On the evening of March 23rd, the Kennedy Center honored Conan O’Brien with the 2025 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The ceremony, which attracted a mix of comedy stars and arts-adjacent members of D.C.’s beau monde, was the biggest event held by the center since February, when President Trump purged eighteen members of the nonpartisan board of directors and installed himself as chairman. With the exception of a few half-hearted references to “new management,” the currency of the night was encomiums, not political critiques. O’Brien, when his turn came to speak, made veiled jabs in the President’s general direction. (Mark Twain, he pointed out, hated bullies and defined patriotism as “supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it.”) But if the evening had a true villain, it wasn’t Trump but Jay Leno, who took “The Tonight Show” back from O’Brien, in 2010, after pledging to retire.
The ceremony was held in the center’s Concert Hall, a 2,465-seat statement piece in white walls and coppery-red carpets, which was renovated in 1997 and conveyed a warm, slightly dilapidated grandeur. Afterward, guests departed for a party at the Reach, a 2019 addition spearheaded by the Kennedy Center’s former president Deborah Rutter. The seventy-two-thousand-square-foot complex of pavilions, galleries, and studios is home to much of the institution’s social-impact programming, which is aimed toward supporting marginalized artists and audiences. Last year, the annex announced a two-year residency program with Play Play DC, a collective that curates “refreshing, creative, fun, healing, and playful experiences for grown and queer adults,” and Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate.
These offerings largely pay for themselves with donations specifically set aside for social impact, but Trump and his allies argue that such “wokey” events are repelling audiences and draining the center’s resources. At a board meeting on March 17th, the President declared his intention to make the center “hot again” by staging more popular programming. Regaling trustees with memories of his first time seeing “Cats,” he noted that a Broadway hit “does well” at the center and that “we are going to have some really good shows.” He also spoke of wanting more control over the Kennedy Center Honors, the institution’s flagship awards ceremony, which has recognized such figures as Bonnie Raitt, Steven Spielberg, and Paul McCartney. Trump complained that past picks have been “radical-left lunatics” and named as possible invitees Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, and the casino impresario Steve Wynn, a major donor; he also suggested that hosting duties for the event would by necessity fall to him, the “king of ratings.” The center’s new president, Richard Grenell, who served as Ambassador to Germany and acting director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term, has shared few details about his programming plans but has promised a “big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”
Both Trump and Grenell were conspicuously absent from the Twain festivities. At the after-party, as donors swanned past white-clothed tables bearing wilting bouquets of truffle-dusted fries, young Kennedy Center staff members, identifiable by their badges, clustered around, looking giddy and on edge. A few days earlier, Tavish Forsyth, an associate artistic lead at the Washington National Opera’s Opera Institute, had posted a YouTube video in which he stripped naked and recited a thirty-five-minute spoken-word poem about whether he should quit his job, after which he was promptly fired. The week of the ceremony, between five and ten employees had resigned. More were waiting until after the gala to quit. “We’re working extra to cover all the people we’re losing but we still don’t know what the outcome will be for our jobs personally or the programs we support at large,” a staffer told me.
Two days after the event, at least five members of the Kennedy Center’s social-impact team, including its vice-president and artistic director, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, were let go. Joseph, who had directed the division since 2019, told me he understands the official motivation to be financial. (A document obtained by NPR reportedly stated that the decision was based on the center’s “staffing needs.”) Speaking to the Washington Reporter, Grenell outlined his plan to cut back on “niche” offerings, saying, “We had spent way too much on programming that doesn’t bring in any revenue.” Former staffers stress that the mission of the Kennedy Center, a nonprofit founded in 1971, is not to make money but to represent the best of American culture. A former employee familiar with the center’s finances told me: “It is simply not accurate to say the center’s finances are in poor health. In fact, under Rutter’s leadership the center’s endowment grew more than fifty per cent.” Between 2014, when Rutter became president, and 2023, the most recent year for which tax records are publicly available, the center’s total assets increased from $470 million to $633 million. For six of those years, it ran a surplus, and the two lean years coincided with COVID’s decimation of the performing arts. “The balance sheets are proof it was in good financial health,” the former employee said.
By most measures, Trump’s takeover has darkened the center’s financial picture. Ticket sales fell by fifty per cent in early February, and haven’t rebounded. Several large donors have paused their infusions, a former staffer told me, until they have a clearer sense of the place’s new direction. Since early February, the institution has also refunded more than a hundred thousand dollars in small donations, the checks for a hundred or three hundred dollars that concertgoers regularly write as bond-cementing exercises—a worrying sign given that traditional nonprofit fund-raising often revolves around modest recurring gifts. One staffer expressed concern that DOGE’s ravaging of the federal workforce would shrink the center’s audience and donor base by slashing their disposable income.
Since the regime change, there has been a steady drip of resignations and cancellations by prominent performers, including the opera singer Renée Fleming and the comedian Issa Rae. On March 5th, Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that “Hamilton” would not be appearing at the center’s semiquincentennial celebration for the Declaration of Independence, next year, because “it’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it . . . we’re not going to be a part of it.” Several other productions, including “Legally Blonde,” have been postponed or called off—a potentially devastating development, as Broadway shows function as the organization’s cash cows. So many artists have quietly pulled out of the 2025-26 season that the center has had to keep delaying its schedule announcements. The Kennedy Center usually unrolls its musical-theatre offerings in April, but, “at this point, I have no idea when we’ll be able to announce a theatre season,” one staff member told me.
In an unintentional nod to its namesake’s Catholicism, the Kennedy Center is a sort of trinity: performance venue, cultural center, and “living memorial” to Kennedy himself. Like all nonprofit arts institutions, it represents a delicate ecology of artists, audiences, donors, and administrators. In 2023, the center’s revenue was about two hundred and eighty-six million dollars. Around forty-five million dollars, or sixteen per cent, of its money comes from the federal government, and is earmarked for maintenance and building operations. The rest comes from ticket sales, donations, and space rentals. When the center is functioning correctly, its crowd-pleasing events bankroll art that is not always supported by the mainstream. The Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra, for instance, are revenue drags, which the center has to subsidize to the tune of nearly thirty million dollars annually. But, over time, these offerings draw gifts from donors confident that they are underwriting a vision they believe in; they also generate prestige, lure talent, and prop up endangered national art forms.
As evidence of malfeasance, Donna Arduin, the new chief financial officer, wrote in an e-mail to staff that Rutter and her team had bequeathed the center an operating deficit of more than a hundred million dollars. But several employees called Arduin’s claim misleading, as she referenced only earned revenue—box-office profits minus expenses—and not contributions, which, in a typical year, comprise about forty per cent of the center’s revenue. (In an e-mail to the Washington Post, the new head of public relations, Roma Daravi, wrote: “I understand this can be confusing to grasp. An ‘operating deficit’ is the net margin from operations. Net margin is revenues minus expenses. The extreme mismanagement of funds is certainly shocking and was designed to leave the Center in the red.”) An employee also disputed Grenell’s complaint, two days after he took over, that “there is ZERO cash on hand,” pointing out that, because theatre tours are seasonal, “cash on hand” fluctuates throughout the year and is a flawed benchmark. Certainly, the person said, there are ill-advised shows that lose money. Trump’s two-hour appearance at the Kennedy Center on March 17th—during which he peacocked on a balcony and bragged about his musical aptitude—cost the organization more than fifty thousand dollars.
Sprucing up the Kennedy Center building has emerged as a priority for Trump, the real-estate grandee; during his visit, he groused that his predecessors had left it in “tremendous disrepair” and mused about covering the exposed columns with his signature marble. Grenell, who has accused the previous leadership of “criminal” financial mismanagement, submitted that the federal funds designated for physical upkeep had been spent on D.E.I. initiatives, a claim that is contradicted by publicly available records. (Since 2020, one of the members of the Kennedy Center’s audit committee—which is responsible for monitoring its outlays—has been the Trump appointee Pam Bondi.)
Mary Helen Bowers, who joined the Kennedy Center board near the end of Trump’s first term, told me that she was excited for a “return to commonsense programming.” She’d been dismayed by “drag shows at a family theatre.” (One of the more than two thousand events hosted at the center last year was “Dragtastic Dress Up,” a gathering with snacks and lip-synching by the artist Tara Hoot, who bills her act as “Mr. Rogers in a dress.”) “That’s telling a large part of the American population, ‘Your family values aren’t important to us,’ ” Bowers said.
Bowers, who trained as a professional ballerina, is married to Paul Dans, one of the architects of Project 2025. When I asked whether she personally felt accepted by the old leadership, she paused. “Superficially, yes,” she said. “But I voiced complaints and concerns . . . that anything that would be more sexually oriented shouldn’t be geared toward families, for lots of different reasons, if nothing else it’s simply bad business. When I shared those thoughts, I don’t know that anything was really done other than ‘Hey, Mary Helen, thanks for letting us know.’ ”
Going forward, Bowers said that the board would focus on “getting the center into better financial health, really honing in on what people want to see and which shows produce higher attendance and revenues.” She was confident that Trump could right the ship. “We have one of the best businessmen in the world stepping in and putting a lot of energy into turning the Kennedy Center around,” she told me, referring to the President, “and I think the finances will reflect that.”
According to one former administrator, Trump’s leadership team has brought in its own fund-raisers, whose strategy seems rooted in political, rather than arts-based, fund-raising. “There’s more of an expectation of access to the chairman” in exchange for sponsorship, the person said. Grenell, who spent the Biden years developing luxury tourist sites in Serbia and Albania, suggested at a recent meeting that Trump’s plans to beautify the center were advancing; a proposal was under way to refurbish the lounges in front of the main theatres. Foreign governments—he expressed interest in seeking donations from the Gulf states and Japan—would fund the renovations. An employee described Nick Meade, Grenell’s chief of staff, prowling around campus “trying to see where else we can put a lounge or a bar or any space to put a donor name on.”
