New Kennedy Center board elects Trump chair, fires Rutter as president

The Kennedy Center board of trustees voted Wednesday afternoon to install President Donald Trump as chairman of the board, cementing the plan Trump announced Friday to overhaul the storied arts institution with him at its helm. It also voted to terminate Deborah Rutter as president and made former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell interim president, according to multiple people with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Trump attended the virtual board meeting. The refashioned board of trustees is made up entirely of Trump appointees, many of whom were appointed after he terminated all of former president Joe Biden’s appointees. New members include White House personnel office director Sergio Gor, chief of staff Susie Wiles and Usha Vance.

“It is a Great Honor to be Chairman of The Kennedy Center, especially with this amazing Board of Trustees,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after the vote. “We will make The Kennedy Center a very special and exciting place!”

Meanwhile, musician Ben Folds and opera singer Renée Fleming said they were stepping down as artistic advisers with the center, as did the treasurer of its board of trustees, TV producer Shonda Rhimes, her spokesman confirmed. In a statement Fleming said she would leave “out of respect” to both Rutter and former board chair David M. Rubenstein, adding, “I’ve treasured the bi-partisan support for this institution as a beacon of America at our best.” Folds said on Instagram that he would leave his role with the National Symphony Orchestra.

Rutter tearfully addressed a packed room of Kennedy Center staff members after the vote at a meeting in the center’s Reach complex.

“I hope I’m not saying goodbye as a friend and colleague to all of you, but I am leaving now,” Rutter said. “And I just want us to keep these ideals that we wear in our lanyard central to the work that we do. And they are from JFK and his family. They were the ones that confirmed them and added one. So let’s remember: courage, justice, freedom, service and gratitude.”

“I hope you know how much I care about all of you, and I pray for the best for each of you,” she concluded, as staffers rose in applause.

Before the vote, at least one board member had grown agitated by what he considered resistance from Rutter to ideas he had pressed. Paolo Zampolli, appointed to the board by Trump in 2020, sent her a message on Monday obtained by The Post.

“As our President would like to see at the Center new development, and we previously discussed, these are the few topics that were never addressed on a proper time manner,” he wrote. “Maybe it should be the right time now.”

He attached an 11-point draft proposal to upgrade offerings at the Kennedy Center, some of them reviving ideas Zampolli floated upon his appointment. Among them were “thematic and cultural lounges” for Qatar, Israel, Africa and more “global representation”; partnerships with NASA or SpaceX for “artistic collaborations in zero gravity”; a blue-carpet, Valentino-designed fashion event inspired by Jacqueline Kennedy and new marina and ferry connections on the Potomac River.

As news of Trump’s appointment and Rutter’s termination spread on Wednesday, the Kennedy Center’s website crashed frequently, citing an overload of visitors.

On Monday, Trump named Grenell as the interim executive director of the Kennedy Center in a post on Truth Social. The position plunged leadership at the Kennedy Center into confusion, as the position “executive director” does not exist. Following Rutter’s address, employees were alerted that Grenell was expected to visit the building that day. The staff meeting concluded with several colleagues tearfully embracing one another before returning to work.

A termination email sent Friday by Gor to several Biden-appointed board members read: “On behalf of President Donald Trump I’m writing to inform you your position on the board of the Kennedy Center is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

The Kennedy Center removed the names of those who had been terminated from its list of board members and designated them as emeritus members. They included all of Biden’s appointees and its chair Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group and principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles.

Among the terminated board members were a mixture of political figures — such as former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Evan Ryan, the former White House Cabinet secretary — and artists such as musician Jon Batiste and event planner Bryan Rafanelli.

This marks the first time a president has removed his predecessor’s board members at the Kennedy Center and installed himself as chair.

“So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday evening. “But we have, I guess, a whole new group of people going in. … I’m going to be chairman of it, and we’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke.”

The day before, he told reporters aboard Air Force One that “some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on.” He also said he has not visited the center but receives reports on it.

“I didn’t want to go,” he said. “There was nothing I wanted to see.”

Trump has cited the Kennedy Center hosting drag shows as one reason he wanted to reshape the institution. These were a tiny portion of the more than 2,000 shows the center hosts each year.

The musical “Schmigadoon!” finished its run last weekend, after Trump first posted his plans. Upon arriving to the Kennedy Center to perform in the musical, actor Ann Harada said, “Everybody [who worked there] was very sad. They sort of felt like, ‘We don’t know what is going to happen.’”

“It just feels like artists and freedom of speech and all of that is under attack,” she added. “... It just feels very Berlin in the ’30s. And no one wants to feel that way.”

When the show started, however, the audience, at least, seemed to put it out of their mind — and seemed hungry to consume the art. Harada compared the experience to the Beatles playing at Shea Stadium.

“I’ve never felt an audience respond like that in my life,” she said.

The Kennedy Center receives roughly 2 million visitors a year, and is funded by a mixture of government-appropriated funding, private donation and ticket sales revenue. Its operating budget in 2024 was $268 million. Of that, roughly $125 million came from earned revenue, such as ticket sales, $95 million from private donations and fundraising and $45 million from federal appropriations, with another $4 million drawn from its endowment.

The federal funding goes to operations and maintenance, not arts programming.

Trump maintained a curt relationship with the Kennedy Center and the arts throughout his first presidential term, breaking a bipartisan tradition by not attending the Kennedy Center Honors ceremonies. Some honorees in 2017 had threatened to boycott events including him.

Before Trump announced his plans, the Kennedy Center was already in the midst of change. In late January, Rutter announced plans to step down as president of the institution at the end of 2025, at which point she would have held the position for 11 years.

“I don’t feel excited,” Rutter said in an interview with The Washington Post at the time. “If anything, I feel kind of sad. But I know that this is the right time.”

Rubenstein previously announced his own plans to step down in 2025, but a search for his replacement came up empty, so he agreed to remain chair until September 2026.

“The work of artists doesn’t always make us feel comfortable, but it sheds light on the truth,” Rutter said Wednesday in a statement. “Much like our democracy itself, artistic expression must be nurtured, fostered, prioritized, and protected.”