President Donald Trump said over the weekend he did not plan to completely tear down the Kennedy Center, but needed to close it down for two years for renovations so extensive that the steel structure will be “fully exposed.” Trump’s Sunday evening post announcing the July 4 closure and rebuilding of the performing arts center “sent shock waves through the center, Washington and the broader arts world,” The Washington Post said. Even some of Trump’s handpicked board members “were blindsided.”
Who said what
“I’m not ripping it down,” Trump told reporters. “I’ll be using the steel,” the “structure” and “some of the marble,” and when it reopens, “it’ll be brand new and really beautiful.” He put the cost at about $200 million. Trump’s “very specific ideas about what he wants to do to the building” do not “align with the building’s current state,” CNN said. Many people “fear another East Wing situation, with Washington one day waking up to a demolition beyond anything residents had contemplated.”
Trump presented his decision to close the living memorial to President John F. Kennedy as a “pragmatic one that was reached with the help of experts,” but it “struck his critics as little more than a face-saving maneuver, since the place has been in a downward spiral ever since he named himself chairman,” The New York Times said. In recent months, “artists stopped performing,” ticket sales “nose-dived,” then Trump “put his name on the building and hosted the honors himself” and “ratings plummeted.”
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Previous “large-scale renovations” to the Kennedy Center, including a $175 million remodel finished in 2019, were done “without shutting down the entire center,” said the Post. So the planned two-year closure “suggests either that Trump doesn’t know how to sustain a viable performing arts center” or “has plans to remake it into something unrecognizable.”
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
