Kennedy Center ticket sales have plummeted amid the Donald Trump administration’s takeover of the feted cultural institution.
The number of people purchasing tickets to the center’s events dropped 70 percent earlier this year when set against the same period for the past three years running, The Wall Street Journal reports.
“The National Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Brahms X Radiohead, which is set for this week, is at slightly more than 20% capacity,” the newspaper writes, citing sources familiar with Kennedy Center ticket sale data.
The WSJ adds that its recent staging of The Sound of Music consistently attracted audiences of less than 60 percent of the venue’s capacity for the duration of its run. Trump himself had reportedly recommended that performance.
Trump announced plans in February to shutter the center for roughly two years, beginning in July, to accommodate what his administration calls a “complete rebuilding” and modernization of the facility.
Insiders told Daily Beast newsletter The Swamp that the president’s decision blindsided almost everyone involved, including executive director Richard Grenell. “It cannot be overstated the degree to which this came as a complete surprise to everybody in the organization, including the office of the president,” one insider said of Grenell, a MAGA loyalist and serial online troll who’s proven conspicuously quiet about the venue of late.
The president insists it will cost $200 million, even as Kennedy Center officials told the WSJ that costs to the taxpayer are more likely to run in the region of $300 million.
He’s apparently gotten hold of a cell number for the center’s head of building maintenance, who the newspaper reports he’s now bombarding with near-constant demands for updates on the preliminary progress of those efforts.
Since assuming office for the second time last year, Trump has undertaken a wholesale MAGA revamp of the federally chartered cultural institution.
He began by replacing the existing board of trustees with MAGA loyalists and appointing himself its chairman.
In December 2025, that board voted to rename the venue, adding Trump’s name to the building’s facades so that the principal sign outside now reads: “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
It’s unclear if that change is legally valid. Federal law continues to designate the institution as only the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
Trump has targeted the center over what he rails against as “woke” programming under previous administrations, with his officials since cancelling numerous artists and performances, among them celebrated composer Philip Glass and Grammy-winning opera star Renee Fleming.
The president himself also stepped in to host last year’s Kennedy Centers Awards ceremony, with the honors largely granted to Trump loyalists like actor Sylvester Stallone, country music artist Geoge Strait, and glam rock band Kiss.
The space was also given over to FIFA for the World Cup 2026 Draw. That ceremony saw Trump awarded FIFA’s inaugural Peace Prize, which did not exist prior to the president’s snub by the Nobel Committee last year.
“President Trump is a world-renowned builder. There is nobody better to oversee the much-needed and long-overdue renovations of the Trump-Kennedy Center,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Beast in response to a request for comment.. “Upon the completion of these upgrades, Americans and visitors from all over the world, for generations to come, will enjoy the Center and marvel at its spectacular features and design.”
