Trump takes the Kennedy Center and spends down the public trust

By Elena Rossi · Reporting from Rome · September 20, 2026

By seizing the Kennedy Center and driving artists away, Donald Trump treats a shared national memorial as personal property, spending down a public trust that only citizens and courts can defend.

A national monument remade in an image of one

In the winter of 2025, the executive branch decided that a living memorial to John F. Kennedy was insufficiently loyal. Donald Trump announced via Truth Social that he would make the Kennedy Center great again. He fired billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein as chairman and installed himself at the head of the board. Richard Grenell was brought in as executive director to purge what the administration termed woke programming. The Broadway production "Hamilton" cancelled its appearance. Composer-in-residence Carlos Simon told CNN that a haze of despair settled over the venue as audiences stayed away. As reported by The Guardian, thousands of protesters later gathered for a human chain event called "Hands Around the Kennedy Center" to fight the administration's plans.

This is not governance. It is Gleichschaltung, the systematic replacement of independent institutional leadership with party loyalists to synchronize cultural output with the leader's personal vision. The mechanism is identical to the one that turned European cultural life into an arm of the state in the last century: take the board, silence the critics, and demand that every public square echo only the sovereign. Like the Annexation of Crimea, which used street renaming and monument building to erase previous identities, this takeover sought to stamp a partisan brand over a shared national heritage. Institutions are slow because they are load-bearing. When an executive tears out the foundation to carve his own initials into the lintel, he is spending down a trust built by generations of citizens who believed the republic belonged to all of them.

The ledger of ruin beneath the scaffolding

The defense offered by the administration is that the building was neglected and financially insolvent. Yet the public record tells a different story. As detailed in The Atlantic, a federal tax filing showed the center received $257 million in federal renovation funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act requested by Trump himself. Excluding those capital funds, the center spent more than it took in, burdened by a $48 million bad debt expense driven by administrative chaos and artist boycotts. In the previous fiscal year under former President Deborah Rutter and a bipartisan board, the center brought in more than it spent. To argue that the institution required a hostile takeover to survive is to mistake the arsonist for the firefighter.

The administration's allies claimed the facility was dangerously dilapidated and pushed for an indefinite closure. But as reported by ABC News, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper intervened. He ruled that the venue cannot install memorials for Trump without congressional approval and ordered thirty days' notice before any major physical changes or demolition. The strongest opposing case rests on the premise that executive energy is needed to rescue crumbling federal properties from bureaucratic drift. Yet this argument collapses against the evidence of the administration's own behavior. A president who poses on Air Force One with a placard reading "Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED," as captured by AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski and cited by ABC News, is not saving a national monument. He is holding it hostage.

The center holds only when citizens defend it out loud

The fight over the Kennedy Center is part of a broader pattern. It includes the demolition of the White House East Wing, the closure of the city's busiest public golf course, and plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery. In each case, public assets are treated as personal fiefdoms. Thousands of citizens surrounded the Foggy Bottom complex with placards reading "Keep your tiny hands off our Kennedy Center" and "You're no Jack Kennedy," as documented by The Guardian. They were performing the essential duty of a republic. They were defending a shared space from partisan appropriation. Actor Lynda Carter addressed the rally, and drag queen Tara Hoot joined the demonstrators, embodying the diverse cultural ecology that the administration attempted to flatten.

The historical pattern predicts that when an administration weaponizes culture, artists leave, donors vanish, and the institution hollows out into a prop for power. To avert this, civil society and the judiciary must remain resilient enough to check executive overreach. The legal victories secured by Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty prove that our constitutional checks still function. She filed the lawsuit leading Judge Cooper to order the removal of Trump's name and block total closure. But courts alone cannot sustain a culture. Like the struggle against culturicide in Ukraine, the defense of shared heritage requires citizens to insist that public institutions belong to the public.

The federal judiciary must maintain its strict oversight to freeze executive efforts to dismantle the national memorial. Meanwhile, Congress must assert its statutory authority to strip the executive branch of unilateral board control and restore the independent governance that allows art to breathe free of political coercion.

Trump takes the Kennedy Center and spends down the public trust

A national monument remade in an image of one

The ledger of ruin beneath the scaffolding

The center holds only when citizens defend it out loud

Sources