If President Donald Trump’s sweeping takeover of the Kennedy Center was a play, his first visit as chairman Monday was the end to Act One.
“The Kennedy Center is in tremendous disrepair,” the president proclaimed to reporters as he toured the center’s rooms and quickly began ticking off everything he’d like to see changed. “We’re gonna make a lot of changes including the seats, the decor…pretty much everything,” he continued. “It needs a lot of work.”
Over the past month, Trump has swiftly implemented a hostile takeover of the legendary arts hub. He ousted the center’s longtime president, Deborah F. Rutter, and chairman, David M. Rubenstein. He subsequently replaced its leadership and board with loyalists like Richard Grenell (his envoy for special missions-turned president of the center) and Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
ADVERTISEMENT
And now as the Kennedy Center sits in an intermission of sorts, the president teased all that is still to come in his Act Two—more Broadway, new decor, and less “radical-left” programming, like Hamilton.
“I never liked Hamilton very much,” the president quipped Monday, seemingly clapping back at the show for canceling a scheduled tour at the center next year in protest of his takeover.
Instead, the president insisted that “We’re going to get some very good shows,” and added: “The thing that does well are Broadway hits.”
As a young man, Trump famously aspired to become a Broadway producer, and in his 2004 book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire: Everything You Need to Know About Success, Real Estate, and Life, disclosed that his favorite Broadway show was Evita (which he saw six times).
Through his work at the Kennedy Center, it seems that the president is seeing that aspiration through, noting his excitement for Les Misérables playing at the center in June and July—another longtime favorite of his.
Alongside becoming chairman, The New York Times reported Sunday that Trump is further seeking to tighten his grip on the center by deciding who gets to be on the committee that selects the honorees for its annual Kennedy Centers Honors gala.
“We’re gonna have Honors. I think it’s going to be a much bigger show than it has been in the past,” Trump said of the annual ceremony to reporters Monday. “It got tired, very tired, very boring, very radical-left. Unless you were a radical-left nobody was chosen.”
“We have some surprises,” he continued. “But I think it has a chance to be a very big show and that’s a big part of the Kennedy Center— honors that evening … I think it’s going to get great ratings actually.”
When meeting up with the center’s board following his tour, Trump kicked things off by noting: “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t been able to be here in a long time, and I shouldn’t be with what I’m doing.”
He swiftly stressed that it was important for him to pass through because the center is a “very big fabric of Washington, D.C.” and much like his aspirations for the rest of the nation, “We’re gonna make our capital great again just like we’re gonna make our country great again.”
But no matter how loudly the president touted a golden future for the Kennedy Center on Monday, it couldn’t drown out the boos Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance received at the center last week while attending a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Trump told reporters Monday when probed about the incident. “He’s the most popular vice president we’ve had in years.”
