Is Trump’s Wreckage of the Kennedy Center an Opportunity for Something Better?

A judge has ruled Donald Trump’s name must be removed from the Kennedy Center and an impending two-year closure for renovations canceled. So the question is, now what?

A furious Trump threatens to walk away from the whole thing and spits out his contempt. His Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, says over the weekend he’s not sure if or when the name will come off. Whatever happens, in a little more than a year, Trump has managed to run aground one of America’s cultural treasures, and relaunching it, whatever that looks like, will be a long and arduous process.

So a few observations: The place is now being run by the janitor. Actually, it’s unkind to call him that. Matt Floca came up through operations, the facility systems that keep a large building running, and he’s probably pretty good at it. When Ric Grenell, the Trump loyalist who wanted to be Secretary of State but was handed the Kennedy Center instead, departed in March, Floca was who the Trump-appointed board reached for. He’s a metaphor for what Trump and his board think the Center is—a real estate venue, a glamorous roadhouse, not a center of culture or an idea.

If Floca’s not exactly the janitor, he’s also not someone with an artistic vision or experience in translating the Center’s mission into something meaningful.

Then consider the Grenell directive that pushed Washington National Opera out the door in January. Grenell said that productions had to be fully funded before they’re staged. While that might sound like fiscal discipline to an outsider, it’s actually a fantasy, because no opera company on earth finances itself that way. Big productions subsidize small ones, revenue is booked across a run, not before the curtain. Ticket sales, grants, and gifts are taken in on different schedules and never all in advance. The WNO had no choice but to leave because the Kennedy Center started acting like a landlord demanding rent up front from a tenant whose business model the landlord never bothered to understand.

Side by side — a facilities manager in charge and artists required to pre-fund their own risk — the stories are revealing. This is what a performing arts center looks like if you strip away the mission and only the venue remains. Trouble is, Trump didn’t invent this formulation, he actually revealed a weakness in the performing arts center premise itself.

When the Kennedy Center opened in 1971 as a living memorial, it became the closest thing America has to a national stage. That matters more here than in it does in many other countries, because the United States never built a culture ministry, never funded the arts the way peer countries do, and never decided as a country that culture was important infrastructure. The Kennedy Center, then, was more a symbol or a gesture.

The performing arts center model (the Kennedy Center is a Lincoln Center contemporary), was originally an urban-renewal-era notion. Gather together resident companies under one roof, give them a shared brand, a shared board, a shared capital campaign, and efficiency and prestige would do the rest and the consolidation would produce a center of cultural gravity.

So did it? What exactly is the artistic argument for housing an opera company, a symphony orchestra, a theater program, and a touring Broadway road-house on one campus, beyond a shared loading dock and a joint donor list? The answer ain’t nothing. But it’s also not an unambiguous win either.

A performing arts campus shouldn’t just exist on the geographic logic of a mall. What do these “partners” have to do with one another? Do they share a mission or are they competing for customers? If you’re selling them under a common brand, is that brand distinctive and meaningful or, because it has to answer to many masters, does the brand retreat to the generic? If you’re going to bundle, is the bundle worth more than the sum of its parts?

Trump and his crew see the Kennedy Center as a venue to be booked and a business to be justified in tickets sold, prestige acts and profits. A cultural institution with only a brand and a building, then, is maximally easy to capture.

What actually binds these organizations together? If the answer is proximity and overhead, then the Kennedy Center is a cultural shopping mall with a federal charter — anchor tenants, shared foot traffic, a brand that’ gets a little more generic every year. If something should bind them, it has to be an artistic or civic argument. Can anyone articulate something compelling? That vacuum is precisely why a facilities manager can run the place.

The Kennedy Center is national in its charter and in almost nobody’s actual life. It’s a building most Americans will never enter, in a city most of them visit rarely if at all. In a country that refuses to build cultural infrastructure, the symbol carries enormous weight — but does almost no direct work in the cultural life of the nation it claims to serve.

And maybe that’s enough. One reason to build the Kennedy Center was that before it, culture in the Capital was modest compared to other world cities. In the 1950s and 60s, the Soviet Union was aggressively training its artists as a showcase for its culture. Though the US made some stabs at promoting American culture abroad, it was popular culture — Hollywood and pop music — that organically got all the attention. The garish red draperies and carpets and stark white marble and oversized common spaces of the complex were built to impress; but they’re no one’s idea of an aesthetic or artistic masterpiece.

And if its only purpose is to be the Capital’s roadhouse, then okay. But the Kennedy Center has always had aspirations to be that national showcase. Its charter mentions being a “living memorial” to JFK. And in the absence of a national arts policy, that performing arts center is a symbol that matters.

The Kennedy Center is a treasure. Not just for what it has been, but because of what it represents. But the practicalities of providing a roof for a bunch of artistic enterprises that essentially have nothing much to do with one another — or worse, having to squabble dysfunctionally among themselves for resources — are an argument for the need for something better. The shared real estate has stunted its resident organizations’ autonomy and identities.

Trump has spent his second term taking a wrecking ball to national institutions, and nearly all the arguments about them are about restoration — how to put the old thing back together when he’s gone. But perhaps this catastrophe is an opportunity to rethink what the Kennedy Center could be. The question is not how do we get the Center back to 2024 but what should this have been all along, and is the wreckage an opportunity to finally build it?

I think it is. At a time when the bottom is falling out of our national arts infrastructure and cultural institutions nationwide are struggling or collapsing, maybe a reborn Kennedy Center could be recreated as an idea with real national impact.

Perhaps the detail worth building on isn’t the lawsuit or the name or the $257 million renovation, but the WNO at George Washington University. The opera company left the building and survived. It will stage its 70th-anniversary season a couple miles away, and the work will go on, because the work was never the real estate. The company is its people, its repertoire, its relationships with audiences and artists. The address was a convenience, not the institution.

Maybe that’s the seed that could animate what comes next. A few ideas:

Decouple the idea from the building. Reconceive the Kennedy Center as a national instrument rather than a national venue — a commissioning engine, a touring and co-production network, a presence that shows up in the many American cities that have no flagship of their own. the center of a network that grows stronger as it builds. National in function, not just on the nameplate. The building on the Potomac becomes one node in that network, not the entire institution and not the hostage.

This is the open source software model, where many contribute to the health of the network, but where the organizer of the network becomes first among equals. There is great power in this role.

Federate the resident companies instead of renting to them. Give the National Symphony, the opera, the theater programs real artistic and financial autonomy, bound by a shared national mission — a common commissioning and touring mandate that gives them an actual reason to be related — rather than by a shared utility bill. The WNO’s move to GWU becomes a template for plural homes, not a defection.

Take the artistic question of mission head on, then build for it. If the gain is a national stage for work that markets won’t fund and regions can’t host, structure the Center to do exactly that and stop pouring subsidy into the parts that are really just a competitive road-house any commercial promoter could run as well or better.

Then the building itself. Does it need a $257 million comprehensive reimagining, or is that the landlord perspective one more time, capital projects being the thing institutions reach for when they can no longer say what they’re for. Separate genuine maintenance from the dream of architectural rebirth. The most radical move available might be to spend far less on the box and far more on the network.

And in the meantime, until Congress reasserts control and until the politics turn, protect the constituent organizations by helping them build work outside the contested building, keep the national commissioning mission alive in a kind of exile, and treat the brand and the box as recoverable later. The idea outlives this administration only if we refuse to let it be held hostage to the address. The WNO has already shown how. The National Symphony is still hostage at the Center, but some negotiated ransom should be found to free it.

There’s great symbolism potential in all this, too. Trump has taken a wrecking ball to national institutions, and many are wondering how we recover. A Kennedy Center reconceived as distributed, resilient, and genuinely national and present in people’s lives rather than perched on a riverbank, is a strong symbol of resistance and rebirth.

Trump says the building may soon close, “probably never to open again.” But maybe the building’s fate isn’t what we should be organizing around.

The real tragedy would be a smaller and more permanently damaged culture icon: a nation’s commitment to culture left so diminished that it could live or die on one tired box on the river. The question, let’s be honest, isn’t really about whether the Kennedy Center survives. It will in some form. The question is can it be something more, something better, something built for what the arts need today.