Trump Reportedly Plans Two-Year Kennedy Center Shutdown (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I'm standing outside the Kennedy Center because President Trump just announced that he is going to be shutting it down for two years, starting in July. It has been a rather rough year for the Kennedy Center, which is supposed to be apolitical. It started in February when the president fired a number of members of the board and replaced them with his own supporters. And this was supposedly being done to protest so-called woke programming, although the truth is there was a whole bunch of different programming appealing to a wide variety of tastes. But in any case, because of what the president was doing, artists started canceling their performances here. And in fact, it got so bad that last October, the Washington Post reported that ticket sales for orchestra, theater, and dance performances were the lowest they had been since the COVID pandemic. Then the president took the unusual step of, as you see behind me in December, changing the name of the Kennedy Center to the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Kennedy Center, of course, was named after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And it was so designated by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. And needless to say, artists who didn't like President Trump or what he's doing to the country or what he's doing to the Kennedy Center continue to cancel performances. Rick Grenell, who is now the director of the Kennedy Center, he's a longtime Trump supporter. He also participated in the election lies of 2020. When asked about this, told PBS that they were unfairly not talking about the fact that lots of performing arts centers were having struggles and that President Trump had raised a lot of corporate dollars. Now the president has decided he is going to close the Kennedy Center for two years to focus on, quote, construction, revitalization, and complete rebuilding. We don't know what that means exactly. And we don't know if he's even going to bother to get permission from Congress. It also just seems to be a fact that whatever spin the White House wants to put on this, a lot of artists and a lot of would-be performing arts goers have voted with their feet. And the voting for the president was not positive, though, of course, I'm sure he'll reject that because he tends to reject negative election results.