The Daily - The Life and, for Now, the Death of the Kennedy Center

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

For 50 years, the Kennedy Center was a sprawling public home for opera, theater, jazz and free programs. Last week, it closed its doors for the time being.Elizabeth Williamson traces how President Trump decided to take over and now shut down Washington’s biggest and most celebrated home for the arts.Guest: Elizabeth Williamson, a feature writer for The New York Times.Background reading: Internal emails and documents demonstrate how President Trump broke the Kennedy Center.The center removed a sculpture called “Blue” that had been a gift from the artist.Photo: Salwan Georges for The New York Times For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, yeah. You know, this is what they play when the performance is about this day. Yes. You're calling people in. So a few months ago, I took a tour of the Kennedy Center with a tour guide there. Oh, can I get your name? Oh, Sandy Weiswiser. A volunteer named Sandy Weiswiser. Wow, I got to spell that out.

W-E-I-S-W. She's 87 years old. She's a huge bundle of energy. And for the last 20 years, she's given tour. every single Monday. Are you an artist yourself? Am I an artist? No, I play the piano, though.

You do? And I hear a lot about the arts. I mean, I love ballet and opera. Before President Trump took over the Kennedy Center, Sandy's tours were always packed. But then, he took over, made a lot of changes, and people stopped coming. And so on the day that I was there,

the center was empty, and I was the only person on Sandy's tour. And as she walked me through the center, the largest gift is this marble, which comes from Carrara, Italy. Beautiful chandelier. It's done by Dale Chahouille. It was clear how proud she was of the place. I like the undulating quality of it.

And how much she reveres it. No bad seat in the place. No, it doesn't look like it. But at some point in the tour, it occurred to me that she was, was speaking in the past tense. Oh, that's the other thing. When I give my tours now, do I give them present tense or past tense? It's very hard.

Yeah, what words to use for my verbs. And the tour she was giving was kind of a tour of wreckage. And what she was explaining and all of her memories started to sound a lot to me like a eulogy. So, I mean, all these little things about all the performers that, are no longer here is very sad. And it also became clear that in Sandy's mind, there was one person responsible for all that had happened to the Kennedy Center.

I mean, this place used to be really thriving and busy and crowded, and now it's very empty. And that was President Trump. From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is the Daily. Today, the life and for the time being, the death of the Kennedy Center. My colleague, Elizabeth Williamson,

brings us the story of how President Trump decided to take over and now shut down, Washington's biggest and most celebrated home for the arts. It's Friday, September 25th. Elizabeth, welcome back to The Daily. Michael, it's great to join you. You have been watching the Kennedy Center shut down for months, first, gradually and then abruptly, when it literally closed its doors about 10 days ago.

So we're coming to you for what feels a bit like a post-mortem here to understand why President Trump has closed this place down. And I think any good post-mortem has to begin with the question of motivation. How do you think about his motivation here? I think you have to go back to President Trump's first term. Remember, this was a really brutal election with a surprise result. He comes into the White House. He had been roundly rejected by cultural elites in New York City, the epicenter of the nation's cultural life.

And he comes into Washington, where the center of the cultural life in the capital is the Kennedy Center. Right. And he's thinking, I'm the president now. So surely he'll be welcomed more broadly by the culture once he's in the White House. But instead, that rejection really continued. And there was probably no better example in that first year than the annual Kennedy Center honors, which is the Kennedy Center's biggest night of the year. And what form does that rejection take?

So three of the five honorees in 2017. said that they either would not come to the White House for the presentation of the actual medals before the ceremony at the Kennedy Center or they were considering not coming. Why did you decide not to do that? Because he's made me feel it's not my White House. The first to say this was Norman Lear,

who created all in the family in many of our most beloved sitcoms and television shows. But I've gotten over that. It is my White House. It oughtn't to be his. And Carmen de Lavalaad, a dancer and choreographer, said out and out, no. I just can't. I'm absolutely not going.

I am 86 now. I have all these years I have done when anybody asked me to. And this is the first time in my life I've ever said no. Lionel Richie, who was also an honoree that year, said, well... You know, I'm going to just play it by ear. I can't decide. if I'll go. I must tell you, I'm not really happy as to what's going on right now with the controversies.

And I think that that was quite a realization for him. He had gotten to the absolute top of our hierarchy, and still that rejection continued. So Trump's response to that was to say, okay, if you don't want me, I don't want you either. And he just was generally a no-show for the entire. entirety of his four-year term. So for the next four years, Trump basically boycotts the Kennedy Center and thoroughly writes it off. Yes.

And so when he begins his second term in 2025, you know, this is now, he's newly energized. He's got a different agenda when he comes in in his second term, as we well know, he is vowing to be people's retribution. But he's also remaking aspects of society, including our cultural life. He comes in as an anti-woke president. He won on that. So barely in office for a month, 18 days, to be exact, he starts to launch a plan to take over the Kennedy Center. And taking over how, just like logistically, what power does he have over it and how does he end up taking it over? So the president has the power to appoint board.

members to the Kennedy Center, and they basically oversee the running of the center itself. Typically, the board members serve six-year terms, so you had overlapping administration board members, appointees. Democrats, Republicans, staggered. Exactly. Yeah, and they worked together, and that was the way the Kennedy Center was designed. But he came in and eliminated all of the Biden-era appointees wholesale and then stacked the board with people who were loyal to himself.

His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, the wife of the vice president, Usha Vance, Howard Lutnik's wife, and so they came in and took over the board. And then their first move was to vote to replace the chairman with Mr. Trump. And the existing chairman, David Rubinstein,

he had personally given $111 million to the Kennedy Center, its facilities and its programming. So immediately, the president replaces this mega philanthropist to the Kennedy Center with basically himself. Yes. And what does chairman of the Kennedy Center Trump do with this newfound power? It's a very exciting development. So President Trump convenes a call with his new handpicked board members.

but he starts by bashing it as what he thinks it is. It got very woken. A bastion of cultural elites. And some people, we're not happy with it. And some people refuse to go, and we're not going to have that. Doing programming that everyday Americans aren't interested in and might even be offended by, and he's going to change all that. I think we're going to make it hot.

We made the presidency hot, so this should be easy. And make the Kennedy's side. are hot again. So thank you all very much for your time. I'm curious if there's any truth to what Trump is saying to this board. Is it elitist? Does it have a left-wing tilt? So I think here is where you realize what a radical misconception the president was laboring under

and partly due to the fact that for his entire first term, he didn't step foot in the Kennedy Center. So it has a symphony. It has an opera. But the vast majority of its programming is meant to be entertainment, popular works. I'll go backstage. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I know that song.

That's about my favorite street. It's a big bird. Big Bird. Almost. So you're talking about performances like Big Bird. and Sesame Street characters. Aretha Franklin. Ladies and gentlemen, Garth Brooks.

Famous Church Corral groups. The Washington Ballet had its children's recital there. It was their chance to dance on the big stage. Local little kids doing ballet. Yes, entire classes of school children came. My own children's classes came. Kids could run down the hall, the grand foyer, which is like two football fields long.

It was a wide open place. My older son mentioned that the first time you ever saw Jaws was projected on the side of the reach, which is the Kennedy Center annex on a summer night. Shut off that engine. Pretty populist. Yeah, exactly. It was the kind of place meant to be open for everyone.

You're going to need a bigger boat. Well, Elizabeth, even if the president's whole approach to the Kennedy Center is based on a radical misconception, of it, how does this approach get put into practice in that first few months of him running it? So to direct the center's day-to-day activities, he brings on Richard Grinnell, who is a partisan warrior, very combative guy, and his job is really to remake the center. So he starts berating people in the hallways, complaining about their activities vis-a-vis programming. He conducts mass firings. They started calling it Firing Fridays, where you get an email and you get 20 minutes to leave the building accompanied by security.

So as he's wiping out the staff, one of the departments he targets is the fundraising department. He boasts that he reduced the numbers of people who were charged with bringing money in the door from 93 to 17 fundraisers. Wow, a pretty interesting decision for a nonprofit that relies, I assume, quite heavily on fundraising. Exactly. So as this purge continues, performers and artists who are scheduled to perform at the center start getting wind of this. And they're objecting and canceling. And he starts fighting with them, saying that the reason that they're leaving is because they are so woke and I'm trying to do, you know, a different thing here and it doesn't matter. But the end result was ticket sales are plunging, audiences are plunging, performances are being canceled.

Mm-hmm. So at this point in our autopsy, Trump via Grinnell is taking actions that become offensive to these artists who are turning around and undertaking the kind of protests that would seem to make Trump's point about elitism even if originally Trump's approach to the center was inaccurate. Yeah. So while Grinnell is claiming that this exodus of artists, was due to ideological reasons at the same time he starts to use ideology as a basis for extending invitations

to others to come into the center. Hello, everyone, good morning. Like CPAC staged a conference on ending Christian persecution. Beautiful, beautiful, and historic facility. And I just want to give a thanks to President of the Kennedy

Center, Richard Grinnell, for giving us the space. They received a deep, They received a deeply discounted rate for renting the center. CPAC being the Conservative Political Action Committee, not a group we associate with a performing arts center. Exactly. This is the official goal for the World Cup,

and we are now going to do the draw. For free, FIFA came in for their draw that year, which was something that the president really liked and wanted. President Trump, up to you. Don't forget to mingle. I think I know what this is going to be now. It suddenly became the kind of place that would welcome him in the way that he expected to be welcomed in his first term. So while Trump and Grinnell were complaining that the Kennedy Center had been captured by the political left,

in fact, they were embarking on a project to sort of make it a political playground of the right. And I think the sort of apotheosis of this was the Kennedy Center honors. Not only did he attend with all of his friends and his political supporters. A very big hello and welcome to... He made himself the emcee of the event. This is the first time that a president of the United States has ever hosted this phenomenal event. I don't know why I'm doing it. And as he was presenting the honors and speaking,

he started to hint around at the idea that maybe this place is so welcoming on the inside. Trump Kennedy Center, I mean, Kennedy Center, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Maybe my name should be on the outside. And less than two weeks later, his handpicked board met, and they voted to put his name on the outside of the center. They took the hint. They did. And his name went on the center one day later. And he got top billing over John F. Kennedy. And so then the center became renamed the Donald J. Trump and on the first line, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts on the second line. So Trump basically puts his name atop the original name, and my recollection is it's basically the same scale of font.

Exactly. And it had this sense of being lesser renaming and more of a giant edit, but it was the way they could do it in the swiftest way possible. Elizabeth, what was the reaction when everyone wakes up to this edit, to the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center's signage. The reaction was swift and it was profound. This was plain and simple, now his, and anyone who passed by could see that.

And this renaming really was the beginning of the end because it triggered a legal battle that brought us to where we are today with the center closed, maybe indefinitely. We'll be right back. So Elizabeth, how does Trump's decision to put his name on the Kennedy Center become, as you say, the beginning of the end for the center?

Tell us about this legal battle. So on the Kennedy Center board, there are these so-called ex-officio members. They're members of Congress that could not be purged by the president when he remade the board. And one of them is Joyce Baxter, Beatty, a congresswoman from Ohio. She filed suit after he renamed the Center. And her argument was

that legally, this renaming could only be done by Congress. And what's her logic there? Well, it's based in the center's origins. So back in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower established what he wanted to be a globally recognized cultural center, it took an act of Congress to do that. So in 1958, Congress passed legislation establishing what was called the National Cultural Center. And that was its official name, the National

Cultural Center. Yes, exactly. And when Kennedy was elected, he and First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, were big champions of the arts and the performing arts in particular. So they worked with Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie Eisenhower,

to build support and funds for the new National Cultural Center. After Kennedy was assassinated, Congress stepped in again, and they renamed the National Cultural Center in Kennedy's honor as a living memorial to him. So Congresswoman Beatty's argument is basically that because Congress turned this into a memorial to President Kennedy, only an act of Congress can change the name back or to something else. Right. Not the president and not even the Kennedy Center's

board only Congress. Got it. That's right. So what happens with the lawsuit? So pretty swiftly, a court rules that Beatty is right, that it would take an act of Congress to rename the building. And around the same time, the president, you know, hates this idea, of course. That his name would come off of it. That his name would come off the building. And so when word spread of that, Washington had a whole day knowing that this was going to happen and this festival-like crowd gathered to watch. So it was hundreds of people chanting, singing, you know, waiting for his name to come off.

So finally they rolled scaffolding into place, and the crowd really went crazy, thinking, okay, this is finally going to happen. And the director of the center could look out and see that this was something that the president wasn't really going to want to see on TV. So then they started to unroll tarps that would obscure the entire operation of removing his name off the building. Hide it, basically. Exactly. So behind the tarps, they started to take the letters off. But they did this at 2.30, 3 o'clock in the morning.

By that time, most of the crowd was gone. And so there was a relative handful of us that could kind of sneak and peer around the edge of the tarps where they, They met the wall of the center. That was really all you had a window into. And then beyond that, they left the tarps up, where they remained to this day. So you could never see that his name had been removed. But of course, his name was removed, even if the removal remains hidden by a tarp. And given everything you've laid out in our conversation,

I have to imagine that this was a really painful moment for Trump because his entire answer to this wounded relationship he had with the Kennedy Center was to take it over and to make it more and more his own. And for a brief shining moment, he literally has his name on the outside. The takeover is total and complete, but now that is being taken from him. Yeah, and you could see that by the emergence of a different argument, vis-a-vis the Kennedy Center, and that was the president increasingly started to say that the center is in terrible disrepair. And this was really ironic because a year prior, he had gotten $527 million

from the big, beautiful bill, to do renovations of the Kennedy Center. And Congress appropriates money every year for maintenance of the Kennedy Center. So what was happening here? You know, in fact, the new director of the Kennedy Center after Rick Grinnell departed was a guy whose specialty, according to the president, he's a pro at construction. Why had this center

suddenly become so dangerous as soon as this name came off the building that it would have to be closed? So if I'm reading between the lines of what you're saying here, it seems like once the president has lost the battle to have his name on the outside of the building,

he begins to lose interest in the Kennedy Center functioning at all. Either it's mine or it's closed. And then he starts to go further and say, well, maybe it doesn't need just to be closed. Maybe the center will be demolished. It will be ripped down on social media, in comments to reporters. He starts to raise the idea that it would be torn down completely.

all the presidents talk about the need for innovations and this rather drastic thought that perhaps the Kennedy Center should be demolished all seems to rest on the idea that the Kennedy Center is in really sad, sorry, dangerous shape. Is that true? Well, I'm not an engineer, but I can say that over the last few months,

I've probably made 25 trips to the Kennedy Center. I never saw anything that suggested a serious danger to people's safety. But what happened earlier this month was that heavy storms in Washington brought down a five-foot chunk of plaster in the main foyer of the building. This is something that, you know, definitely needed to be repaired. But instead of just making that repair, they closed that enormous section of the building. They found security camera footage of the plaster actually falling. spread that around on social media.

They measured the shards of plaster as they lay on the carpet. They measured the size of what they called a debris field like this was a plane crash. Nobody cleaned up the mess left by the falling plaster for two weeks. In the meantime, this chunk of plaster became a sort of politically tinged argument for giving the president what he wants a closure of the place. which is exactly what happened on September 15th. The Kennedy Center Board voted to close the building entirely. Elizabeth, what's the impact of the Kennedy Center being totally closed now? 2,500 people have lost their jobs.

There are no paid performances there any longer, where there used to be many in a day. There are no tours. No one sees the exhibits, the art, anything. It's just the absolute antithesis of how presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy and Congress conceived it. And that led to protests last week by thousands of people. This place has a lot of personal memories for me, times that I went on my first date here. Came here with my family, came here with my husband.

who came just to say, sure, this needs to reopen, but also just to mourn all that had happened that had gotten it to that point. I played 18 hours Christmas music in the Grand Hall at Christmas time this last year. People who had a lot of memories in the place. Well, when my mom was alive, every Mother's Day, we got her a ticket to the summer musical.

And that was like an annual family tradition. And they wanted to share what it meant to them. I mean, it's a beloved art space for all of us. An affordable option for many people if you couldn't afford to buy tickets. It put the lie to the way the president had characterized the Kennedy Center,

that it was a place that welcomed everybody that really set out to bring people in, not to exclude them. And at one point during the protest, people laid hands to full, a human chain around the building. And it was like they were protecting something that was a living thing. And to them it was a living thing.

But now it was padlocked and closed and fenced off. The opera has moved elsewhere. They perform outside the Kennedy Center now. The symphony performs elsewhere. The performances that were there took years to book. And now that Trump has so thoroughly politicized it and personalized it, made the Kennedy Center entirely about himself, all that is gone, at least for the time being. Well, Elizabeth, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to Notre Dame. Some MS now journalists are just now regaining access to the White House happening. as we have been speaking right now. On Thursday afternoon, reporters for CNN, Politico, and MS Now were allowed to re-enter the White House grounds after a federal judge ruled hours earlier that the president's decision to ban them

was likely unconstitutional. Laura, if you hear me, I want to get to you right away for the latest in what your experience has been. Yeah, I hear you, Peter. So I was just allowed back into the White House through the Northwest Gate. Trump's compliance with the ruling brought to an end for now, a days-long standoff over press freedom.

That standoff triggered a rare act of coordinated protest by major TV networks, which have refused to record and distribute video of the president as they usually do. And the average 30-year mortgage rate surpassed 7% this week, an ominous sign for a housing market in which prices are already historically high. high and out of reach. Economists say that with borrowing costs this steep, potential buyers are increasingly unlikely to purchase a home. Today's episode was produced by Lexi Dio, Jack DeSidoro, and Eric Kruppke.

It was edited by Patricia Willens, with help from Michael Benoit. Contains original music by Diane Wong, and music by Marion Lazzano Will Reed, Alicia Baitube and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Special thanks to Afim Shapiro. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Sunday.