Workers affix signage adding President Donald Trump’s name on the facade of the Kennedy Center in December 2025. | Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he will be shutting down the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years starting in the summer. Trump claims the shutdown, which comes after a series of high-profile boycotts and cancellations, will allow him to perform “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” that will make the Kennedy Center “the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World.”
It’s worth digging into why Trump has gone to such lengths to reimagine the Kennedy Center. While the Center is prestigious and a diplomatic asset, most presidents before Trump have been content to leave it to its own devices while they focus on more volatile political matters.
Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on the Kennedy Center ever since he got himself installed as chair last February in an unprecedented campaign. (US presidents have the right to appoint people to the Kennedy Center board, but none have ever served as chair, which is the person in charge of overseeing the Center’s finances, governance, and programming.). He has put his name on the building on top of John F. Kennedy’s (possibly illegally). He has demanded a new “anti-woke” direction to the programming and installed himself as host of the annual Kennedy Center Honors (the broadcast had historically low ratings).
As dozens of artists and celebrities have canceled their planned performances at the Kennedy Center, and ticket sales have plummeted, Trump has only doubled down on his plans to control the Center. “America will be very proud of its new and beautiful Landmark for many generations to come,” he declared on Truth Social on Sunday evening.
The Trump administration is currently embroiled in multiple scandals, including the horrors of federal agents’ actions in Minneapolis and Trump’s as-yet unexplained appearance in the Epstein Files. His approval ratings are tanking. Yet Trump appears content to delegate handling of those matters to his lieutenants, and instead focus on what he cares about most: the nation’s performing arts center. Why does he care so much?
I’ve written before about the opportunity this takeover gives Trump to have his revenge on the theatrical world, which made its disdain for him clear during his first term in office. But it also offers Trump a chance to fulfill a romantic old dream of his.
In 1970, a 23-year-old Trump became a co-producer on a Broadway show called Paris Is Out! apparently with the goal of making producing his full-time career. “He had done his homework, and that was unusual,” his co-producer told the New York Times in 2016. “Most of the people who put up money for shows just wanted to meet girls and go to parties, but he wasn’t like that.” But the show was a flop, and Trump never produced anything again.
Instead, he became a fixture at Broadway openings and theatrical events. As early as 1992 — the same year his then-fiancee Marla Maples made her Broadway debut — Trump was toying with the idea of making a musical of his own life. In 2005, he announced that The Apprentice would be adapted as a stage musical, a plan that never reached fruition. When he turned to politics, he made a habit of blasting Andrew Lloyd Webber at campaign rallies. (Lloyd Webber has asked him to stop.) During his first term, according to a former White House press secretary, one of his aides was assigned to play him show tunes whenever Trump was about to fly off the handle.
At the Kennedy Center, Trump has been able to indulge his inner theater kid. Leaked audio of his first meeting with the board as chair found him waxing poetic about a memorable visit to see Cats on Broadway. “All of a sudden the lights go on and you see these people moving so incredibly, like nobody can move except a professional dancer,” he marveled. He considered Betty Buckley, who originated the featured role of Grizabella in Cats, a revelation. “Of all the great voices and stars, bigger stars than her, she had the best voice,” he said. He made a point of saying that he tended to be a purist when it comes to recasting Broadway shows. “Oftentimes it seems the original is the best,” he mused, like any teenage Hamilton fan ready to throw down for Phillippa Soo’s Eliza.
If his renovation turned bulldozing of the East Wing is any indication, Trump’s “rebuilding” of the Kennedy Center is likely to be drastic — another chance for the president to reshape federal buildings to his own preferences; another chance for the man who plastered his name across shoddy gilded towers around the world to put his name on a new building. But it also gives Trump a chance to put his stamp on a world that he has plainly always loved, and which has, just as plainly, never really loved him back.
