#kennedy-center

#kennedy-center

The Brentano String Quartet had finished their performance when a special guest dropped in backstage: the US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We thanked her for everything she had done for our country, recalls violinist Mark Steinberg. It was a nice moment. The year was 2016 and the place was the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

I think all of you are people that appreciate the arts and culture. This is now about the Kennedy Center. It's time for us, it's time for us, it's time for us to rise up and speak,

The president announced on Truth Social that the recently renamed center will close on July 4 for two full years of renovations. No better way to celebrate 250 years as a nation than by shutting down our center for the performing arts! Most high schools, given the opportunity to shut down their performing-arts departments, don't view it as an exciting, patriotic celebration, and prefer to have a bake sale.

Translation: It has been brought to my attention that due to the name change (but nobody's telling me it's due to the name change), but it's been brought to my attention that entertainers are canceling left and right, and I have determined that since the name change no one wants to perform there any longer,

I have determined that the fastest way to bring The Trump Kennedy Center to the highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur, is to cease Entertainment Operations for an approximately two year period of time, he said in a post on his Truth Social platform. The temporary closure will produce a much faster and higher quality result! The closure will start on July 4, to coincide with the 250th Independence Day celebration.

Kennedy Center vice president Kevin Couch has stepped down just 12 days after being appointed to the role. During his short stint, Couch served as vice president of artistic programming at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, known as the Kennedy Center - the national cultural centre of the US. In December, Kennedy Center's board "unanimously" voted to rename the institution the Trump-Kennedy Center following Trump replacing the chairman with himself and removing existing board members.

A year ago just a year ago the Kennedy Center in Washington DC was a world-class centre for the performing arts. It had a resident opera company, respected artistic teams, and a run of the acclaimed musical Hamilton to look forward to. It had a bipartisan board that upheld the dignity of an organisation that, since it was conceived of in the mid-20th century, had been treated with courtesy and supported by governments of both stripes.

In the wake of a slew of artist cancellations, Kennedy Center leadership says it wants to book "performers who aren't political." Apparently, that ethos doesn't extend to its film programming, as the Washington, DC venue is set to host the premiere of a new Melania Trump documentary on January 29th. The film, simply titled Melania, will be released in theaters worldwide by Amazon MGM on January 30th, 2026, reportedly as part of a $40 million licensing deal.

Toby Morton, a TV writer and producer who has worked on the long-running and joyfully offensive sitcom, said he purchased the domain in August after predicting the president would change the name from the Kennedy Center to the Trump Kennedy Center after he installed himself as chair and stocked the board with loyalists. The name change has brought turbulence to the institution, with several performers abruptly pulling out of scheduled concerts in protest.

Prior to changing its name to the Trump-Kennedy Center, its board reportedly adopted bylaws limiting voting to members appointed only by Donald Trump.

Recently, the Trump administration faced a similar situation. After Donald Trump purported to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, the jazz musician Chuck Redd withdrew from a planned Christmas Eve concert. The administration's response was somehow both more authoritarian and comic than the one in the movie. The Kennedy Center's president, Richard Grenell, announced that the Center intends to sue Redd for his impudence. Grennell's letter threatening legal action depicts Redd as a sad loser suffering "dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support" and "lagging" attendance whose withdrawal, paradoxically, is "very costly to a non-profit Arts institution."

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Screenshot via Comedy Central A prescient writer for the irreverent Comedy Central show South Park correctly predicted that President Donald Trump would slap his name on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, so he bought up Trump-Kennedy Center web domains to troll the president. Writer Toby Morton bought the trumpkennedycenter.org and trumpkennedycenter.com domains back in August and is now plotting how best to parody Trump's vanity, according to The Washington Post.

I think it wasthese days you don't know what has to be confirmed or notbut it looked like, on the Kennedy Center, they started putting the name Trump on it, Segura began. Rogan confirmed, Yeah, he added his name to it. Segura replied, Yeah, it's crazy. And he took out the Kennedy Rose Garden. You're like, what? Take it away. Now it's like a cement f*cking plot.