What Comes Next for the Kennedy Center?

“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”

– John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963, remarks at Amherst College

On February 7th, 2025, President Donald Trump announced his intention to fire members of the board of trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and name himself chairman. “At my direction,” Trump wrote on his social media website, “we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN.” Within a few days, Board members had been dismissed and replaced with Trump appointees, and on February 12, 2025, the newly-selected Board officially elected Trump as chair. Since then, Kennedy Center consultants including musician Ben Folds and singer Renée Fleming have resigned. Actress Issa Rae, author Louise Penny, and several others have canceled appearances. The megahit musical “Hamilton” is also canceling its 2026 run at the Kennedy Center. According to a recent article in The Guardian, a source from within the Center says further big names are withdrawing. “It’s more than you’ve heard so far. That is the existential threat we’re facing.” The Kennedy Center has since released a complete list of cancellations over the last six months. The list includes as many as 26 scheduled performances at the Kennedy Center that are now canceled or postponed.

Commissioned in 1955 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Kennedy Center is the result of Eisenhower’s conviction that there should be a center of culture in Washington, “an artistic Mecca.” Eisenhower was succeeded by President John F. Kennedy, a lifelong supporter and advocate of the arts, who took the lead in raising funds for the new National Cultural Center. After Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, legislation was signed renaming the Center as a living memorial to the late president and a symbol of commitment to what he called “our contribution to the human spirit.” 

Critics of Trump’s takeover consider it antithetical to the ideals on which the Kennedy Center was founded. The Guardian’s source went so far as to label the move “warfare,” “an attack on freedom of expression and speech,” “repressive,” and “un-American.” The general fear that is spreading amongst patrons of the Center is far from unfounded; Trump’s “coup” may very well mean a loss of freedom of expression. Kerry Kennedy, JFK’s niece, and president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, admits: “I do worry about it, not as an abstraction but because we’ve already seen it with the AP [Associated Press] being barred from White House events for refusing to go along with what the White House dictates. That’s very dangerous for democracy and has grave implications for what will happen not just at the Kennedy Center but for government funding of the arts across the country.” What the future of the Kennedy Center holds remains to be seen, but the slew of cancellations and denouncements does not bode well for the cultural center of our nation.