Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center is showier, emptier and more political – The Washington Post
At the gala opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, Kennedy family members sit in the presidential box. (Thomas J. O’Halloran / Library of Congress)Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center is showier, emptier and more political
In 10 months, the president has transformed Washington’s cultural hub. Now comes his biggest night yet: the Kennedy Center Honors.
Updated today at 12:48 p.m. EST, 16 min
By Travis M. Andrews and Janay Kingsberry
On the day in February that President Donald Trump took over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, his new board ousted Deborah Rutter, the longtime president of the institution. She gathered her staff to offer a hopeful farewell. That evening, she welcomed other leaders to her home to mourn.
“As with any wake, you drink a little too much, and you tell stories, and you laugh, and you cry,” Rutter told The Washington Post in a conversation in the spring.
Rutter had planned to step down at the end of 2025 after leading the Kennedy Center through a decade in which it had diversified its offerings, endured the 2020 lockdown and emerged to boast robust ticket sales and, according to publicly available tax filings, steadily grown revenue.
She still had four major items on her to-do list: growing the center’s endowment; furthering its work as an arts educator around the country; strengthening the financials of the National Symphony Orchestra; and renewing the contract with CBS or finding a new broadcast partner to air the Kennedy Center Honors.
Those plans died. But the Kennedy Center did not.
The center is now guided by a board of Trump loyalists and a new staff including the center’s president, Richard Grenell, a pugnacious veteran of the first Trump administration. They have terminated much of the former staff, lambasted the former leadership and made changes including the addition of high-wattage events like the World Cup draw. They have embarked on a $257 million renovation, in line with Trump’s broader effort to leave his mark on Washington’s cityscape. They’ve boasted about hefty fundraising.
Now, nearly 10 months in, a picture of a transformed institution has come into view. Standbys of the Kennedy Center’s stages like the National Symphony Orchestra have been strained by plummeting ticket sales and organizational uncertainty. Traveling productions and acts have pulled out. And a new kind of right-leaning programming has begun to take root.
So what is the Kennedy Center now?
For one thing, it’s getting a Trumpian revamp. He ordered new marble and the repainting of the exterior columns in austere white. Portraits of the first and second couples now hang in the center’s Hall of Nations, and the building exterior is occasionally lit up in red, white and blue (a move that, many staffers joke, makes the building look like the flag of France, not America).
“It was in rough shape,” Trump said at an event Saturday ahead of the Kennedy Center Honors. “But we’ve fixed the White House, and we’ve fixed the Kennedy Center.”
Even the medallions for the Honors, created by Ivan Chermayeff and made for nearly 50 years by a D.C.-area family, have been redesigned by Tiffany & Company.
And — wittingly or not — the new leadership has made the center a political football for the first time since its opening in 1971. House Republicans have suggested renaming it for Trump (the whole building) and the first lady (just the Opera House). Conservative groups have flocked there to host conferences and meetings. Senate Democrats are investigating the Kennedy Center, accusing Grenell of “self-dealing, favoritism, and waste,” which he has denied.
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