Chicken Little made quite the mess by shouting that the sky was falling when it wasn’t. (Fake news.) TACO Trump, meanwhile, is causing a similar scene even when accurately reporting on Truth Social that a piece of the Kennedy Center’s ceiling fell into the building’s grand foyer earlier this month. Well, except for the part where the president breathlessly claimed that many people could have been killed.
More broadly, Trump’s allies are united in saying we told you so: the Kennedy Center can’t survive without Trump taking over the renovation project… and installing his name on the outside of the building at the same time, naturally.
It’s a terrible crossroads for Center supporters. Do you accept the poison pill or let the building lapse into further disrepair? A protest is planned for Friday early evening for supporters to link arms and encircle the building.
“If there are enough people, we will try to ‘hug’ the Kennedy Center,” a Kennedy Center usher wrote in a neighborhood group chain in promotion of the event.
Perhaps Trump will need a hug himself. Amid a flurry of histrionics and back-and-forth developments on Tuesday, the same D.C.District Court judge who had in May ordered Trump’s name removed from the Center dealt the president another defeat, reiterating his earlier ruling that Trump needs Congress to go along with him to approve any re-naming or branding plans. “Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” he wrote.
Trump went on social media to assail the judge as “very hostile and conflicted” and declared the Kennedy Center in a “virtual state of collapse” and “destined to doom.” Earlier, he had a temper tantrum when he called into a virtual meeting of the Center’s board, telling Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio member who got the lawsuit over the center’s ownership started, “I think you’re incompetent.”
(Beatty didn’t miss a beat, responding “I KNOW you’re incompetent.”)
As painful as it is to say, the demise of the once premier art and cultural center may now be at hand with or without Trump. (Although, it’s fair to say, in no small part thanks to his big ego.) Its slow slide into disrepair was set in motion in February of last year when Trump abruptly fired all the institution’s trustees, upending decades of bipartisanship to install loyalists in their place. He also named himself chairman of the board.
It was less a spotlight turn than a huge turnoff. Artists didn’t want to come. Donors didn’t want to give. And audiences dwindled to the point where the newly installed Trump leadership couldn’t pay the bills. Let’s be clear here: The Kennedy Center lost money because Donald J. Trump put his name on the building, not because it was taken off under court orders.
“I’m surprised to see it’s still open,” Kandie Stroud, a long-time performer and showgoer at the Center, told the Daily Beast. She was in the Concert Hall on August 14 for a Washington Chorus dress rehearsal, and remembers many of her fellow singers taking photos on their phones, wanting to capture the surroundings for perhaps the last time. “It’s so odd you have these magnificent chandeliers and this beautiful space that we may never see again,” Stroud said, acknowledging after a beat or two that, yes, “The place is decrepit.”
Well, now it’s not really open. The Trumpy board—Susie Wiles, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, country singer Lee Greenwood and model agent Paolo Zampolli among them—voted on Tuesday to close the venue pending the repairs that may or may not come to pass. Judge Cooper had ordered that the Center remain open, but with safety now an issue, and no programming scheduled, the closure will likely hold.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that the Center will be closed immediately for “Safety reasons,” but Renovation and Reconstruction cannot begin until the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name. “If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”
In other words, the fix is in. The board is doing what Trump wants. They were presented with a 57-page assessment detailing how the Center is facing bankruptcy, can’t pay its bills and is facing a daunting renovation that will require hundreds of millions of dollars. (And only Trump has the cachet to raise that kind of money, the report noted.)
A wait and see attitude has taken hold among many Center watchers—if they can hang on until the midterms and there’s a power shift, that the Democrats could use their newfound leverage in Congress to wrest control of the Center back. But that’s a poison pill too—the optics will not be great if they’re seen as prioritizing theater (political theater, if you will) over gas prices, measles outbreaks and ICE raids. Expect them to stress the Kennedy Center is not first and foremost an arts and cultural institution—rather, a memorial to a fallen president, and thus, hallowed ground.
“What would people think if Trump wanted to add his name to the Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, FDR, MLK memorials? That is the most significant factor in all of this,” says a longtime Center supporter who did not want to speak on the record. “Trump wants to desecrate a memorial to a former president.”
