I’ve written multiple times about Donald Trump’s obsession with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and his authoritarian motivations to control the arts and culture institutions in this country.
The president’s obsession is now threatening the country’s preeminent performing arts center, and everyone — whether you’re an arts person or not — should take note.
According to the president’s telling, the Kennedy Center is falling apart and was in such financial disarray that he just had to take it over and now, he must just (depending on the day of the week) either shut it down or bulldoze it entirely. Of course, he says if only he could put his name on the building he’d be able to save the institution.
In order to assess Trump’s claims of institutional insolvency, I pulled years of financial data on the Kennedy Center.
“I can say with a clear conscience that Trump is lying about the Kennedy Center’s financial stability.”
I can say with a clear conscience that Trump is lying about the Kennedy Center’s financial stability — at least, the financial stability it enjoyed before the president ousted the center’s board and appointed himself as chair.
The Kennedy Center’s financials
Anyone who has worked in or served on the board of a nonprofit arts institution knows there are years of surplus and years of deficit.
In the fiscal year ending September 2022, The Kennedy Center reported a deficit of just under $13 million and net assets of just under $475 million.
In the fiscal year ending September 2024, The Kennedy Center reported more than $306 million in revenue, just over $266 million in expenses and an operating year surplus of just over $40 million. That’s in addition to the organization’s net assets of just under $600 million.
Before the organization had filed its tax report for the fiscal year ending in September, the president began his hostile takeover.
He was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2025, and less than three weeks later, on Friday night of Feb. 7 announced he’d taken over the board.
This never has been about The Kennedy Center’s financial position.
Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle and chant at counter protesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on Aug. 11, 2017. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Charlottesville revisited
The president’s obsession with “owning” the country’s performing arts center is about two things: Vengeance and a fascist consolidation of cultural power to control the narrative we Americans tell about ourselves and our country. And all roads lead back to Charlottesville, Va.
By August 2017, the country was in the midst of a reckoning over Civil War monuments. In response, a coalition of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, neo-fascists and far-right militias organized a rally in Charlottesville to oppose the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Dubbed the “Unite the Right” rally, images spilled over onto social media featuring young men in kakis carrying tiki-torches and shouting slogans like, “You will not replace us,” “Blood and Soil,” “The South will rise again,” and “Hail Trump!” These slogans were not selected by happenstance: they were lifted straight from the racist American Confederacy and the murderous Nazi Germany.
On Aug. 12, the second day of the Charlottesville rally, a 20-year-old white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19. In response, the president refused to denounce white supremacy.
In his first statement on the events from his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, Trump condemned “the egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides — on many sides.”
Trump condemned “the egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides — on many sides.”
Trump’s placing blame for the violence on those opposed to white supremacy angered politicians on both sides of the aisle. After 48 hours of nonstop criticism, Trump sparred with reporters on the issue. He doubled down on defending the white supremacists sympathizing with their cause — after all, the Confederacy is evidently a point of pride for many in this country.
At one point, a reporter said, “The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest —” and the president cut her off: “Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves — and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
In response to the president’s unrepentant adoration of white supremacists, individuals in government and cultural institutions began taking a stand against him.
All 16 members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities — a nonpartisan advisory body established by President Ronald Reagan — resigned on Friday, Aug. 19. Rather than replace the group, Trump disbanded it.
Similarly, artists affiliated with The Kennedy Center came out in protest. Historically, each December since 1978, the center offered a handful of lifetime achievement awards at a special gala. The awards ceremony was accompanied by a reception at the White House. In August 2017, two of the five honorees announced they would boycott the reception hosted by then-President Trump, and others publicly stated they were considering skipping the event.
On Aug. 20 the White House announced that the President and First Lady would skip the Kennedy Center Honors in December.
The president and First Lady declined to attend in 2018 as well — the first for a sitting president. They skipped the ceremony again in 2019.
With the COVID pandemic, the 2020 awards ceremony was postponed until May 2021. By that point, Trump was holed up in his Mar-a-Lago resort after surviving his second impeachment trial for inciting the January 6 insurrection.
A security guard stands next to a scaffolding and a large protective tarp covering part of the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on September 15, 2026. US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the Kennedy Center will close down — possibly for good — after a judge ruled his name cannot be added onto the famed arts institution’s exterior. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images)
The Kennedy Center and Trump’s name
What better way to exact revenge on the artists and cultural institution that humiliated him in his first term than to conduct a hostile takeover of the organization and place his name above President John F. Kennedy’s on its façade.
Since Trump hijacked the center’s board and filled it with loyalists, he and the center have been tied up in a legal battle over his attempt to memorialize himself with the center’s renaming.
Twice, his attempts to rename the center have been ruled illegal by a federal judge. Now, Trump seems to be considering having the Kennedy Center demolished in retaliation.
Legally, Trump has no standing to order the arts center owned by the nation to be destroyed. But Trump never has cared much about whether something was legal or not.
Congress has the power to step in, but given the current makeup of the second branch of government, that is unlikely to happen until after the midterm elections.
Until then, those of us who care about democracy, the rule of law and standing up to authoritarian tyrants can clearly name what is at stake and what the president’s motivations are.
Trump is suffering from, among other things, a bruised ego and he is lying about The Kennedy Center’s finances and the need to close for renovations.
Mara Richards Bim
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as the first Justice and Advocacy Fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas where she recently was ordained to the gospel ministry. She earned the master of divinity degree and a certificate in spiritual direction from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company, which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.
Related:
Why you should care about the Kennedy Center board | Analysis by Mara Richards Bim
What’s the difference between the Kennedy Center and a wedding cake? | Analysis by Mara Richards Bim