Can the Kennedy Center Survive Trump?
In early February, President Donald Trump announced he was going to fire the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in D.C. He himself would be chairman, and as he wrote on Truth Social, he would make the center “GREAT AGAIN.”
But in the past few months––as Trump has appointed new members to the board and plenty of scheduled artists have boycotted the center—it’s become clear that the administration seems to have a pretty loose idea of what it wants art to look like.
On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman about how the administration is using the Kennedy Center as a laboratory for its ideas about arts and culture. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: Can we go back in time a little bit and talk about the Kennedy Center and its role in Washington culture? How did it come to exist in the first place? Where did it come from? Why was it important to D.C. to have an institution like this one?
Katy Waldman: The original impetus for this was the end of World War II. President Eisenhower wanted to lift the country’s spirits and bring them into a peacetime mentality and to promulgate the soft power of the country through arts and culture. And then after President Kennedy was assassinated, this plan that was on the back burner for having a cultural institution fused with a desire to honor President Kennedy and his own personal commitment to the arts. And so the Kennedy Center was born, and it was a trifecta. It was the cultural hub that Eisenhower envisioned, it was a performing arts stage, and it was a living memorial to President Kennedy.
How did Donald Trump think about the Kennedy Center during his first term?
The buzzy thing that happened in the Trump vs. Kennedy Center narrative in the first term was that some of the artists who had been awarded this very prestigious prize, the Kennedy Center Honors, threatened to boycott the ceremony if Trump attended. And this was right after Charlottesville. So it’s not just like they were being political for no reason, something awful had just happened. And they were saying, “Well, given this sympathy with neo-Nazis, we’re not going to come to the Kennedy Center Honors if Trump is there.” It was a pretty principled artistic decision. And Trump said, “OK, fine. I’ll let you have your ceremony in peace. And also, I’m not gonna have a reception at the White House for any of the artists who have received this award.”
And starting then, he has never done anything for the Kennedy Center Honors. Which was kind of a splashy news story but didn’t affect the operations of the Kennedy Center much. And in fact, some of the people I talked to were saying they had a perfectly fine relationship. The presidential box in the concert hall was filled almost every night. He was offering this as a perk to people visiting.
This was not the approach that Trump has taken in his second term. He has sort of done much more of a DOGE-style takeover, where he’s going in with a chainsaw and hacking up a pretty delicate ecosystem and then throwing a patch of AstroTurf down on top and being like, “See, it’s great.”
He ousted Deborah Rutter, who’d served as the Kennedy Center president since 2014. He replaced her with Richard Grenell, who has mainly been a foreign policy adviser to Trump until now. Does Grenell have any connection with the performing arts?
This is Trump’s weird central casting/reductive views of how identity works. Grenell did spend some time in Hollywood, but he is also the highest-profile openly gay member of the Trump circle. And so I wonder whether Trump thought, Oh, you could do theater.
Grenell is an ambassador. He came up through the U.N. He did the National Security Council. He is also a real estate developer. He also, according to basically everyone who I’ve talked to who has interacted with him personally, is a pretty terrible human being. The quotes are something like, “This is the worst person I’ve ever met.” He seems like a really cruel and combative guy.
What has he done since he’s taken over? Has that cruelty been manifest?
So I want to tread carefully here. I think the ways in which he has fired people or laid people off have been somewhat heartless. And also, there’s been a lot of slippery explanations. For example, several shows with LGBTQ themes have been canceled at the Kennedy Center. And there was an email exchange that leaked between Grenell and an artist who wrote to him to ask what was up with that. He was really antagonistic and sort of angry, speaking to this artist. And I think that reflects a broader ethos of, like, Seed any ground, come in hot, attack, attack, attack.
Trump and some of the officials he’s put in charge have basically said the Kennedy Center is in financial disarray. What’s the reality of its financial situation?
From what I could tell, it was flourishing. It had money, and it was doing what it was supposed to be doing pre-Trump. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was always making more money than it spent on its programming. But because its sources of revenue were not just box office, but were also gifts and donations, it was still overall in the black.
It seems like what the new leadership at the Kennedy Center is trying to convey to the public is: “In the past, the Kennedy Center was putting on shows that didn’t make money. And we’re gonna stop that because that was bad business.”
I think what the previous leadership was saying is it’s actually good business, because even if we don’t make money on these more experimental or more niche shows, we are fulfilling the mission of the center, which is to represent the diversity of American culture. And that’s going to pull a lot of donations from people who agree with that vision.
Ticket sales are down now, though, right?
That’s a whole different part of the picture, which is no matter how well or badly the center was doing before Trump, the Trump anti-Midas touch is in operation here, and now everything is worse. Not only are ticket sales down, but donations have been paused, artists are pulling out. All of the spigots for money have slowed or have been turned off.
You spoke with Mary Helen Bowers, a ballet dancer who’s quite conservative and has been on the Kennedy Center board since the end of Trump’s first term. Did she have a vision for what the Kennedy Center programming would look like going forward?
She seemed very optimistic. She said that the world’s greatest businessman is stepping in to right the ship of the Kennedy Center, and so we’re all going to be blessed with great art in the future. But one thing that has been pretty striking about the new leadership is that they don’t really have a coherent vision for what the art of the Kennedy Center is actually going to be. So we have a quote from Grenell saying there will be a great big celebration of Christ at Christmas. And we have Trump saying more Broadway shows. But beyond that, I haven’t really been able to get a good sense of what they want.
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