‘Not what we signed up for': inside Trump's ‘shocking' Kennedy Center takeover

The Guardian

24-02-2025

America's biggest annual gathering of conservatives had just got under way near Washington when its organiser, Matt Schlapp, turned to Ric Grenell and quipped: 'My daughters want tickets to all the good Kennedy Center shows.'
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Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence, was recently named by Donald Trump as interim president of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. He told the Conservative Political Action Conferenc last week that his vision for the centre is 'to make art great again', including 'a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas'.
Trump's shock decision to seize control of the Kennedy Center, with a loyal apparatchik in charge, has put his anti-woke 'Maga' populism on collision course with America's progressive cultural scene like never before. Performers are cancelling shows, donors are questioning their support and audience members are threatening to boycott. It is the biggest crisis in the 54-year history of the Kennedy Center, the crown jewel of performing arts in the nation's capital.
Supported by government money and private donations and attracting millions of visitors each year, the centre is a 100ft-high complex on the banks of the Potomac river featuring a concert hall, opera house and theatre, along with a lecture hall, meeting spaces and a 'Millennium Stage' that has been the site for free shows.
It has long been a bipartisan enterprise, first conceived during the administration of Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, who backed a bill from the Democratic-led Congress calling for a 'national culture center'. It was later designated as a living memorial to President John F Kennedy, a Democrat, after his assassination.
Construction began in 1965 and the centre formally opened in 1971 with a premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Mass. Five years later, within view of the Watergate complex, it hosted the premiere of the film All the President's Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
The centre presents theatre, contemporary dance, ballet, vocal music, chamber music, hip-hop, comedy and jazz and also serves as the home to the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera. It has hosted artists ranging from the Paul Taylor Dance Company to a joint concert by Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. Its educational initiatives reach more than 2.1 million teachers and students.
Other highlights include the annual Mark Twain prize for comedy, with recipients including Lorne Michaels, Tina Fey and Bob Newhart, and the annual Kennedy Center Honors for outstanding artists, most recently Francis Ford Coppola, Bonnie Raitt and the Grateful Dead, among others.
All this is now in jeopardy. Earlier this month Trump ousted chair David Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist, and installed himself to preside over a board that by tradition was divided between Democratic and Republican appointees but is now predominantly Republican, with recent additions including country star Lee Greenwood and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
The Kennedy Center president, Deborah Rutter, brought on by Rubenstein in 2014, was fired soon after the board shakeup, along with the centre's general counsel and head of public relations. Rutter told National Public Radio (NPR): 'I'm really, really, really sad about what happens to our artists, what happens on our stages and our staff who support them. The Kennedy Center is meant to be a beacon for the arts in all of America across the country.'
Trump wrote on social media that Grenell 'shares my Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture' and would be overseeing 'daily operations' to ensure 'NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA'. But he also admitted to reporters that he has not attended performances at the centre.
The cultural community was stunned by the velocity of the takeover. Amy Austin, president and chief executive of Theatre Washington, says: 'It was shocking to have that come so suddenly and so early in an administration that is making so many changes. For them to act as if there needed to be programmic changes at the Kennedy Centre when referring to one drag show and not acknowledge the work that's done there was ridiculous.
'There was no cause given for the need for change. Ever since the institution was founded it's always been a bipartisan place. The board of trustees was always a mixed group of people who, we would say in DC, come from different sides of the aisle but come together around the arts. And then it was summarily dismissed.'
The radical overhaul comes as Trump and his ally Elon Musk scythe through the federal government on a mission to root out waste and inefficiency. The Kennedy Center had a budget of $268m last year, with $225m flowing from ticket sales and donations and $43m coming from taxpayers to cover building operations and maintenance.
Last week Grenell raised concerns about the centre's finances in a post on X, claiming that its chief financial officer acknowledged having 'ZERO cash on hand'. A staff member at the centre, who wishes to remain anonymous, dismisses that as an 'absolute fabrication', 'complete manipulation of the data' and 'manufactured crisis'.
The source says: 'The real crisis we're facing, in addition to people rescinding their membership, is that we're normally finalising our season at this time and it's been completely turned upside down. You see performers pulling out and that has real ramifications for staff and morale. We feel like we're walking on eggshells. But I want to convey the amazing leadership my colleagues are showing in an untenable situation.'
The changes have sparked significant backlash. Kennedy Center consultants such as musician Ben Folds and singer Renée Fleming resigned and actor Issa Rae and author Louise Penny cancelled appearances. The Manhattan Theater Club announced that it would not bring Eureka Day, a satire about a school forced to reconsider its liberal vaccine policy, for a planned two-week run 'due to financial circumstances'.
During a concert that proceeded as scheduled, singer-songwriter Victoria Clark wore a T-shirt reading 'ANTI TRUMP AF'. Stand-up comedian W Kamau Bell lambasted the president during his set and, in a dig at a pro-Trump musician, asked: 'How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?'
The source says further big names are withdrawing. 'It's more than you've heard so far. That is the existential threat we're facing. We were just about to initiate the selection of this year's Kennedy Center honorees; all of this has been upended.'
'This coup is antithetical to the founding of the institution. The Kennedy Center is a neutral space, non-partisan by design, where everyone can see themselves on the stage. Thrusting it into a political space like this is unconscionable. This is not what we signed up for.
'This is warfare. It's an attack on freedom of expression and speech. It's repressive. It's unAmerican. The Kennedy Center is a pipeline to the broader arts ecosystem. There will be ripple effects across the whole cultural ecology if the Kennedy Center is not playing its role.'
Nowhere in Washington do politics and culture meet as they do at the Kennedy Center. An 8ft-tall bronze bust of John F Kennedy sits in the grand foyer and an 81-inch bronze statue of him stands on the adjacent Reach campus. Upstairs a permanent exhibition explores the 35th president's relationship with the arts. Shops feature books by and about Kennedy and his wife Jackie along with magnets, mugs and other merchandise.
Kennedy's words about the role of culture in society are inscribed in the exterior marble walls of the complex. Their highbrow references would be unthinkable for any US president today and are almost absurdly contrary to Trump's ingrained anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism.
For example: 'There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age Elizabeth also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.'
Kerry Kennedy, his niece, was at the 1971 grand opening and in 2000 saw her book Speak Truth to Power turned into a play there by the Argentine-Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman. Featuring actors such as Sigourney Weaver, Alec Baldwin, John Malkovich, Alfre Woodard and Giancarlo Esposito, the performance was attended by president Bill Clinton and human rights defenders from across the world.
She recalls: 'For a lot of the people in that audience, it was an important part of the healing process. To me that one performance encapsulates why the arts are so vitally important for our country, for democracy and for the world.'
But the speed and scale of Trump's actions are unlike anything the Kennedy Center has experienced in its history. Kennedy describes the firing of Rubenstein – who donated $120m to the organisation over 20 years – as 'crude and rude and ungrateful'. She is concerned about Trump reshaping the centre to reflect his own preferences and potentially eliminating content he deems objectionable.
Kennedy, who is president of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, admits: 'I do worry about it, not as an abstraction but because we've already seen it with the AP [Associated Press] being barred from White House events for refusing to go along with what the White House dictates. That's very dangerous for democracy and has grave implications for what will happen not just at the Kennedy Center but for government funding of the arts across the country.'
She adds: 'It's the assault on our democracy that concerns me. I've worked for 40 years on stopping autocracies from repressing people's voices and the one consistent pattern is they go after the arts, so that's very dangerous.'
Others share concerns that Trump will cause lasting damage to the Kennedy Center's reputation as a space for diverse artistic expression. It could enter a death spiral in which artists and donors are alienated, ticket sales decline, programming shifts in a more populist direction and its status as a non-partisan institution is shattered.
Peter Marks, who was the Washington Post's chief theatre critic from 2002 to 2023, says: 'It's so distressing and potentially ruinous for the foreseeable future. Once an institution becomes weaponised, once an arts organisation takes such a dramatic shift away from its mission, it's very hard to get it back to what it was. People stop thinking of it as theirs and think of it as belonging to someone else. Once that happens, the alienation is disastrous.'
The Trump brand could prove toxic. Marks adds: 'Which artists in this country are going to want to be aligned on a title page in a programme with Donald Trump's name at the top of it? It changes the whole question of the relationship between an artist and their audience and why they're there.
'I doubt that many producers are going to pull, for example, their theatre productions at this point – it's too financially difficult – but I wonder how many artists are going to be able to stomach lending their name to anything marketing-wise for the Kennedy Center. It remains to be seen just how deep the wound is in the short term.'
Trump mostly ignored the centre during his first term, becoming the first president to routinely skip the honours ceremony. One honouree, producer Norman Lear, had threatened not to attend if Trump was there. It remains uncertain whether the president will show up this year – and whether artists will stay away as a result.
Recently on social media Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself waving his arms like a conductor in a concert hall and wrote: 'Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!' What might a Trump-infused artistic programme look like? In a phone call to the Kennedy Center board obtained by CNN, he promised: 'We're going to make it hot. And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.'
And at CPAC last week, when Grenell was asked what he thought the ideal performance at the Kennedy Center would be, he chose country singer Dolly Parton. 'I would love to see it,' he said.
Indeed, his boss's cultural palate is frozen in the 20th century. Trump is known to admire singers such as Elvis Presley and films such as Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Gone with the Wind and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
His campaign rallies warm up with numbers from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, open with Greenwood's God Bless the USA and close with the Village People's YMCA. His celebrity supporters include Mel Gibson, Dennis Quaid, Kid Rock, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight. Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, is an aspiring singer seemingly immune to bad reviews.
Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump adviser, mischievously proposed an opening night performance by the J6 Prison Choir, consisting of people jailed for the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol only to be later pardoned by Trump. Bannon also described the Kennedy Center 'as the high church of the secular, atheist administrative state that runs the imperial capital'.
Trump's bid to control or neuter cultural institutions plays into a long history of authoritarians using the arts to push their agenda. One source in the Washington theatre industry drew comparison with Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet politician whose doctrine sought to define permissible revolutionary art and labelled 'incorrect art' as counter-revolutionary. The source said: 'We are entering a Socialist Realist moment in American cultural policy. The purge is already happening. And there is a climate of fear at arts institutions. It's a scary time.'
Marks, the theatre critic, agrees that a 'war on the arts' has been declared but adds: 'The louder the war becomes, the more vociferous the response will be and you will find a whole rising up of writers and musicians and directors and actors who are going to find other avenues of expression that will, I hope, show up this disastrous tack that the government has taken and actually compel some great art.
'That's what's going to happen because it's inevitable. Outrage feeds contemplation ultimately and we're going to all find out what that means over the next few years.'