It has been a little over a year since, just weeks after starting his second term, President Trump made himself a chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His action shook the theater world, not only because the community is generally more left-leaning in its beliefs, but also because prior presidents were more hands off when it came to their approach to the Kennedy Center. So I wanted to look back at the past year and see how Trump’s self-appointment has affected the Kennedy Center and the theater community as a whole, and how it will continue to do so years to come.
History
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts first opened its doors in September 1971. Located in the heart of Washington, D.C., the road to opening day had been long. The idea for a center of art was first proposed back in 1933 by Elenor Roosevelt, who had the goal of aiding unemployed actors during the Great Depression. In 1933, a resolution to create a center for the arts was passed by Congress; however, it took until Representative Arthur Klein brought it back as part of the National Cultural Center Act in 1950 for any action towards the creation of the institution to start. After the law’s passage, President Eisenhower made it a goal to raise the funds for the 61 million dollar project, but only raised $13 million. The project would only have all of the funds required after President Kennedy raised the remaining amount needed through a campaign focused on the importance of the arts. Unfortunately, he would not live to see even the beginning of construction. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, his successor President Johnson passed a measure to name the performance center after the deceased president. With the funds collected, construction on the Kennedy Center began in 1964, ending in 1971.
First Term
While the majority of President Trump’s initiatives against the Kennedy Center began in his second term, his distaste for the theater began in his first term with the Kennedy Center Honors. The theater’s gala would recognize and award artists and performers who the institution selected to deem as American greats, and was a pillar of the performance center. Every sitting president attended this yearly ceremony. However, in 2017, those who were being recognized at that year’s ceremony stated that they would not attend if President Trump was present. Thus, he did not attend that year, breaking tradition and leaving him with a grudge against the institution. Trump displayed his feelings towards the arts during his first term in other ways, specifically through the small amount of National Medal of Arts he distributed during his first term–9 compared to Obama’s 76 and Biden’s 33–and his attempts to remove funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Second Term
Within weeks of starting his second term, President Trump made himself a chairman of the Kennedy Center, and soon after fired the institution’s president Deborah Rutter, board chairman David Rubenstein, the general counsel, and those Biden appointed on the board. These positions were all quickly filled by Trump with those who shared his belief system, with Rutter being replaced by Richard Grenell. According to Kennedy Center workers who spoke with The New Yorker writer Katy Waldman back in 2025, these new staff members did not understand the basics of arts administration, and Grenell was also revealed by The New Yorker to have a habit of lying about ticket sales. In the same month, he took a tour of the Kennedy Center, during which he made claims to reporters that the Kennedy Center was in “tremendous disrepair” thanks to previous management. In the same interview, Trump spoke poorly of the shows previously put on at the Kennedy Center, and then admitted that he had never seen any performances there.
Since then, artists and shows rapidly canceled their performances at the Kennedy Center in favor of other DC locations or just not performing at all. Their shift to other DC venues was also encouraged by the fact that Trump chose to no longer continue the tradition of booking shows that featured performers that were non-union. The list of artists, shows, and companies that have canceled their performances include but are not limited to: Philip Glass, The Washington National Opera, “’Hamilton” (which Trump reacted to by claiming that he “never liked” “Hamilton”), Stephen Schwartz, Brentano Quartet with Hsin-Yu Huang, the U.S. Marine Band, and “Eureka Day.” In addition, when President Trump attended a performance of “Les Miserables” at the Kennedy Center last year, 10 members of the touring cast boycotted the performance, as the cast was reportedly given the option not to perform that night (a month after Trump attended the performance of “Les Miserables,” it was announced that they intended to rename the opera theatre in Melania Trump’s honor). Similarly, in 2025, JD Vance and his wife attended a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO), during which they were booed by the crowd. In addition to shows cancelling their performances, the newly appointed leadership of the Kennedy Center also cancelled shows that President Trump did not approve of. One, but not the only, example of this is how events lined up for Pride Month last year were cancelled without explanation, such as the multi-week long “Tapestry of Pride” event which was supposed to celebrate queer artists. Other changes, such as pronouns in e-mail signatures being banned and a prayer vigil for Charlie Kirk being hosted after his death, showed how the performance center was now moving away from its previous identity of acceptance. Before Trump, the shows performed at the Kennedy Center were diverse, from classical music and ballets to a NSO performance with Kendrick Lamar and a robot playing a trumpet as part of the JAPAN! culture + hyperculture festival in 2008. The 2025-2026 year’s line up was much more limited and selective. Moreover, when Trump then went on to host the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors, awards were given to artists that Trump picked, and during the gala he said that he would tailor the next season’s schedule in accordance with the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The most obvious of these changes, however, occurred in December 2025, when Trump renamed the Kennedy Center to the Trump Kennedy Center. Since even a week after Trump announced his new position at the Kennedy Center, ticket sales plummeted, as many did not want to give their money to an institution that was being led by our current administration. Despite the fact that all of these changes have undoubtedly affected the Kennedy Center in a negative way, they were all relatively manageable in the grand scheme of things.
However, the worst was still yet to come for the theater. On February 1st, President Trump announced that the Kennedy Center would close on July 4th for renovations and then reopen in roughly two years, a timeline that just so happened to align perfectly with the end of his second term. The choice to shut down the Kennedy Center is undeniably one of Trump’s many actions of revenge. The closure, not only targets the artists who excluded him from the Honors gala during his first presidency but also artists who now refuse to perform at theCenter and those who refuse to buy tickets to what shows were still left. While the claim that the building needs renovations may be truthful, as in an email, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations Roma Daravi wrote that the renovations would include repairing/replacing the exterior of the building, getting various parts of the interior such as the HVAC and plumbing system up to code, and improving parking. Many are not inclined to believe him, as the Kennedy Center was refurbished fairly recently, with a $250 million expansion occurring in 2019, and refurbishments, such as the 2002 garage expansion, have occurred that did not require the center to close. Micheal Kaiser, the president of the Kennedy Center at the time, even made a point of finding ways to keep the building open during renovations.
As someone who had the opportunity to perform at the Kennedy Center a little under two years ago and got to see the backstage area, I can confidently say that the building is not in the disarray that its leadership is describing. Trump and Richard Grenell also claim that the institution has been doing poorly financially for several years, while former directors claim the opposite – while ticket sales have been dramatically declining, it is thanks to Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center.
Ramifications
During a 1962 fundraiser for the Kennedy Center, President Kennedy told the crowd, “The encouragement of art is political in the most profound sense, not as a weapon in the struggle but as an instrument of understanding of the futility of struggle.” President Trump has taken the Kennedy Center and used it as a weapon against those in the arts who he does not agree with. Trump appears dead set on shaping the Kennedy Center into a place where only art that he approves of is produced, which thus limits the amount of art that can come out of the Kennedy Center and makes it so these pieces would most likely not express the diverse worldviews.
Now that the Kennedy Center, one of the largest performing institutes in D.C., will be shut down, both performances in Washington D.C. and their employees will be impacted. The Kennedy Center was often the birthplace of Broadway shows, as productions would start there before transferring to New York. It was also the home of the NSO and the Washington National Opera, which helps invest and draw new audiences to these older forms of art. The Kennedy Center stimulates the art scene of DC and the surrounding area, as many NSO members teach their instruments to younger performers.
Aside from this, many employees of the Kennedy Center have been and are now losing their jobs. On March 26, 2026, the Kennedy Center began the first wave of layoffs ahead of the institution’s two-year closure. Multiple departments were affected, but the number of staff members fired is currently unknown as of press date. These recent layoffs are nothing new – according to information given to The New York Times by two anonymous ex-employees, 20 staff members had been fired as of April 2025. Leaders of the NSO have assured their musicians that the Kennedy Center would help them find other venues where they could perform during the shutdown, but many who are employed at the Kennedy Center are now forced into a position where the future of their jobs are unclear.
However, not all hope is lost for the Kennedy Center – on March 25, 2026, Representative Joyce Beatty filed a lawsuit against the theater’s name change, arguing that only Congress can change the name of the institution, and a bill has previously been introduced to block the name change. Despite this, the next two years for the theater and performing arts scene in Washington D.C. and the surrounding DMV are still currently up in the air. Hopefully, these performers and shows will be able to move to other venues and we will continue to be able to experience the richness and diversity of our local theater community, despite what has become of the Kennedy Center.
Personal Experience
I got the opportunity to perform at the Kennedy Center back in 2024. At the time, I was performing in the local musical theater program Young Artists of America’s production of the youth premiere of Disney In Concert: A Dream is a Wish. During our rehearsal process, YAA, along with Children’s Chorus of Washington and Fairfax High School Bel Canto, was offered the opportunity for their female-presenting singers to perform as a chorus for Grammy Award-winning singer songwriter Aoife O’Donovan. The album we performed songs from alongside O’Donovan was her, at the time, most recent album “All My Friends,” which explores the history of the fight for women’s rights through music. These were the type of performances that would occur at the Kennedy Center prior to President Trump’s takeover.
In addition to having performed there, I have also gotten the chance to see several shows there, with the two most recent being “Schmigadoon” and “Parade”. “Schmigadoon” is an example of how the Kennedy Center is often a vital part of a show’s journey to Broadway, as the production started in D.C. and is now slated to open on Broadway April 4th. “Parade” was an interesting performance – not just because it was an amazing musical, but also because it was the first show I saw after President Trump became involved in the Kennedy Center. The main difference I noticed was in the pre-show announcements;, in addition to the typical monologue about turning off cell phones and where emergency exits were located, it ended with a message of “and God bless America,” which while not in of itself an inherently negative statement, it paired with the knowledge of who was in charge of the building I was currently sitting in reminded me that this space was no longer the welcoming home I, and many other members of the theater community, once saw it as.
