Trump Said He Would Rid the Kennedy Center of ‘Woke.’ He Injected His Own Politics Instead.

When President Donald Trump announced a takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last year, he claimed to be fighting a specific sort of cultural rot at the Washington, D.C., institution. “We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center,” he said in February 2025. “So I’ll be there until such time as it gets to be running right.”

The president abandoned that in May 2026, after a federal judge ruled that the center was illegally renamed after Trump. Trump’s remedy for a “woke” Kennedy Center was to replace one alleged strain of political capture with another.

The center operates in a gray zone between the public and private sectors. Taxpayers fund building maintenance, operations, security, and repairs. Private donors and ticket sales, meanwhile, are the main source of money for programming. Originally known as the National Cultural Center, the venue was renamed by Congress in 1964 to honor President John F. Kennedy after his assassination. Memorials to former presidents are not unprecedented. Yet naming an arts institution after a politician was itself a political act, as was using taxpayer money to create it in the first place.

Trump is a singular character. But he has provided an example, however cartoonish, of what can happen when you give the public sector control over something that is inherently a private endeavor. The vast majority of Americans will never set foot inside the “national cultural center.” Why are they paying for it? And why does someone like Trump have any say over it?

The takeover was predictably disastrous. Ticket sales plummeted, artists canceled performances en masse, and donations reportedly declined. “It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center,” Washington National Opera artistic director Francesca Zambello, who said donor confidence had “shattered,” told The Guardian last year. “But if we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets in there, we have to consider other options.” The company left the Kennedy Center soon after.

In August 2025, at the height of the takeover, Parade arrived at the Kennedy Center. The musical tells the story of Leo Frank, a man whom historians widely agree was wrongly convicted of murder. After his death sentence was commuted to life in prison, he was lynched by vigilantes.

Parade was relocated to the center’s Eisenhower Theater from its opera house, which is more than twice the size, amid weak ticket sales. The show is a powerful exploration of antisemitism, media malpractice, racial dynamics in the South, and tribalism—the type of complicated story that is tailor-made to transcend partisan fractures. At Trump’s Kennedy Center, it played to a sparsely filled house.