Donald Trump Continues to Have Nothing Nice to Say About the Kennedy Center
President Donald J. Trump — who recently overhauled the once-bipartisan board of directors at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and installed it with loyalists who elected him to serve as its chairman — held court Monday in a place that he had not publicly visited during either of his terms in office: the Kennedy Center.
In an unprecedented move that follows numerous other unprecedented moves at the Kennedy Center over the past month, Trump convened a meeting of the arts institution’s board in the Center’s Concert Hall, the same place where J.D. Vance and the Second Lady, Usha Vance, were booed by the audience at a National Symphony Orchestra performance last Thursday night, a moment that spawned multiple viral videos.
Kennedy Center board meetings are not normally held in performance spaces, and Trump seemed displeased by some of the logistics involved in doing so. In remarks made prior to the board meeting before a small gaggle of White House reporters, Trump bemoaned that Lee Greenwood, singer of Trump’s favorite song, “God Bless the USA,” and a newly appointed board member, could not sing at the meeting because it was going to cost “$30,000 to move a piano.” Then Trump added: “We’re going to have a little problem with the people who work here.”
The new Trump regime at the Center includes interim president and former ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who nodded along throughout Trump’s Monday remarks to the press. Within the past week, the president’s administration has openly criticized the institution and its previous leaders, including former Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter, who had already announced her plans to retire at the end of 2025 before she was abruptly fired by Trump, and former board chairman David Rubenstein, the philanthropist and owner of the Baltimore Orioles who had held the position for more than 14 years until Trump snatched it for himself. During the board meeting — or at least the portion of the board meeting that streamed on YouTube before the single camera allowed to film cut out during Trump’s discussion of tariffs — the president alluded to Rubenstein without saying his name: “I’m so surprised because I know the person who was in charge of it, and he’s a good man. I never realized this is in such bad shape.”
Trump mentioned multiple times that the Kennedy Center is in disrepair. “We’re going to make a lot of changes, including the seats, the décor, pretty much everything,” Trump said while gesturing down at the Concert Hall from the presidential box. Those comments echoed remarks made to the Washington Post by Trump officials who recently toured the arts venue and described it as “filthy,” noted that it “smelled of vomit,” and added that they “saw rats.”
One current staffer batted down that rhetoric as “a blatant lie.”
“It is a 53-year-old building, so there are definitely hallways that might smell a bit musty,” this person said. “But nothing is nearly as disgusting as they are trying to make it out to be.” The staffer added: “I walk the internal corridors underneath this building every day and I can say confidently we don’t have a rat problem, just like we never had a ‘drag shows targeting our youth’ problem.” (Trump previously took aim at drag shows held at the Kennedy Center as an example of the kind of “woke” programming the Center would avoid on his watch.)
Multiple current and former Kennedy Center employees, who asked to remain anonymous because of job-security concerns, characterized the day-to-day experience of working in the month since Trump’s takeover as stressful, upsetting, and often shrouded in uncertainty about which shoe may drop next. Some employees expressed discomfort with a specific email that Grenell sent to staff the morning after the Vance booing incident, which took place during a National Symphony Orchestra performance of music from Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka. According to sources who received the email, Grenell claimed that several Kennedy Center staffers had shared their embarrassment over the booing with him.
“I hear your outrage,” he reportedly wrote. “As the premier arts organization in the United States of America, we must work to make the Kennedy Center a place where everyone is welcomed … as president, I take diversity and inclusion very seriously.”
“He’s saying J.D. was booed because he’s a Republican,” one Kennedy Center team member said. “He was being booed because the administration took over the Kennedy Center.”
“It’s interesting that he uses diversity and inclusion at a time where you add one more word in there and you’d be under attack,” another Kennedy Center staff member noted, alluding, of course, to the third piece of the Republican-despised term DEI: equity.
The New York Times had previously reported that Trump planned to introduce a resolution at the board meeting that would give him extensive control over who gets selected as a Kennedy Center Honoree, a lifetime-achievement award reserved for those who have made significant achievements within the arts-and-entertainment world. It was unclear immediately after the meeting whether that had come to pass. Before leaving the Kennedy Center, Trump did make sure to announce that his administration plans to release 80,000 pages of previously classified documents about the assassination of the Kennedy Center’s namesake, John F. Kennedy. He shared this information with the media while standing in the Kennedy Center foyer, where a displayed image of President Kennedy loomed over his right shoulder.
And when a reporter asked Trump if he was surprised that Vance was booed at the Kennedy Center, he replied, “I don’t know anything about that,” adding, with a straight face, that Vance is the “most popular vice-president in years.”
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