John F. Kennedy’s nieces are coming out swinging at Donald Trump after his handpicked Kennedy Center board voted to shutter the performing arts center.
“This is hostage taking by the president of the United States,” Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, told CNN’s Erin Burnett, while Maria Shriver, the daughter of JFK’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, seethed, “How small-minded, how narcissistic,” in an X post.
The Kennedy Center’s board, which includes second lady Usha Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and MAGA musician Lee Greenwood, among other Trump loyalists, voted Tuesday to close the performing arts center for two years, just after U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper shut down Trump’s bid to slap his name on the building.
The board claimed that the institution was on the verge of bankruptcy and in dire need of renovations, and bizarrely insisted that putting the president’s name on the building was the only way to save it, a narrative Trump, 80, repeated in an unhinged Truth Social post.
But Kerry, the sister of Trump’s health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., noted that the GOP-led Congress already approved $250 million for Trump’s renovation project last year.
“Just to open up the checkbook and send the money. I don‘t see what the issue is here,” she said on CNN, calling the president and his devotees’ bluff. “The court said, you can’t put your name on it. Then, all of a sudden, it’s bankrupt. But all of a sudden, if his name is on it, it’s got $250 million in the bank. So this is not an issue of bankruptcy.”
She then seized on Trump’s claim that he is “the only one” who can “save” the center “because I have the ability to raise the money, and the ability to construct” to attack his presidential record.
“There’s a war in Iran that’s costing us billions, billions, and billions of dollars, $40 billion so far,” she said on CNN, noting that Americans are facing skyrocketing gas prices and an unbearable cost of living. “President Trump, please focus on what’s important. Leave the Kennedy center alone. Allow us to move forward with this great art center, this monument to a slain president, and leave it alone. Focus on your job.”
Shriver hit out just as hard at Trump’s obsession with renaming the center in an X post.
“That a sitting president would not let any renovations to a public building go on unless he gets to first put his name in the said building… What a sad state of affairs,” she wrote. “Imagine spending your time and your days focused on this, as everyday Americans struggle with healthcare, gas prices, rent, and food. Imagine spending your days focused on this, while a war rages under your leadership.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Congress established the center in 1964 as a “living memorial” to assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and Congress has generally been understood to have the power to change the name.
“Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper, an Obama appointee, wrote in Tuesday’s ruling.
