A Day, and a Nation, at the Kennedy Center
From Tchaikovsky to redneck humor: the arts in Trump’s America.
WATCHING THE DISMANTLING of the Kennedy Center from my new hometown in Dallas called to mind the old saying about going broke, how it happens slowly and then all at once. Early into his second term, you got the sense that President Donald J. Trump was unlikely to remain hands-off this time around. But it’s still kind of shocking how quickly things spiraled out of control.
First came the decision in February 2025 (announced via Truth Social, naturally) to fire Kennedy Center1 president Deborah Rutter, whom he accused of mismanagement of the venue and, worse, allowing too much “woke” programming. He then purged the board, and its new members elected him board chair. Then he installed a factotum in the form of former ambassador Richard Grenell as head of the organization. These moves provoked a backlash from the artists who were scheduled to perform at the center: Issa Rae canceled a sold-out show; the touring company of Hamilton bailed on its scheduled 2026 run; and, more recently, Philip Glass withdrew a symphony composed to celebrate the life of Abraham Lincoln that had been commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra, which has used the Kennedy Center as its main venue since the center opened 1971, and as its headquarters since 1986.
Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center’s other major resident, the Washington National Opera—which also has been there since the beginning—announced in January that it was leaving the center altogether, a decision made all the more shocking by the fact that there simply aren’t many suitable replacement venues in the Washington, D.C. region. The Kennedy Center is the natural home for the opera company, yet a bizarre diktat from the new Trumpified leadership requiring every show be funded fully in advance isn’t compatible with the economics of the opera business.
Not helping relations with artists is Trump’s insistence on turning himself into the star of the show. While it’s unsurprising that the failed Broadway producer believes himself to be the cure for all the Kennedy Center’s woes, illegally slapping his name on the building was hardly an act calculated to ease tensions with artists who do not want to feel as though their work is being used to endorse a man whose policies they find repugnant. And taking over the Kennedy Center Honors—handpicking the honorees, like noted Trump supporter Sylvester Stallone, and then emceeing the ceremony—was just rubbing salt in the wound. Little surprise, then, that the center’s board was reportedly having trouble even fielding a 2026–27 season, according to CNN.
Grenell has blamed the artists themselves for all this trouble. He told CBS Mornings last year that “many of the left can’t perform for conservatives because, whatever reason, they’re political” and scolded world-renowned banjoist Béla Fleck for canceling a show because “the woke mob” only “wants you to perform for lefties.” This is abject nonsense: The Kennedy Center is not the house artistic organ of whichever party controls the White House but a bipartisan cultural institution. Hamilton performed at the Kennedy Center during Trump’s first term; Philip Glass took home a Kennedy Center Honor during Trump’s first term. The issue is not Trump’s win or the fear that conservatives might show up to watch Issa Rae. The issue is Trump’s interference and a board full of Trump toadies attempting to ingratiate themselves with the big man by doing the only things he actually cares about: putting his name on buildings and acting like he’s all-knowing and all-powerful.
But the damage has been done. With great fanfare—that is to say, once again by posting on Truth Social—Trump announced on February 1 that the Kennedy Center would close for two years so it could undergo massive renovations. Can’t have empty seats and empty concert halls if they’re not open, after all.
And that’s why I hopped on an airplane at 6 a.m. last Friday morning. If the Kennedy Center is in such dire straits that it was about to close for two years of renovations, I needed to experience it for myself.
IF ALL MY TRAVEL PLANS worked out, I hoped to take in two shows: a midday performance by the National Symphony Orchestra and an evening show with Jeff Foxworthy. (You gotta eat your vegetables before you get your deep-fried dessert.) I held off on buying the NSO tickets in advance, though, since I didn’t entirely trust Southwest to get me into D.C. on time—but here I was, on the ground, at 10 a.m. I checked into my room at the Watergate, went upstairs, and pulled up my phone to get a ticket and . . . no dice. Tickets were no longer available for purchase at 10:45 for the concert at 11:30. A sellout? On a random Friday?
No, no: They were now half off, the friendly fellow at the box office informed me after I scurried through the ice-covered sidewalk to inquire. Plenty of seats left, prices as low as $12. I wanted to be near people and have decent sightlines—“pretty sparse up in the tiers,” he frowned, looking at his screen, so he plopped me right in the middle—Row T, about halfway in—and handed me the ticket. I was in for a treat: First up was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with a guest performance by Behzod Abduraimov, followed by Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8. Before that, though: refreshments.
On my way to the bar, I came across a quartet discussing the sad state of things at the Kennedy Center and lamenting the upcoming closure. After eavesdropping for a moment, I introduced myself and asked how long they’d been coming to the shows.
Wayne and Bonnie had been coming since 1976, while Robert and Rachel started showing up in 1996, back when the American Film Institute’s theater was located in the Kennedy Center before it moved to Silver Spring in 2003. Rachel in particular recalled the way the Kennedy Center has helped her and her husband grow in their appreciation of the arts—she recalled coming out of the movie theater and seeing a bunch of opera attendees in their finery and thinking “Oh, look at those tony swells, we’ll never do that.” But then one day the music director handed her a postcard announcing an upcoming production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, and they were in.
The center has had its ups and downs—the seating arrangements when reopening after COVID made for some odd shows, Rachel remembered—but the mood that has settled over everything is a dark one, even as she and her fellow attendees could find humor in booing JD Vance when he showed up for a concert last year. “It’s supposed to be a bipartisan board,” she said. “It’s not a bipartisan board.”
Robert was blunter in his appraisal.
“I was just outside and saw Trump’s name on the building for the first time, and that’s just profoundly depressing and enraging,” Robert said.
The simple truth is that this guy is a malignant narcissist and his ego couldn’t handle the fact that world-renowned artists were refusing to come. People weren’t coming. And so the idea of just watching this continue to get worse, month after month, year after year, was simply more than he could handle. . . . It’s embarrassing for the country.
“And what’s going to happen to one of America’s best orchestras?” Bonnie, a violinist and youth orchestra conductor, asked. The answer to that is still up in the air.
Having acquired my beverage (chardonnay on tap, $19), I took my seat. It was slightly more crowded than I’d expected, though the upper tiers were in fact pretty sparsely populated. As we settled in for the show, the audience stood and the orchestra struck up a rendition of the national anthem, which caught me by surprise. I’d missed the 2025 directive from Grenell to institute the playing of the anthem before every performance, rather than at the beginning of each season as had previously been the case. It didn’t bother me, mind you—I threw my hand over my heart like most everyone else—but one man in the crowd seemed less enthused, given the fist he threw up during the performance.
The Tchaikovsky concerto was delightful, and I will not embarrass myself by attempting to judge the performance or the pitch (I am notoriously tone deaf2); all I’ll say is that it’s always entertaining to see a pianist go to town, and watching Abduraimov bang away at the ivories and produce impossibly complex and rousing melodies from it was no exception. Like Liberace, but classy.
As Aburaimov exited and intermission began, I slid forward a dozen rows and sat next to the gent who threw up his hand. I introduced myself as a member of the press and he asked for a card, which I do not have. After googling The Bulwark—“Bill Kristol, heh”—he introduced himself as Seth and did not mince words.
“I think it’s important for people who support the arts—or people who don’t support the arts—to find ways to express their views, appropriate ways,” he said, noting that this is his third show so far this year. “Many people made political gestures during the national anthem, usually that’s placing one’s hand over one’s heart. So political gestures are entirely appropriate.” He was, of course, silently protesting the very thing I was there to cover: “The actions of this convicted felon, this highly deplorable, immoral individual who has unfortunately been put in a position where he can exercise power beyond what is constitutionally granted him.”
I thanked Seth for his time and headed back to the bar for another pull of chardonnay. The bartender was distraught when I told him I had tossed the adult sippy cup the venue provides to ensure no spills, as there’s a $3 discount for reusing it; fortunately, he remembered me from before and decided to replace the cup and throw in the reduction. (Always tip your servers, folks.) I asked him what he planned to do if the Kennedy Center closed as planned and he just kind of shrugged and handed me the drink. He’s one of the 400 or so employees who will simply have to find something else to do during the two years Trump’s bruised ego will be placated, I guess.
Seated again for the second half of the performance, I flipped through the program’s notes on what was to come. It seemed Seth wasn’t the only one mounting a protest.
“For conductor Kurt Sanderling, who knew Shostakovich and attended early performances of the Eighth Symphony, this piece covertly depicted the impossible position of the independent artist and intellectual in Stalin’s Russia,” Nicholas Swett wrote in the program’s notes, remarking also that “obsessively mining secret symbols of resistance from instrumental music can be a tenuous and ultimately tiresome exercise.” Yet it couldn’t help but come to mind when, in his introduction to the piece, musical director and conductor Gianandrea Noseda, who has said publicly he hopes to remain above the fray in this time of tumult at the Kennedy Center, commented that the symphony’s second movement (allegreto) is lighter than the heavier opening adagio. Shostakovich, he said, was composing with a fake smile—“Like this one,” Noseda said, pulling his own mouth into a rictus grin—before finishing his overview and turning to the musicians.
AFTER A LATE LUNCH on the Georgetown waterfront and a brief layover in my Watergate3 hotel room, I was back at the Kennedy Center for an early evening performance by Eric Williams and a trio of fellow jazz musicians at the Millennium Stage.
Millennium Stage is one of the underappreciated gems of the D.C. arts scene: a free daily performance at 6 p.m. by a variety of artists in the cavernous grand foyer of the Kennedy Center. You just reserve a ticket and show up and soak in the tunes or the performance or the poetry or whatever’s on tap that day. And yes, the nature of the tickets means that the audience is, sometimes, a bit less than attentive—at one point, a chittering band of Chinese exchange students in the row behind me had to be audibly shushed by an aggrieved audience member—but the very informality of the daily show is part of what makes it so entertaining. There’s no pressure here because there’s no cost to attend other than your time. It is arguably the purest expression of the Kennedy Center’s mission to expand love of the arts.
BUT PURITY DOESN’T KEEP THE LIGHTS ON: that’s what acts like Jeff Foxworthy are for. He is the evening’s main attraction and one of several standup acts brought in to appeal to a Trump-friendlier audience. The weekend before, Adam Carolla had been in town a night, doing two shows in the Terrace Theater venue. Tony Hinchcliffe, last seen calling Puerto Ricans trash at the Republican National Convention, hits the Kennedy Center’s concert hall on May 2. (Plenty of seats are still available for Mr. Hinchcliffe’s show!)
There is, naturally, a fairly stark contrast in the audience for Foxworthy as opposed to the National Symphony Orchestra. No one was likely to throw their fist in the air in protest during the ceremonial performance of “Freebird.” Similar age range—I was probably twenty years south of the average attendee at both shows—but far different crowds, for sure. I say this not to stereotype but merely to describe: more mustaches and mullets in the evening show. And there was a cowboy hat, four rows ahead of me.
To avoid accusations of simple snark, allow me to say, up front, that I think this dichotomy is wonderful. We can debate the artistic merits of standup versus opera versus musical theater versus great drama versus legitimate the-a-tur like Shear Madness4 all day; to paraphrase a great philosopher, America is a land of contrasts, and those contrasts were on full display this Friday. One thing both audiences shared, however, was an appreciation for the Kennedy Center itself. I was heartened to see audience members posing for selfies in front of the Robert Berks sculpture of Kennedy’s noggin that sits in the main atrium outside the opera house and to overhear folks lamenting that it would be closed for two years.
Of course, there were some naysayers. After grabbing a Port City IPA ($9, including my recycled sippy-cup discount) I sat down for the show; as the start time neared, the seats behind me were filled by a couple who took in the surroundings and commented, “Well, you can see why he wants to update things.” I was about to turn around and ask how many shows they’d been to—the symphony fans all seemed quite happy with the acoustics and the décor earlier in the day—when the lights went down and Jeff Foxworthy strode out onto the stage.
And look: He puts on a good show. Foxworthy has been one of the most consistently successful standups of the last thirty years for a reason, and it’s not because of his redneck bit. (Not entirely, anyway; at one point an audience member admitted to doing something vaguely ridiculous and he suggested that it demonstrated they could, in fact, have a sunburnt nape, which led to much cheering in the crowd. “That was his famous catchphrase,” a nearby seatmate informed his wife.) He’s a natural storyteller and delightfully self-deprecating, carefully straddling the red-blue divide without being too mean-spirited.
One brief example: He has a story about stepping on a cottonmouth and getting bit and needing his wife to bring him a shovel to take care of the problem. He jokes that when he told this story to his friends out in Los Angeles, one of them asked if the shovel was to help him relocate the snake, and he sniggered, “Yeah, I relocated it alright, all three pieces of it.” This, naturally, inspired many laughs from the audience—if you think you can relocate a poisonous snake, you might be a city slicker—but it’s all in good fun given that it came within spitting distance of a joke about peeing into a pool from outside the pool and how such behavior may mark one for redneck status.
WHAT’S FRUSTRATING about the recent ugliness is, frankly, how unnecessary and needlessly antagonistic it all is. There is no reason that Issa Rae and Jeff Foxworthy and the National Symphony Orchestra and Hamilton and Les Miz and George Strait and Philip Glass and whoever else cannot exist under the same roof.
But Trump’s goal here wasn’t to achieve coexistence or some newly struck bipartisan artistic space. It was domination and dominion, an effort to gut the site and wear it like a skin suit while demanding respect, as he’s been trying to do with the Nobel Peace Prize for the last year.5 Considering how little conservatives respect either the Nobel Peace Prize or the Kennedy name, one might think it odd that the Republican president is so obsessed with both. But Donald Trump isn’t a conservative and he’s barely a Republican despite dominating the party so thoroughly. He is, fundamentally, a creature of New York City, one who has been trying to win the respect of its denizens for decades now. His greatest fear in life is that somewhere, some member of the elite is laughing at him behind his back, mocking his gaucheness. And it’s why he’s attached his name to the building built to pay tribute to the very soul of the Northeast establishment, leeching off the Kennedy brand in an effort to steal some valor.
That his and Grenell’s effort failed spectacularly is not surprising. That it seems to have killed a beloved artistic space is, however, pretty depressing.
Given that the name of the Kennedy Center remains—by law—the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, that is how it shall be referred to throughout this piece.
I have never stayed in the Watergate but couldn’t pass up the symbolism of staying there in the midst of the most comically corrupt presidency of my lifetime. The walking-distance location was also a key selling point: You simply travel down Jamal Khashoggi Way across from the Saudi embassy and it takes you right to the Kennedy Center. A little surreal, all of it.
Shear Madness is a literal D.C. institution, having played more or less constantly since 1987. One hopes it is able to endure through the Kennedy Center’s closure.
The Iowahawk Maneuver, we call it.
You used the word "bipartisan" more than once. But isn't "nonpartisan" or even "nonpolitical" a better fit?
Also: great job of documenting your expense report. :)