turning in my Kennedy Center Honor,” Baez said to the crowd, “but that would be admitting defeat.”