A Trumpian drama has been playing out inside the performing arts center all year. It has been damaging for business.

Credit...Video by Kent Nishimura For The New York Times

The Kennedy Center Crackup

A Trumpian drama has been playing out inside the performing arts center all year. It has been damaging for business.

• Nov. 7, 2025

This year’s fall season at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts officially kicked off one Friday night in September with “The Sound of Music,” the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein crowd-pleaser about nuns and Nazis.

In the cavernous Hall of States, where the name Donald J. Trump is now etched into the marble, a V.I.P. zone complete with a velvet rope line was set up for various Trump officials and allies. Breitbart, Newsmax, The Daily Caller, The Washington Free Beacon and other Trump-friendly publications all had spots along the red carpet.

The government officials and the right-wing press and hundreds of families settled into their seats. But before the towheaded Von Trapp children got the chance to dance, a voice came over the speakers: All actors needed to immediately clear the stage. There were “technical difficulties,” the voice explained. The crowd whispered as the curtain fell. It stayed down for the next 33 minutes.

That is not the only breakdown the Kennedy Center has had since President Trump named himself its chairman in February.

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The Kennedy Center is among the largest arts institutions in the world.Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

Interviews with 25 people, including current and former Kennedy Center executives, board members, longtime employees, recent hires, industry leaders and Trump administration officials, revealed a Washington institution in crisis.

Audiences are staying away. Internal sales figures obtained by The New York Times showed ticket sales down by about 50 percent from same period last year during one typical week in October. Dozens of employees, many with decades of experience, have been fired or quit. Outsiders with few obvious qualifications aside from party loyalty were handed top jobs. The center’s head of human resources estimated that staffing was down 30 percent from before Mr. Trump took over. Others call that a conservative estimate.

The new bosses insist they are not out to radically change the Kennedy Center but are merely trying to correct some bad business practices while attracting new audiences and donors. Some things still hum along. The programming has remained, for the most part, unchanged. The renowned conductor Gianandrea Noseda has re-upped his contract with the National Symphony Orchestra.

Still, the Kennedy Center is yet another piece of Washington that Mr. Trump is making over in his own image. What happens when the playbook for a Trumpian takeover is applied to an enormous performing arts center that houses an opera company and a symphony and puts on more than 2,000 shows a year?

“Come see for yourself,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last week in a post about changes he was making to the building. “I am doing the same thing to the United States of America, but only on a ‘slightly’ larger scale!”

In the grand opera that is Mr. Trump’s return to Washington, the Kennedy Center is like the play within the play. The stakes are lesser, the characters smaller, but the story lines are joltingly familiar.

“Please begin making your way back to your seats,” the voice at “The Sound of Music” said.

The show would go on.

Act I: ‘The Ambassador’

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Richard Grenell, the new Trump-appointed president of the Kennedy Center.Credit...Paul Morigi/Getty Images

First, a dramatis personae.

In the role of leading man we have Richard Grenell, the Kennedy Center’s new, Trump-appointed president. The most important thing to understand about him is that he did not want this job.

He was the ambassador to Germany during the last Trump term and wanted very badly to become secretary of state this time around. Instead, he landed a half a mile and a world away from the State Department.

According to four people familiar with his thinking, Mr. Grenell, 59, was not thrilled with this assignment, but it was what the president wanted for him. Who was he to refuse?

“RIC, WELCOME TO SHOW BUSINESS!” Mr. Trump wrote in a post announcing the arrangement.

The Kennedy Center is among the largest arts institutions in the world. Mr. Grenell’s job involves jousting with unions, managing hundreds of employees and cultivating relationships with arts world players and patrons.

The woman whom Mr. Grenell replaced had the job for 11 years and ran the Chicago Symphony Orchestra before that. The man who came before her had worked on various dance companies and in the Royal Opera House in London.

Mr. Grenell explained to several members of his new staff that he was married to a man who danced in a couple shows on Broadway more than 20 years ago. This seemed to be his primary connection to the arts.

“He would bring up his husband as a way to be like, ‘Well, I know a lot about entertaining dance because I fell in love with a dancer,’” said Jane Raleigh, 35, the Kennedy Center’s former dance director. She said he talked a lot about the 1980s pop star Paula Abdul and that he said he wanted programming that could “be like Paula Abdul.”

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Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

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Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

In August, Mr. Grenell fired Ms. Raleigh and her team. She had worked there for 11 years. He replaced her with Stephen Nakagawa, a former dancer with the Washington Ballet who got the job after writing a letter to Mr. Grenell pledging to help “end the dominance of leftist ideologies in the arts and return to classical ballet’s purity.”

The staff soon learned more about their new major-domo.

Mr. Grenell wanted to be addressed as “the ambassador.” He fought publicly and often with hecklers in the comment section of the Kennedy Center’s Instagram account. (“You sound vaccinated,” he replied to one person who compared him to the Nazis from “The Sound of Music.”) He hung huge pictures of himself with Mr. Trump in his theater box. He ordered the National Symphony Orchestra to perform the national anthem before every show it played.

And yet, although Mr. Grenell’s hand was heavy, many could not help but feel that his heart was not really in it. He rarely seemed to be in the building. He proved exceptionally difficult to get a meeting with. Many people who work there said they still had yet to actually meet him. He’s never held an all-staff meeting.

His desire to play a role in geopolitics never went away; throughout the year he conducted negotiations with Venezuela, even traveling there, which irked others in the Trump administration. Earlier this month, The Times reported, Mr. Trump called him off.

Mr. Grenell declined to be interviewed.

Act II: ‘Transferable Skills’

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Nick MeadeCredit...Taya Gray/The Desert Sun, via USA Today Network

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Rick LougheryCredit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

Mr. Grenell’s ensemble includes a cast of small-time Republican operatives he has put in charge of daily management of the center.

Chief among them are Rick Loughery and Nick Meade. They worked for political groups run by Mr. Grenell and function as his enforcers while he’s away. Because all three have similar names, many in the building refer to this troika as “Ric and the Icks.”

Other characters include Tammy Walsh, who is Mr. Grenell’s childhood friend; Joe LaFauci, a Republican state committeeman from Palm Beach, Fla., who has been put in charge of board relations; and Roma Daravi, a onetime ballerina who worked in the first Trump White House and is now chief of communications at the Kennedy Center.

There’s a subgroup of Republicans in the building connected to the Trump ally and election denier Kari Lake — most notably her former campaign aide Lisa Dale, who holds the critical job of head of fund-raising at the center.

Relations between the old guard and the new are sometimes awkward.

“I cannot express how unfriendly and unprofessional they were,” said Mallory Miller, 39, who was also fired from the dance department in August. “They just didn’t speak to us. They would walk by us in the hallway and not even look at us.”

She recalled an early interaction she had with Ryan Hamilton, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully in Nevada last year for a seat on the Clark County Commission. Now he’s in charge of some programming staff members at the Kennedy Center. After watching a Cuban dance company perform, Ms. Miller recounted, “he said, ‘Wow, they’re so talented they could be on a cruise ship.’”

“Even to this day,” she said, “I cannot decide if he was mocking us or complimenting us.”

Mr. Hamilton declined to comment.

As the new leadership settled in, things around the office began to change. Fox News could be heard blaring from the executive offices throughout the day. A piece of paper Scotch-taped to the wall near where the bosses sat appeared one day. It read: “YOU ARE ENTERING A FREE SPEECH ZONE.”

A recent walk through the administrative floors during the middle of a workday revealed the windowless warren of cubicles where the fund-raising team sat to be almost empty. The lights were not even on. They are activated by motion sensor.

Mr. Grenell posted online recently about how he had cut that department down from 93 people to 17. He called it “an embarrassing bloated group.”

And yet, in an interview in September, the center’s vice president of human resources, LaTa’sha Bowens, insisted that “a lot of people made the personal decision to exit on their own.”

As for the inexperience of many of the new hires, Ms. Bowens, 45, said, “I’m a firm believer that you can look at all different backgrounds in a person’s résumé and really see what those transferable skills are that would make them a successful candidate, and I think that’s what this administration is doing.”

Asked what transferable skills officials from Republican politics brought to the management of an art institutions, she responded, “I don’t know, because I’m not in politics. That’s not my area.”

Act III: More Nutcracker

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Lisa DaleCredit...Paul Morigi/Getty Images

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Roma DaraviCredit...Shannon Finney/Getty Images

The people who ran the Kennedy Center in the past tried to keep politics out of it. The board was bipartisan and the audience was, too. Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg used to go see the same operas and sit on opposite sides of the same aisle. (They once appeared together onstage in powdered wigs as extras in Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”)

“Political persuasion was never a factor we considered or discussed in artistic programming,” said Michael Kaiser, 72, who was the Kennedy Center’s president from 2001 to 2014. “Our Board included 14 members of Congress who were evenly split between the two parties. This balance made it clear to everyone at the center that the only way for us to work was to ignore politics.”

But Mr. Trump does not do nonpartisan, let alone bipartisan. He purged the board of Democrats, replacing them with the Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo, among others. And he has posted caps-lock screeds online about the programming (“NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA”).

“It’s a very exciting time to serve,” said one newly empowered board member named Mary Helen Bowers.

Ms. Bowers, 46, is a ballet professional (she helped train Natalie Portman for “Black Swan”) who is married to Paul Dans, one of the key architects of “Project 2025.” She was on the board during the first Trump term and remained through the Biden years. She said she was “bothered” by how things were run then.

“There was definitely drag programming that was going on,” she said. (Indeed, there was.)

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Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, and Polly Jordan walk past Tara Hoot, Ricky Rosé, Vagenesis and Mari Con Carne outside the Kennedy Center to attend “Les Misérables” in June.Credit...Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press

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Protesters during the “Kennedy Center Can’t Cancel L.G.B.T.Q. Pride!” rally in May.Credit...Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

She said that when she thinks about programming, she asks herself: “Are we welcoming families? Are we welcoming Christians? Are we welcoming believers?” She would like more “Nutcracker,” she said. “Let’s expand our classical performances. Let’s bring on more ballets, like Swan Lake.”

Like other conservatives interviewed for this article, Ms. Bowers contended that left-wing politics had crept into the Kennedy Center, warping it so that it became a place that was not welcoming for all. And yet, she would not accept that Mr. Trump had injected his own politics into the place, which has driven away audiences.

“That characterization is a little unfair,” she said. “In the past, I don’t think that everyone felt welcome, to be frank with you. I know that lots of conservatives did not.”

Asked why people were not coming to the Kennedy Center as much anymore, Ms. Daravi, the head of communications, replied with two words.

“Liberal intolerance.”

Act IV: ‘Not Some Random Theater’

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Mr. Trump has taken a great personal interest in building renovations.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Like many other large arts nonprofits, the Kennedy Center cannot pay for its presentations without the help of substantial private donations.

Last year, its operating budget — what it spends to stage the extravagant productions and pay the hundreds of people who work there — was about $268 million. The center tries to earn back that money through a mix of ticket sales, donations and other revenue streams, just barely managing to scrape by year after year.

Experimental art and avant-garde operas and new productions do not always manage to earn back what they cost to put on, but for the Kennedy Center to be taken seriously in the arts world — and, more earnestly, for it to fulfill its higher purpose — it had to take risks and hope that the more popular productions (like “The Sound of Music”) and generous donors could make up for any losses on the back end.

That was the model, anyway.

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Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

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Credit...Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

To manage the Kennedy Center’s finances, Mr. Grenell has brought in another old friend he knows from Republican politics: Donna Arduin. The two met in the 1990s when they were both working for Gov. George Pataki of New York. She went on to help run state finances for many different Republican governors.

There is a line from the new management that they have inherited a mess of epic proportions. Mr. Grenell has said that the way the center was run was nothing short of “criminal,” and Ms. Arduin, 62, concurred.

But to hear them explain their outrage, it sounds less like they uncovered a criminal book-cooking scheme and more like genuine shock from two people who have never worked in nonprofit arts before and are only beginning to understand the wildly impractical nature of such an enterprise.

Mr. Grenell has said that every production at the Kennedy Center must be “budget neutral.” In other words, there is no longer an appetite for taking risks on art that may not turn a profit.

“Do you think the Kennedy Center should be having shows that don’t sell tickets and make money?” Ms. Daravi asked. “We’re America’s cultural center. We’re not some random theater.”

Maybe the only thing that everyone at the Kennedy Center can agree on is that the building is in rough shape.

Mr. Trump managed to secure $257 million for repairs in his spending bill that passed over the summer. (The property is owned by the federal government since it was constructed as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy.) That pot of money is solely for renovations, not programming.

When the president walked through the building a few months ago to inspect it, the man leading him around was Matthew Floca, a Kennedy Center official who will help oversee how the money is spent. According to one senior White House official, the president calls Mr. Floca on an almost weekly basis to check on the renovations.

Mr. Floca, 38, ticked off some of the things the money would be used to do: redoing the seats in the opera house; replacing 30-year-old pieces of rigging equipment backstage; installing new chillers and boilers. (The building gets its condenser water from the Potomac River.)

“It was a wild experience to have the president commenting on the chillers and boilers of a building, ” Mr. Floca said.

The president’s abrupt demolition of the East Wing has fueled panic among the Kennedy Center staff that there is a secret plan to tear the center down so that it can be rebuilt as the Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts. It did not help when Mr. Trump posted about the building on social media last week, calling it “the new TRUMP KENNEDY, whoops, I mean, KENNEDY CENTER.”

But Mr. Floca insisted nothing so dramatic was in the works.

“We’re not gold-leafing the entire building,” he said with a laugh.

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Maybe the only thing that everyone at the Kennedy Center can agree on is that the building is in rough shape.Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.

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