Mother Jones
The Kennedy Center Was Part of DC Life. Trump Destroyed It.
On a glorious Sunday morning in May, a friend and I arrived at a Metro station in Northwest Washington, DC, to board a special coach organized by the Washington National Opera. Its destination was Baltimore, and we were going to their production of West Side Story. Ticketholders had received conflicting emails, and the last one said the bus would leave promptly at 11 a.m. But when 11 a.m. rolled around, and all the elderly patrons had loaded their walkers into the hold, and most of the seats were filled, an opera employee said they’d wait until 11:30 to accommodate a few stragglers. A revolt ensued; we had pre-theater brunch reservations! The mutineers prevailed, and the bus finally headed up I-95 about 15 minutes late.
I couldn’t blame the WNO for the delay. After all, it is an opera company, not a travel agency. No, the inconvenience was President Donald Trump’s fault. For 44 years, the WNO had performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, adjacent to the infamous Watergate by the Potomac River. But after Trump single-handedly destroyed the capital’s premier arts venue in just a few short months, the WNO decamped, along with most of the Center’s donors, patrons, and scheduled artists. Trump plans to shutter the venue for good in July, under the guise of “renovations.”
That’s why I was on a bus heading to Baltimore’s Lyric Theater, 40 miles away, where the WNO would be performing a show that would have been an easy walk for me only a few months earlier. When the WNO offered us a ride, my friend and I thought it might be fun—an opera party bus! Instead, it became yet another depressing reminder of all we have lost in our city during Trump’s second term in office.
I’ve lived in DC for more than 30 years, and for those of us who live in the metropolitan area, which includes suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, the Kennedy Center isn’t just another white-marbled national monument. It’s our beloved, if stodgy, local arts venue, as parochial as Salt Lake City’s Capitol Theater or Proctor’s in Schenectady, but with the world-class offerings of Lincoln Center. It’s where we would go for the annual free tuba Christmas concert, take out-of-town guests to see a Broadway musical, and the place where my kids learned to love the arts. Which is why Trump’s destruction of it feels so intensely personal.
It’s where we would go for the annual free tuba Christmas concert, take out-of-town guests to see a Broadway musical, and the place where my kids learned to love the arts. Which is why Trump’s destruction of it feels so intensely personal.
As our chariot left DC and the Mormon Temple loomed on the horizon, I thought about how much the Kennedy Center has been part of my life, and the lives of my children. I took my daughter there for the first time on a preschool playdate. During the day, when the stages are dark and the weather bad, the building was an informal gathering place for city toddlers. Escaping the deluge of rain outside the massive lobby windows, my daughter and her friend wore themselves out running up and down the tatty red carpet, past the giant head of JFK, while their parents spread out picnic blankets on the floor and opened snacks.
I have lost count of how many Nutcrackers our family has seen at the Kennedy Center. But I can’t forget the first one, when we made the epic mistake of bringing a three-year-old to the Balanchine matinee. I grew up in Ogden, Utah, and my mother was a ballet lover. She started taking me to the Ballet West Nutcracker on the campus of Weber State College when I was about five years old. Later, we would see it in Salt Lake at the Capitol Theater.
But a Nutcracker matinee in Utah is kid-centric. At the Kennedy Center, we ended up sitting behind NPR’s Supreme Court reporter extraordinaire Nina Totenberg, who was wearing a fur coat. She was not even slightly amused when, as the curtain rose, my daughter cried out, “I have to go to the bathroom!” We watched that one on the TV screen in the hallway.
Later, we ferried the kids and their stuffed animals to the National Symphony Orchestra’s Teddy Bear concerts, complete with instrument petting zoos, and countless family theater productions. The center has long partnered with DC public schools for all sorts of free arts education programs, a setup that saw my husband once walking a class of first-graders there for Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny. In 4th grade, my daughter’s ukulele class played Bruno Mars’ “Count on Me” in the lobby. Even as a college junior, she still thinks of the Kennedy Center as a “magical place,” especially the gift shop full of ballerina Christmas ornaments that now grace our Christmas trees.
When my son’s middle school teacher assigned the class to see a cultural event and write a paper on it, he went to see the National Symphony Orchestra perform the Saint-Saëns organ symphony on the center’s 4,972-pipe Casavant Bros. pipe organ—a work that can be performed in only a handful of US venues. He’s now a regular patron of organ concerts.
During my son’s years of singing with the Children’s Chorus of Washington, he performed Carmina Burana with the NSO on the Kennedy Center main stage. The chorus also had a joint performance at the Millennium stage, the center’s free venue, with the local Sticks & Bars Marimba Youth Ensemble—the sort of annual event Trump dubbed too “woke” and quickly eliminated from the schedule when he took over.
And then there were the musicals: Matilda, Moulin Rouge, Les Misérables, the Girl Scout trip to see Back to the Future. We saw the Phantom of the Opera swing from the massive chandelier, though we passed on Trump’s favorite, Cats. During the holidays, we once took my parents to see the British musical Choir of Man, fresh off the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My daughter and I saw a weird Royal Swedish Ballet production of Romeo and Juliet where dancers rode Segways to the Tchaikovsky score.
The first time I ever sang in a choir was at the Kennedy Center for the Martin Luther King holiday’s free “Let Freedom Ring” concert, headlined by Aretha Franklin. Hosted by Georgetown University, the impromptu community chorus was conducted by the amazing local talent Nolan Williams Jr., who let amateurs like me join without so much as an audition and somehow managed to turn us into a beautiful, unified voice. The concert had been a fixture of the King holiday for 23 years. That is, until this year, when Georgetown joined the Trump-instigated exodus of performers and directors and moved the event to Howard University.
A month after I sang on the King holiday, Williams brought our chorus back to perform in a special event at the Kennedy Center to celebrate the birthday of his friend Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). The surprise special guest turned out to be the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama, who led the audience in “Happy Birthday” as Kennedy beamed from his seat. The lion of the Senate died six months later of a brain tumor.
Segway ballets aside, the Kennedy Center was never the venue for risky new productions. For those of us who live in the community, it was like an old shoe, a well-worn place to enjoy the classics, expertly performed by some of the greats, where you might just as easily see a Supreme Court justice or a president as bump into someone you know.
Until Trump came along, Washingtonians took for granted that the Kennedy Center was an institution in the most literal sense, both an edifice and a fully-engaged part of the community that was impervious to change. It is, or was, kind of stuffy, a venue where you’re likely to be shushed for crinkling a candy wrapper or singing along to the music of the night. Fierce ushers in red blazers, affectionately known as the “red meanies,” kept latecomers corralled until the appropriate break in the action, and ensured adherence to various house rules.
Trump was not wrong when he observed the Kennedy Center can feel a little down at the heels, a place where patrons in evening wear trod over crushed red carpet that occasionally bunches up from wear. But it was far from “on the verge of collapse” as Trump claimed when he took over, and its shabby chic is hardly justification for shuttering, gutting it, and slapping uncomfortable marble armrests on the red-velvet seats.
President Donald Trump participates in a guided tour and leads a board meeting on March 17, 2025 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty
During the ride to Baltimore, my friend and I lamented the absurdity of our situation. In August 2025, we’d purchased a three-show opera subscription for nosebleed seats at the Kennedy Center. By then, it was already in trouble. In February last year, Trump admitted that he’d never seen a show there. Nonetheless, he announced that he was taking it over. “We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center, and we don’t need—some of the shows were terrible,” he told reporters. “They were a disgrace that they were even put on.”
“We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center, and we don’t need—some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on.”
He crowned himself chairman and ousted the center’s president, the bipartisan board, and much of the experienced staff. He installed one of his minions, former US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, a man with no arts management experience, to run the place. Soon after, Hamilton yanked its 2026 run. People had started boycotting long-planned shows and cancelling subscriptions.
Many Washingtonians faced a tricky choice: we didn’t want to endorse the changes, but we also wanted to support the artists. My friend and I also wanted to see the opera—so we bought a subscription and hoped for the best.
In early November, everything seemed almost normal for the performance of Verdi’s Aida. But when we went back for Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro a few weeks later, the Kennedy Center had the quality of a stately old home where the patriarch had recently died. The windows that normally offer a panoramic view of the terrace overlooking the Potomac River had been blacked out.
The lobby outside the Eisenhower Theater looked like a storage unit, full of cheesy white leather couches stacked up in piles surrounded by marble-topped tables. The changes, we realized, were preparations for Trump’s last-minute move to host the final FIFA draw for the World Cup. The event would occupy much of the space—for free—for three weeks and displace planned holiday concerts and symphony performances, so the soccer teams could be chosen in DC.
That was the last time I went to the Kennedy Center. In December, Trump plastered his name on the building and immediately sent the venue into a full-on death spiral. WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello had seen what was coming. In November, she intentionally triggered a crisis by giving an unauthorized interview to the Guardian in which she disclosed that thanks to Trump’s takeover, 40 percent of the season’s tickets had gone unsold and donors were fleeing.
“They say things like: ‘I’m never setting foot in there until the “orange menace” is gone.’ Or: ‘Don’t you know history? Don’t you know what Hitler did? I refuse to give you a penny,’” she told the Guardian. “People send me back their season brochure shredded in an envelope and say: ‘Never, never, will I return while he’s in power.’”
Zambello said the WNO was thinking about leaving the Kennedy Center. Within days, Grennell had kicked them out, liberating the opera from Trump’s sinking ship. The WNO became itinerant. We got a refund for the last performance in our subscription, but then the WNO offered us tickets to see the show in Baltimore, so we reupped, and even got a ride.
After lunch, we hustled back to the Lyric with about 10 minutes to spare, only to discover that dozens of people were still waiting just to get inside the building. Unlike the Kennedy Center of old, the smaller Lyric entrance was set up with metal detectors. Opera patrons unused to toting clear plastic purses got stuck in security checks. Once we got through, the lobby was still packed with people, some buying popcorn from the—gasp!— snack bar, which, to be fair, had far better offerings than the meager fare offered by the black-tie-clad waiters at the Kennedy Center. Others made a mad dash to the restroom, which, unlike the Kennedy Center’s, was big enough to handle a crowd.
The show had already started by the time we entered the theater, despite the dozens of people standing in the back, grousing and jostling for a better view of the stage. Overwhelmed ushers tried to figure out how to let them find their seats without disrupting the performance.
Once we sat down, I was briefly annoyed by a woman kicking my seat, fuming that such a thing would never happen at the Kennedy Center. Channeling the red meanies, I turned and gave her the stink eye. Afterwards, I discovered that she was wearing an “opera mom” button. She had come from New Jersey because her daughter was in the show. She was so excited she’d been tapping along to the music. We apologized to each other.
After the final bows, we shuffled out to the bus and discovered it had started to rain. And got stuck in I-95 traffic. An older woman sitting behind us took a phone call and learned she had been fired. She had a complete meltdown, sobbing loudly all the way home. It somehow seemed fitting. We envied the intrepid folks sitting in front of us who’d brought a little cooler with box wine and their old plastic take-home Kennedy Center cups. Finally, we made it back to the Metro and boarded a train for home. The show had been good, but the nine- or 10-hour adventure left us deflated.
In the big scheme of Trump administration horrors, the Kennedy Center’s demise is admittedly a small one. No one has died because Hamilton got cancelled. At the same time, Trump’s assault on the Kennedy Center just heightens the feelings of powerlessness in a city long known as “the last colony,” whose disenfranchised residents are already subject to the whims of a Congress that doesn’t represent us. Trump’s finger is in many local pies: taking over the public golf courses, installing racist statues in Freedom Plaza, deploying the National Guard in our neighborhoods. And that doesn’t even include all our public servant friends and neighbors who’ve been DOGE’d out of federal jobs and are trying to figure out how to survive in an expensive city with a perilous job market.
My friend Amy Austin is the CEO of Theatre Washington, a local nonprofit that sponsors the Helen Hayes local theater awards. “Here, in our home,” she said, speaking for many of us at the event earlier this month, “armed soldiers have walked the streets for months now. Institutions and careers we once believed were permanent and critical have vanished seemingly overnight. We feel what’s happening, and it’s not something that we will shake off.”