Donald Trump Throttles His Own Passion Project

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

 

Why did Donald Trump announce this week that Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will be closed for the next two years for extensive renovations? A project of that scale had not been announced. Renovations were already underway with financial backing from a specific congressional appropriation. Senator Susan Collins (R., Maine) could not have been alone when she confessed that the announcement came as “a big surprise to me.” The Kennedy Center’s own board of trustees was “blindsided.”

 

Trump administration officials now maintain that the venue will soon be unusable without significant repairs and maintenance, although it will remain open just long enough to participate in the events centered around the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4. It’s certainly true that the Kennedy Center cannot maintain its current pace of operations without the repairs Congress funded last year, even though Trump himself said that renovations would not disrupt the center’s operations as recently as last October. It’s also true, however, that the Kennedy Center cannot keep up its usual tempo in the absence of artists willing to perform there.

 

That’s where speculation has led the national press. The conclusion that artist boycotts contributed to the venue’s shuttering is supported by both the abrupt cancellation of scheduled Kennedy Center events amid a revolt by talent and by claims from current and former staffers that the venue had been mismanaged. “Rumors that Trump would shut down the Kennedy Center have circulated since late fall of last year,” the Washington Post reported, “with many current and former employees suggesting it would be a tourniquet to stop the press coverage of declining ticket sales and artists boycotts.”

 

The naked political biases of grudge-bearing artists and Kennedy Center stewards notwithstanding, the venue did see a significant decline in ticket sales last year. And that was before the president put his own name on the building’s façade, inspiring a wave of canceled performances from the acts that the venue had already booked.

 

We can be skeptical of the motives of those who offer a pat explanation for this still mysterious turn of events while also concluding that this could not be what Donald Trump wanted. If there’s one thing you can say for sure about this president, he loves the Kennedy Center. The president kept his distance from it during his first term in office amid the refusal of so many artists to perform there while Trump occupied the Oval Office (a relevant data point for those who insist it was only this president who politicized its stage), but he seemed determined this time around not to be deprived of its pleasures.

 

Trump took an unusually active role in the Kennedy Center’s management and programming early in his second term. He named himself chairman of the venue’s board last spring. In recorded meetings, the audio of which was reviewed by the press, the president named specific acts that should play there and identified a number of artists he believed should be Kennedy Center honorees. “In the past, I mean, these are radical left lunatics that have been chosen,” Trump said at the time. “I didn’t like it. I couldn’t watch it. And the host was always terrible.” Indeed, the president even flirted with hosting the award ceremony himself.

 

Overhauling not just how the Kennedy Center looked but how it was run clearly became a presidential passion project. It is a project that will end prematurely this summer. The president made it plain to all that he wanted to leave an indelible mark on the place, and he has. Like John Steinbeck’s Lennie Small, Trump held the object of his affection too close, inadvertently throttling it.