‘It will never be the same’: How Trump turned on the Kennedy Center and brought it to its knees

By Jeremy Herb, Sunlen Serfaty, Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — When President Donald Trump’s name was ordered removed from the Kennedy Center this spring, it seemed that an opening to move on from his reign over the performing arts center might have emerged.

“I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management,” the president wrote in a late-May Truth Social post, seemingly relinquishing the control he’d seized a year prior.

Speculation even bubbled up among some of the more than a dozen “ex-officio,” board members — who don’t get a vote but are not allied with Trump — over whether the former board chairman, billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, could be brought back to help restore the center’s fundraising and programming, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. (CNN has asked Rubenstein for comment.)

But after Trump said he would remain chairman, “it kind of all squelched pretty quickly,” one of the sources said. The hope that his crusade to rename a monument dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy had ended turned out to be wishful thinking.

Instead, nine months from a cold December day when cranes first placed Trump’s name on the marble façade, the institution has been brought to the brink by the president still very much engaged in a fight: lights have been turned off inside, infrastructure is crumbling and protests swirl while legal battles mount.

A lawsuit brought by Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex-officio board member, led to a judge’s ruling that Trump’s name had to be scraped off the building and that the board could not shut down the facility altogether.

Trump has only ratcheted up his threats to tear down the building in response to the legal setbacks: The president was seen with a poster this week through the window of Air Force One that appeared to read “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.” Though the federal judge has since ordered a 30-day notice be given before any major change happens, it’s not at all clear where things go from here.

Late Friday night, the administration argued in court that the Kennedy Center must close for two years, asking the federal judge in the case to allow it so that the “dangerously dilapidated and decrepit” building can be renovated.

On the same day, over a dozen Kennedy Center employees were laid off, including its lead spokesperson, according to two sources familiar with the matter — gutting an already skeleton staff. The Kennedy Center declined to comment on the cuts.

Trump has said previous leadership is to blame for the dire financial situation. During a contentious board call this week, he also blamed Beatty for bringing litigation that, he said, has contributed to the center’s downfall.

While the president and his allies on the board argue his name needs to be re-affixed to the building to revive fundraising, current and former officials, performers and industry officials say it is precisely Trump’s involvement that alienated the center’s donors and prompted scores of artists to cancel their performances.

“The Broadway productions will not come back, the artists will not come back,” said a source familiar with discussions about programming. “None of those donors will come back as long as Donald J Trump is the chairman.”

Current and former Kennedy Center officials, musicians, artists and other performers with ties to the center suggest that Trump’s takeover has added a permanent imprint on the Kennedy Center, whether or not his name ultimately ends up on the building.

“There are wonderful theaters throughout this country, and they are certainly part of the cultural ecology,” said LaRue Allen, president and executive director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, which has a 50-year history with the institution. “But the Kennedy Center — it is our nation’s capital. It is our national showcase.”

Another Kennedy Center source who recently left said simply: “It will never be the same.”

CNN has asked the White House for comment.

‘The Kennedy Center, they do a beautiful job, an incredible job’

Trump’s focus on the Kennedy Center is emblematic of a notable shift from his first administration to a second one that has targeted arts, cultural and educational pillars across the country, in addition to Trump’s unrelenting desire to remake the nation’s capital to his liking.

In his first term, Trump mostly avoided the venue, skipping the Kennedy Center Honors after awardees threatened to boycott the event if he attended. The White House even said in a 2017 statement that the president and First Lady Melania Trump were not participating “to allow the honorees to celebrate without any political distraction.”

And when the Kennedy Center initially received $25 million in funding in a March 2020 Covid stimulus package, Trump defended the aid, saying: “The Kennedy Center, they do a beautiful job, an incredible job.”

Nine months later, however, he singled out a $40 million line-item for the center while criticizing a subsequent December 2020 Covid aid bill — a foreshadowing of his future disaffection.

By his 2024 campaign, Trump made clear that going after so-called “wokeism” would be a pillar of a second presidency. He didn’t appear to single out the Kennedy Center on the campaign trail, but in his third week in office he’d already set a takeover plan in motion.

“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in February 2025.

Trump said he had fired Rubenstein as chairman of the board as well as board trustees “who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

The takeover became the first domino in a cascade of Trump moves to remake the nation’s capital, including the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, the closure and remodeling of the busiest public golf course in Washington, DC, and his ongoing efforts to build a 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery — projects all still being fought over in court.

Though Trump has widely criticized cultural institutions and museums, he’s been able to exert only so much control over them, primarily by reducing their federal funding. The federal government has gutted the agencies that fund the arts, including the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, and denied and rescinded tens of millions of dollars in grants to organizations that don’t align with the president’s values.

But the Kennedy Center is one of the few cultural institutions where the president has been able to flex more of his power by seizing control of the board. He has similarly tried to bring the federally funded Smithsonian Institution to heel, with more uneven results.

A week after Trump’s board takeover, the president was named as its chairman, and he installed longtime loyalist Richard Grenell as executive director.

“So we took over the Kennedy Center,” Trump told reporters. “I’m going to be chairman of it, and we’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.”

His new role prompted several cancellations, including most notably the Broadway show “Hamilton.”

Leading up to the center’s Kennedy Center Honors in December 2025, which Trump himself was hosting, the president began referring to the building as the “Trump Kennedy Center.”

On December 18, 2025, the board made that declaration official by voting to rename the facility the “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” saying that the change honored Trump’s work at the center after taking over.

One day later, new signage was installed to add Trump’s name to the building’s façade.

A legal and financial saga

The legal battle and wave of cancellations that has ensued present particular challenges for an institution that makes part of its budget from ticket sales.

Operating as a non-profit, the Kennedy Center received roughly $37 million from Congress in the last fiscal year, according to the latest appropriations legislation signed into law. But the bulk of its revenue comes from programming and private donations. In fiscal year 2024, during the Biden administration, the Kennedy Center reported $307 million in revenues, according to documents filed with the IRS.

Last year, Grenell sought to revamp the center’s calendar to include, in his words, more family-friendly programming. He brought in “Dog Man: The Musical,” based on the popular kids’ graphic novel series, at the recommendation of second lady Usha Vance.

At the same time, the center became a place to host events that lean in to Trumpian ties, including the premiere of the documentary “Melania,” a Charlie Kirk memorial and the FIFA World Cup draw (where the organization gave Trump a peace prize).

But after Trump’s name was added to the building, a wave of performers pulled out, and ticket sales sagged. Multiple sources told CNN earlier this year that attendance at the Kennedy Center had been so low that for months it had to “paper the house” — a theater term that means to fill seats by offering free or discounted tickets.

“There was a haze of despair around the performances. Nobody was showing up to performances,” Carlos Simon, the Kennedy Center composer-in-residence since 2021, told CNN.

Simon, who is in the last year of his residence, noted that the National Symphony Orchestra is now playing at other venues in Washington. He said he’s stayed in his role at the Kennedy Center “for the morale of the folks who were still there trying to do the good work of presenting music.”

“I feel really bad that it’s become this political tool or pawn, but music still has to go on,” he said.

Amid the cancellations, Trump announced in February that the Kennedy Center would close for two years on July 4 to allow for renovations — a move critics suspected was to being made more to provide cover for the shrinking pool of patrons than because of the need for such a dramatic closure.

The Kennedy Center also received an influx of funding last year thanks to Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which contained $257 million for the center to pursue “necessary expenses for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures.”

Yet the board has argued only Trump’s help can muster the funds to renovate the building — and Trump has made clear his help will only come with naming rights.

In the meantime, Matt Floca, Grenell’s successor as executive director, this week told the judge in the Beatty case that the center needs to temporarily close due to safety concerns.

Even if the building survives, officials say getting the center’s programming to return — particularly Broadway shows — would still take months if not several years.

That is under the assumption, of course, that performances would be willing to return, said the source involved in the center’s programming.

“If we started now in terms of engaging with property companies, going back and forth and getting a deal made, we could have Broadway tours back at the Kennedy Center by the basically middle of ‘27 into ’28,” the source said. “That’s how long it takes for all these pieces to be put in place.”

CNN’s Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.

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