President Donald Trump is trying to get rid of the “massive deficit” plaguing the storied cultural institution he is trying to rename after himself.
Trump, 79, blames himself for plummeting sales at the Kennedy Center.
“People don’t realize that the Trump Kennedy Center has suffered a massive deficit over the years, like everything else, and I’m in it just to save it and make it better than it was before if possible!” he wrote in a Truth Society post on Monday.
President Donald Trump is distancing himself from plummeting sales at the Kennedy Center. / Donald Trump on the Truth Society
Ticket sales have struggled since Trump reinvented the once-venerable arts institution in his image in February.
In October, nearly nine months after Trump took office, a Washington Post analysis of ticketing data found that sales at the Kennedy Center’s three largest performance venues — the Opera House, the Concert Hall and the Eisenhower Theater — were the worst in three years.
Data from September 3 to October 19 last year showed that just 57% of tickets for a typical production, including “giveaways” or tickets given to staff or media, were sold, compared with 93% in fall 2024 and 80% in fall 2023, the outlet reported.
Trump renamed the cultural institution after himself without congressional approval. /Anadolu/Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
This is largely thanks to prominent artists and performance groups pulling out of scheduled performances—many of them in protest of the Kennedy Center’s MAGAfication. This month alone, the center has been hit by a large number of cancellations.
Grammy Award-winning soprano Renee Fleming withdrew last week due to what the center called a “scheduling conflict.” The Martha Graham Dance Company, the oldest such group in the United States, also canceled April performances without providing an explanation. The Washington National Opera also ended its five-year residency at the Kennedy Center earlier this month.
But Trump’s assertion that the Kennedy Center has “suffered massive deficits for many years” has been disputed by former staff at the institution.
The Kennedy Center’s new chief financial officer, Donna Arduin, claimed in a March email to staff that the organization was facing a $100 million deficit. But staff told The Washington Post that number was inaccurate.
“The suggestion that our operating deficit exceeds $100 million is inaccurate,” a staff member with direct knowledge of the center’s finances told the outlet. “Our audited fiscal 2023 financial statements, publicly available through ProPublica, show that this number does not include important sources of nonprofit revenue such as donations, grants and endowment support.”
The staff member added: “Nonprofit organizations are designed to rely on philanthropic and institutional support to accomplish their mission. Using an ‘earned revenue minus expenses’ framework oversimplifies the situation and adopts a for-profit perspective that does not reflect how a nonprofit business model operates.”
In December, the Trump-appointed board of directors announced that it would rename the venue the Trump-Kennedy Center, although it would require congressional approval.
