Inside the Slow Death of the Kennedy Center

Prior to the Trump takeover of the Kennedy Center, Saturday evenings were bustling. It wasn’t unusual to have 10 to 12 shows in a day — where all nine venues on the campus were in use and sold out — which meant more than 7,500 people would move through its hallowed halls.

The Saturday evening of this past Memorial Day weekend was very different. I stood alone in the Grand Foyer of the Kennedy Center having just finished a shift at the box office, a part-time position I’ve held since September 2019. As a freelance writer who covers the music and entertainment industries, this job allows me an incredibly flexible additional source of income. (To avoid any signs of favoritism, I’ve never written about the Kennedy Center prior to this.) The only show that evening, Shear Madness, was being performed upstairs in the Theater Lab to a crowd consisting mostly of a school group. Other shows originally scheduled for that date had long been cancelled.

To say the last 16 months have been rough for employees here would be a severe understatement. While the beauty of this massive hall can typically distract me from the never-ending nonsense of the new regime, the emptiness that night was only a reminder of it. If I uttered a word, it would echo and bounce off the Orrefors crystal chandeliers and sconces donated by the country of Sweden; the mirrors from Belgium; and the eight-foot bronze bust of President John F. Kennedy by the American sculptor Robert Berks, the wall behind it one of the few places in the building where the words “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” have remained unchanged. Surrounded by the grandeur that is a living memorial to President Kennedy, I thought about how the Center would not exist had it not been for a Republican president: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

IN 1955, EISENHOWER CREATED a commission to examine building an arts center in Washington, D.C. A lifelong lover of the arts, he was the first to bring Broadway stars, including Thelma Ritter and Sally Ann Howes, to perform at the White House in 1958. That same year, Eisenhower signed the National Cultural Center Act into law, with the federal government providing the land and private donations covering the costs.

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When President Kennedy was sworn into office in January 1961, he took up the mantle of the National Cultural Center, with he and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy holding fundraisers. So involved was President Kennedy in making the Center a reality that during a state visit to Italy in July 1963, he secured a donation of 3,700 tons of Carrara marble from the Italian government for the exterior facade and interior walls of the building.

After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, President Johnson led bipartisan legislation to rename the facility the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, signing it into law on Jan. 23, 1964. On Dec. 2, 1983, Congress amended the John F. Kennedy Center Act, stipulating that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” The amendment was signed by then-President Ronald Reagan.

More than 30 countries contributed materials to the Center. And for the man whose vision it was in the first place, one of the venues inside the Kennedy Center was named the Eisenhower Theater in October 1968, five months prior to his death.

The Kennedy Center opened on Sept. 8, 1971, with a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Marione Ingram, a 90-year-old regular patron, witnessed the very first performance. “We didn’t have a place where dance, theater, other cultural events were happening [in the same venue], so we were really over the moon,” she says. “The opening was very elegant and very exciting and essential.”

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As a federal building whose budget and charter are overseen by Congress, the Center operated independently for over 50 years, hosting nine presidents — five Republicans, four Democrats — for a variety of galas, movie premieres, and the Kennedy Center Honors, which began in 1978. (The sixth Republican, Donald Trump, opted out of the annual ceremony during his first term when honorees threatened to boycott the White House portion of the proceedings.)

Ingram, who has seen the Center evolve over the last five decades, is disheartened with the changes over the last year and a half. “Now there’s an atmosphere that’s really, really depressing,” says Ingram. “Everything that happened after [Trump] decided to take over was horrible.”

WHEN NEWS OF THE TAKEOVER broke in The Atlantic on Friday, Feb. 7, 2025, it took everyone in the building by surprise. The Kennedy Center is operated by an executive staff (president, CEO, vice presidents of public relations and marketing, and so on) and a 34-person board of trustees. With the exception of 18 ex officio board members, who attain the position as a result of holding a specific professional role, such as mayor of Washington, D.C., and Secretary of State, board members are appointed by the president and serve six-year terms. With some previous appointees from his first term still on the board, Trump quickly removed half of the remaining board members — specifically the ones appointed by President Biden — replacing them with supporters and sycophants including Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham along with Pamela DeVos (sister-in-law to Trump’s Secretary of Education during his first term, Betsy DeVos). The new appointees voted Trump in as Chairman.

Even when Trump confirmed the news on his Truth Social account, a lot of the employees thought (or hoped) it was a joke. Then-Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter emailed the staff that afternoon stating, “At this time, we have not received any formal notification from the White House.”

But Monday revealed that senior leadership’s weekend negotiations with the White House had failed. Rutter was fired two days later. As the bleeding of her administration began, Kennedy Center Chairman David Rubenstein, who’d held that position for 15 years, rushed to the Reach — the campus’ newest building, opened in 2019 — to retrieve artwork and artifacts he owned on display there, including an original Andy Warhol of Jacqueline Kennedy and a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

“I immediately knew that [the takeover] was going to be a disaster,” says a Kennedy Center employee who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. “I think a lot of people did.”

Sweeping dismissals began almost immediately. If an employee received a meeting request email from human resources on a Friday that was also a payday, their time was up. The following Monday, new appointees chosen by Trump or the newly named interim president Richard Grenell — typically, people with no prior experience connected to their new role — would arrive to fill those empty positions.

Miller says the new staff made little to no effort to interact with those who remained: “They did not look at us, speak to us, introduce themselves for a very long time. These people were not there to promote any sort of arts. They didn’t know what they were doing is the nice way to put it.”

THE OUTCRY FROM THE PUBLIC was instant and enormous. Many wrote offering us support (“There are so many in the DMV that are sad today. Please resist the force of Trump and stay true to your values”). Others were abusive (“You disgusting pigs! How do you work there?”). Either way, people demanded their tickets returned, money back, and subscriptions terminated. We were sent emails on what language to use and told to behave like it was business as usual. Only it was anything but.

Our new boss, Richard Grenell, had been an ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term. He had no experience in arts management, concert promotion, or live entertainment — though he did state publicly that he was suited to the role because he was married to a former professional dancer.

The same inexperience bled down into Grenell’s appointees. Those fired from the Kennedy Center had years if not decades in their respective fields. Now, in order to get a job in the new administration, it appeared you simply had to know Grenell. Tammy Walsh, who a source tells me was Grenell’s babysitter when he was a child, was brought in for board relations, then moved to senior director of campus planning. A former swim student of Grenell’s, Somer Salomon, who has a Ph.D. in theology but scant programming experience, was brought in to handle faith-based programming. Grenell’s political aide Nick Meade became the vice president of governance, and Rick Loughery, a foreigner senior advisor, became executive vice president.

Grenell wasted no time making changes that demoralized the veteran staff. He insisted on being addressed as “Ambassador,” hung pictures of the president, Vice President JD Vance, and their wives by the stage door in the Hall of Nations, and eliminated the work-from-home option (though Grenell spent most of his tenure working from his home in California).

As shows and artists associated with the Center fell off the calendar in rapid succession (and, a source tells me, those with pending contracts backed out before the deals were signed), Grenell took to X blaming performers, stating they refused “to perform for everyone regardless of their political beliefs.” If that were true, it would certainly be unprecedented. President Nixon opened up the center without incident during the Vietnam War. No artists or patrons protested President Reagan during the Iran-Contra affair or President Clinton during his impeachment hearings. Not even President George W. Bush during the second Iraq War or in the fall of 2019, when the Kennedy Center showed his paintings in the “Portraits of Courage” exhibit at the Reach, earned boycotts or cancellations.

Some of Grenell’s edicts seemed arbitrary and needlessly cruel. He instituted a new policy stating that no employee working in a public-facing position was allowed to wear a mask. An exception for those who obtained doctor’s notes testifying to “a disability under the ADA that requires wearing a mask” was perfunctory at best. One immunocompromised employee who’s been with the Center for more than a decade provided the required certification but was still put through a gauntlet of HR meetings, invasive paperwork, and reprimands, leading union lawyers to eventually step in to reach a compromise on his behalf.

“I was angry,” he says of the ordeal. “I was frustrated, and, frankly, I was disappointed that I was experiencing such discrimination at a place that I had worked and loved for so many years.”

Even minor changes seemed intended to dampen spirits or flex power. Grenell demanded the NSO play the national anthem before each performance, something Ingram, the longtime patron, says “degraded the whole Center and the experience.” (When I witnessed this policy in action before NSO’s performance of Brahms Symphony No. 1 x Radiohead, the theater had the stilted vibe of Rick’s Café in Casablanca when German officers start singing “Die Wacht am Rheim.”) Trump, a documented fan of gold, had the original gold pillars that surrounded the building painted white. The willow trees on the west side of the building were chopped down. The staff canteen, also used by musicians and cast members, was temporarily closed for renovations that never happened, then permanently shuttered, allowing Grenell to fire five people from Restaurant Associates.

“Now there’s an atmosphere that’s really depressing. Everything that happened after Trump decided to take over was horrible.”

Meade and Loughery, meanwhile, were living the champagne life, purchasing tickets to shows and meals in the Center’s restaurants and charging them to Kennedy Center accounts. (Both Meade and Loughery are reported to have been let go in March.) Grenell awarded a $10,833.33-per-month contract for Jeff Halperin, husband to Arizona’s 2022 Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, for “social media capture/editing” services.

These expenses were especially ironic given that, since his arrival, Grenell had been claiming that the Kennedy Center was broke. In an email sent on June 11, 2025, Grenell wrote, “At the beginning of the year, we had no cash on hand or in reserves, and staff were being compensated from dwindling debt reserves.” (Deborah Rutter responded to these claims in a statement to the press saying, “At the time of my departure, the Kennedy Center was fiscally sound, on track to balance its budget for the year, and positioned to grow its endowment significantly while serving as a beacon for free artistic expression and a place where everyone could belong.”) But as a federal building overseen by Congress, the Kennedy Center has to submit a budget every year along with an independent audit and filing annual 990 documents that outline its financials. Nothing in those documents backed up Grenell’s claims.

Such egregiously wasteful spending prompted Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to launch an investigation in November 2025. Then, in December, Trump announced he was adding his name to the building. The move unleashed another wave of artist cancellations and another outcry from irate patrons, as well as a lawsuit filed by Ohio Congresswoman and ex officio board member Joyce Beatty.

One employee, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said the moment marked a boundary that had been crossed. “If this is still the JFK Center then I am proud to be a representative [of it],” the employee says. “But once [the name change] happened it [was] a defeating, ‘this is the beginning of the end’ situation, where it didn’t feel like we were going to be able to come back from this.”

AT THIS POINT, THE WRITING was on the marble walls that Trump was going to close the building. Shows that, pre-takeover, would easily sell out could barely draw an audience. As people stayed away in droves, Grenell blamed the programming department, telling them, “Well, it’s all because you’re programming this so bad,” says Miller.

With the revenue from ticket sales dropping, Grenell focused on rentals. Instead of working with agents and artists to produce shows, Miller says, programming employees were told to propose cut-rate deals: “‘For the low, low price of blah, blah, blah, you can perform.’ They were charging them for the opportunity to rent the Kennedy Center.” There were few takers. FIFA, however — the organization that presented Trump with its inaugural FIFA Peace Prize last December — was given free and exclusive use of the campus for nearly three weeks for World Cup draw events, at a loss of over $5 million. And despite plummeting cash flow, the new administration spent liberally to rebrand signage and ticket stock. Everything, even staff badges, had Trump’s name added to it.

On Feb. 1, Trump announced he was going to close the Center after July 4, 2026, to begin two years’ worth of reconstruction. The timing of the announcement coincided with when the Center would normally be unveiling its new season. This saved the regime the embarrassment of having to admit they didn’t have programming for a 2026-7 season.

Much about the closure was unusual. Through all past construction and repairs, the Center has remained open. Each venue on campus has been renovated over the years, with one being closed while the others remain in operation for a normal run of shows. The proposed work also seemed barely thought-through: The one rendering of the renovations released to the public made many of us in the building laugh; the picture was nothing but an AI version (with trees added) of our desktop screen saver.

The timing of the renovations, too, raised eyebrows for many employees. Most of the union contracts, including the box office, would be up for negotiation during the closure, giving the new regime an opportunity to bust the unions that have been in the building since its opening. Trump has long been anti-union, despite being a member of SAG-AFTRA for more than 30 years, only resigning in 2021 when their board was set to hold a meeting over his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. (According to The Hollywood Reporter, he still receives an annual six-figure pension from the union.)

The first union layoffs began in April, when those working in group sales, subscriptions, and single-ticket phone sales were terminated. With phone sales eliminated, a source tells me the Kennedy Center lawyer stated the organization is considering outsourcing all of the ticketing work and are considering Ticketmaster.

With Tessitura serving as the ticketing software for the Kennedy Center for over 20 years, some employees and patrons worry a switch to Ticketmaster could cause issues even beyond the loss of jobs, such as increases in services fees and a loss of customer data. But the change to Ticketmaster shouldn’t come as a shock, given that Grenell is on the board of its parent company Live Nation, which also donated $500,000 to Trump’s 2026 Inauguration.

“The name change was a ‘beginning of the end’ situation, where it didn’t feel like we would be able to come back from this.”

THE SPRING SAW MORE CHANGES as Grenell stepped down and several of his appointees were shown the door. Matt Floca, hired during the Rutter era as vice president of facilities, was promoted to chief operating officer and executive director, bonding with Trump over their shared history in construction. The idea for the two-year closing, in fact, came from Floca, who in April took members of the media on a tour pointing out things that need repair.

What Floca failed to mention is if the necessary funding isn’t provided by Congress, repairs get backlogged. During testimony in Beatty’s lawsuit, Floca admitted the renovations could be done in phases, and that part of the decision to close was due to low ticket sales. Sources tell me that in May, Floca visited Trump twice in the Oval Office to request money. He had asked his team to create large visual aids “so Trump would understand what he was talking about,” one source adds.

Endowments for the Fortas chamber music concerts, the NSO, and the WNO have not been paid, prompting the WNO to sue the Kennedy Center for its $17 million endowment.

The board’s next meeting in mid-July will discuss three options regarding the renovations, another source tells me: closing the main building and the Reach, keeping the Reach open while the main building closes, or keeping both buildings open. “But that would require programming,” the source adds of the third option. “And programming can’t program because there’s no money.”

ON MARCH 13, HANDS OFF THE ARTS, a resistance movement co-founded by Miller, started holding weekly vigils outside the Kennedy Center every Friday evening. On May 31 — the day that would mark President Kennedy’s 109th birthday — the gathering was a mini celebration instead, as the ruling from Rep. Beatty’s lawsuit came in from U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper, declaring that Trump’s name had to be removed from the building within 14 days. (Additionally, Trump’s name was removed from all marketing materials, employee IDs, and ticket stock.)

On June 13, crews went to work to remove Trump’s name. Employees, NSO musicians who had just finished performing, and patrons came to watch, though all they really witnessed was workers putting a tarp up. (As of this writing, the tarp is still up; on July 8, an appeals court denied Trump’s attempt to halt the name removal.)

While the name removal is a step in the right direction, Trump is still associated with the Kennedy Center. There’s been no mention of him stepping down as chairman or removing board members he appointed. Should Trump stop being president tomorrow, he will still be the chairman of the Kennedy Center. The board would have to vote to remove him (which his cronies wouldn’t do) and there’s currently nothing in the charter that prevents this from being a lifetime appointment, or one that is passed down through his family for generations.

Currently, the closure of the Kennedy Center is going forward; an email to staff sent on May 27 provided instructions for archiving, shredding, and transferring materials to the Kennedy Center Archives. Areas that normally would contain posters promoting upcoming shows now feature long-past performances, a visual reminder of the before times. Though Trump has yet to take a wrecking ball to the building, it is already a shell of its former self.

What has been lost over the last year and a half goes beyond money — the performances and pieces that would have been commissioned around America’s 250th anniversary, those stepping into the building for the first time, marveling at its design, the people who would have had the shared experience of an audience in a packed house watching a terrific show.

For this slow desecration of the Kennedy Center to end, Congress needs to amend the charter with language that removes Trump along with his appointed board members and prevents presidential interference with the Kennedy Center from ever happening again. Only then can the hard work of repairing the Center’s reputation and restoring its artistic legacy — the one founded by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy — begin.

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