Monday, June 15, 2026
In the wee hours of Saturday, June 13, following an extension of the midnight deadline due to thunderstorms, workers removed what many consider the most objectionable plastering of the current president’s name around the District of Columbia.
Once again, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “the sole national memorial to the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy within the city of Washington and its environs,” honors one individual alone. Under the blue tarp that remains, the letters that spelled “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” are gone.
The debranding complied with a May 29 order by Judge Christopher R. Cooper of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, an Obama appointee, in response to a lawsuit filed by U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who is an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board.
However, the center’s survival in anything like its pre-Trump form is far from certain.
The number of subscribers and other ticket-buyers plummeted following the Trump administration’s February 2025 hostile takeover, when Deborah F. Rutter, president since 2014, and board chairman David M. Rubenstein were jettisoned.
Staffers left and were fired. Many more, in anticipation of a shutdown (see below), were laid off. Boycotting donors were replaced by those looking to curry favor. Artists, ensembles and touring companies canceled performances, often without relocating them.
Under the revamped board and the new president, a narrative of inept financial and physical plant management, suggesting impropriety, was the party line, setting the stage for the Ken Cen’s supposed rescue, meriting the addition in December of 2025 of a second, living honoree to its name. (President Richard Grenell, a Trump ally, was replaced in March by Matt Floca, the center’s former vice president of facilities operations.)
A two-year closure for the purpose of reconstructing the massive Edward Durrell Stone building, due to begin on or soon after July 4, was temporarily blocked by Cooper, also on May 29, following a lawsuit by the DC Preservation League and others. Why the $250-million, Steven Holl-designed expansion known as the Reach, completed in 2019, could not host events during this period went unexplained.
To the stymieing of his project, the president responded with a typically boastful and vituperative Truth Social post, concluding: “Therefore, based on the fact that the Radical Left Democrats care more about opposing your favorite President, ME, than saving a dying Performing Arts Center, almost all of which lose large amounts of money throughout the Country, we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.” On June 11, the Kennedy Center appealed the order blocking the closure.
But apart from the closely bound National Symphony Orchestra, a Kennedy Center affiliate since 1986 — which has yet to announce dates and venues for its 2026-27 season — there is little from which to construct a performance schedule should the center remain open.
Washington National Opera bid the center farewell at the start of the year, scrambling to present the remainder of its season at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, the Lyric Baltimore and the Music Center at Strathmore. In ending its 15-year affiliation, WNO risked losing control of its endowment, still under the Kennedy Center umbrella.
On June 11, the opera filed suit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to reclaim more than $17 million. The estimated amount represents the company’s endowment and other funds donated and collected on its behalf. Responding, the center stated that it plans to countersue and that it had long subsidized the company, which by an outside accounting firm’s tally had racked up a $72-million deficit since 2011.
WNO’s recently announced season will include: “Madama Butterfly,” “Nixon in China” and “We the People” — a concert with Renée Fleming, Thomas Hampson and Marian Anderson Vocal Award winner Amber R. Monroe — in DAR Constitution Hall (reconfigured with a thrust stage) in November; “Odyssey,” a holiday opera in Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theater in December; a world-premiere ballet-opera “O’Keeffe: Kiss the Sky” and “Mozart’s Idomeneo: A Trojan Tale” in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall in March; and “La traviata” at Strathmore on April 29 and 30 and May 1.