BUDDY-BUDDY

Trump’s Ghost Town Kennedy Center Hands Plum Gig to Insider

The president is threatening to tear the feted institution down if he doesn’t get his way.

Donald Trump’s deserted Kennedy Center has given a longtime insider a plum artistic-director job, even as the president threatens to tear down the shuttered landmark.

Rick Canny, an entertainment executive who began advising the Trump-controlled institution last April, will now run its programming, according to the Washington Post.

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Canny will not join the payroll directly and has instead landed the promotion through an updated contract with his consulting firm.

Officials have not revealed his pay, though the job was advertised internally with a $270,000 to $290,000 salary bracket.

The appointment formally recognizes an adviser already deeply involved in the 80-year-old president’s plan to either remake the center in his own image, or, failing that, raze it to the ground.

Internal correspondence obtained by Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s office shows Canny pressing for sweeping changes to how the venue sells tickets, markets performances, and chooses which events deserve support, the Post reports.

“We don’t need passion projects,” he told then-finance chief Donna Arduin in a March email. “This is business.”

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An anonymous official at the Kennedy Center also told the Post that Canny had repeatedly criticized the institute’s box office.

“He had always said that… they’re useless, they’re not good at it,” they said. “We don’t need people. We can put out kiosks. It should all be done online.”

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Trump’s crusade to overhaul the Washington cultural landmark began just weeks after he retook office last January, when he installed himself as board chairman, filled its leadership with allies, and pushed to put his name alongside that of the slain president the center commemorates.

A federal judge later ordered Trump’s name be removed from the building and blocked further efforts to restore it without congressional approval.

The ensuing legal fight spiraled into an even bigger spectacle last month, when the Trump-aligned board voted to shut the main complex for two years of renovations, despite an existing court order against its closure.

Trump then threatened to scrap his proposed $257 million MAGA makeover and warned the building could be “ripped down” unless he got his way, before being photographed aboard Air Force One examining what appeared to be a demolition document.

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The alarming developments prompted a judge to demand 30 days’ warning before any major structural changes, including demolition.

Since Trump’s takeover, artists have abandoned performances, audiences and donors have fled, and the venue’s finances have cratered.

By May, officials expected just $124 million in revenue against a $220 million annual target.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Kennedy Center for comment on this story.

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