The takeover was swift, and total. Over the course of a few days in February, President Donald Trump purged the historically bipartisan board of the Kennedy Center, the federally backed performing arts center in Washington, DC, of any members appointed by Democrats and gave the shiv to billionaire David Rubenstein, the board chair first appointed by George W. Bush. Those trustees were replaced with Trump loyalists, Palm Beach neighbors, fundraising kingpins, the wife of a Cabinet member, and—why not?—Lee “Proud to Be an American” Greenwood. Trump then called for a vote to install himself as the chair, which passed overwhelmingly. Longtime director Deborah Rutter was fired in short order.
The new interim director, Trump announced, would be Richard Grenell, who served separate stints as acting director of national intelligence and German ambassador in the president’s first term, and is already serving as an envoy for “special missions” in the Trump 2.0 diplomatic corps. Grenell, who goes by Ric, has claimed to be the first openly gay Cabinet member in US history. (He was an acting director, and was never confirmed, while Pete Buttigieg, who served as transportation secretary in Joe Biden’s Cabinet, was.) In the run-up to inauguration, he made no secret of his desire to serve as Trump’s secretary of state. According to Politico, a Grenell associate offered MAGA influencers as much as five figures to promote Grenell’s campaign for the position—only for him to lose it to Marco Rubio. (Grenell told Politico that “none of this is true.”) The nation’s performing arts center would be part of his consolation prize. And it came with an edict: Make it sizzle.
“It got very wokey and some people were not happy with it,” Trump told the Kennedy Center’s staff in a phone call that was recorded by a participant and leaked to CNN last month. “I think we’re gonna make it hot. We made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.”
There was immediate outcry as several performers announced they would be canceling their upcoming appearances at the Kennedy Center. Issa Rae and Rhiannon Giddens nixed their shows, and Ben Folds resigned from his position as an adviser of the center-affiliated National Symphony Orchestra. Comedian W. Kamau Bell played a previously scheduled set as a protest, vowing to “turn the ‘wokey’ up to eleven!”
Then came a bombshell on Wednesday evening: Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that a planned run of Hamilton at the Kennedy Center tied to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence would be canceled. The hit musical’s creator said it would be “untenable for us to participate in an organization that had become so deeply politicized.”
“We’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center,” Miranda told The New York Times in a joint statement with lead producer Jeffrey Seller.
Grenell seemed blindsided by the news—he took to X to claim that Miranda had told the press before alerting the center.
“This is a publicity stunt that will backfire,” he wrote.
The biggest Broadway hit in decades canceling such a run can only exacerbate an already ongoing dent in ticket sales. According to a report in The Washington Post, the center’s box office took a 50% hit in the first week after Trump’s takeover. As the story has crested and receded and crested again in the national news, long-standing Kennedy Center staffers are only now beginning to experience their new realities.
“There are a bunch of new people on our floor that nobody really knows what they are doing,” one source currently working there told me when we spoke this week. “They went around and introduced themselves to us last week…. They have weird titles at the Kennedy Center, positions that never existed before. One of them’s chief of staff, and I’m like, I don’t, okay, what? It’s just like Grenell’s people.”
Speaking of titles, Grenell’s is not, apparently, “interim executive director,” as has been reported. In his missives to staff, he’s referred to as “president, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” When he’s spoken about in meetings, sources said, it is almost always as simply “the ambassador,” a reference to his previous post as chief US diplomat in Berlin during Trump’s first term.
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For all the tumult happening inside the Kennedy Center and in the swirl around it, the takeover appears to be slow going. That huge celebration of Christ that Grenell announced at CPAC to great MAGA fanfare? A source I spoke to said that they had conferred with several colleagues, and found that none had been privy to discussions of it internally; none had any indication it was going forward. Ditto for a Steve Bannon–hyped performance by the J6 Prison Choir, the collective of men prosecuted for their involvement in the deadly riots on January 6, a recording of which was coproduced and promoted by FBI director Kash Patel and played by Trump at rallies. (A rep for the Kennedy Center told the LA Times, “We do not have any information on this as a Kennedy Center–confirmed event.”)
Grenell’s first email to staff didn’t come until last Friday. He laid out some platitudes in a message riddled with syntactical errors. “I believe we must return to commonsense programming and upgrade our marketing strategy to include outreach to everyone,” he wrote. He also reiterated the claim, oft repeated by the administration, that the center was saddled with debt. (“If you go woke, you will go broke,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, discussing the matter in a statement to The Wall Street Journal last month.)
A brief note on the public-private finances of the Kennedy Center. According to The New York Times, the federal government does provide funding to the center, but specifically for the upkeep of the building. That amounts to 16% of the center’s total budget. Programming is funded in part by private donations and ticket sales. The Times reports that the center has a $163 million endowment, and a fundraising operation that took in nearly $141 million in contributions in 2023. There was a budget deficit of $1 million in 2024, according to the Times, but that’s not abnormal for a cultural institution—the Brooklyn Museum, by comparison, faces a projected $10 million deficit by the end of its fiscal year in June.
The early days of the purge included longtime Kennedy Center public relations executive Eileen Andrews, replaced by Roma Daravi, a hard-core Trump cheerleader and Fox News regular. Daravi’s office did not respond to questions for Grenell and the Kennedy Center for this story. On Thursday the newsletter the “Washington Reporter” published what it said was an “exclusive statement” from Daravi about the raft of cancellations.
Ric Grenell arrived in Washington in 1991, fresh out of the Harvard Kennedy School, to work on George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. He stayed in town after Bush lost, and at 28 found himself working as press secretary for Republican representative Mark Sanford at the peak of the Gingrich revolution in 1994. Around the time, The Washington Post published a profile of the young Grenell, a romp that highlighted his Logan Circle bachelor pad. At the time, according to the profile, he was hanging with liberal friends such as Arianna Huffington, admiring Hillary Clinton, worshipping Kathie Lee Gifford, and slamming beers on the bar-heavy strip of 18th Street in Adams Morgan. The headline was “Republican Party Animal.”
He left DC for Albany and then San Diego before returning once Republicans took back the White House in 2000, then spent eight years as a spokesperson to the US delegation to the United Nations. Once Obama came to town, he was ready to get out, especially after the State Department refused to name his partner, Matt Lashey, in the UN’s Blue Book, a guide to diplomats and their spouses, because they were gay and didn’t fit the State Department’s legal definition of “spouses” at the time.
Grenell moved to Los Angeles to try to get a job in Hollywood, and boasted of the Tinseltown bona fides he had honed in the public sector. He made a big deal out of the fact that he had worked in close contact with Ryan Gosling, through the actor’s involvement with the UN-affiliated Ugandan genocide group the Enough Project. He said he worked with George Clooney, and indeed the superstar did speak to the UN Security Council alongside UN ambassador John Bolton while Grenell was his spokesperson. (A rep for Bolton—whom Grenell has referred to as a “mentor” but is now on Trump’s enemies list—said he was not able to speak for this story.)
“He conflated brief, inconsequential meetings with A-listers like George Clooney and Ryan Gosling to bolster his credentials in Hollywood, but to very little success,” Brad Chase, Grenell’s former business partner, said.
Grenell ended up flacking for DaVita, a decidedly unsexy firm that makes kidney dialysis machines, not hit movies. There was a ton of money, but it was nowhere close to even the periphery of fame. He eventually founded his own communications firm, Capitol Media Partners, bringing Chase, his deputy at DaVita, along with him. And he finally got his celebrities, if not exactly the cream of the crop: Suzanne Somers, Gary Sinise, Sophie B. Hawkins, the telenovela star Kate del Castillo, who later connected El Chapo with Sean Penn. A close friend at the time was Bettina Sofia Viviano, a producer of the Adam Sandler cross-dressing comedy Jack and Jill. In 2021, Herschel Walker was forced to cancel a campaign appearance at Viviano’s house after she posted an almost impressively offensive image to her Twitter account: an anti-vax illustration that showed syringes in the shape of a swastika.
“He would jump for every opportunity, he would work with any D-lister,” Chase said.
By 2012, Grenell had signed on as a foreign policy spokesperson for the Romney campaign, but staffers immediately had to respond to his singular sense of humor on Twitter. He berated Newt and Callista Gingrich, and often mused about Rachel Maddow’s supposed celebrity doppelgänger. (Justin Bieber, according to Grenell.) After a few weeks, he resigned under pressure from the ultraconservative Christian right, which was critical of his sexual orientation and support for same-sex marriage.
Grenell was a bit in the wilderness after Obama won a second term, and appears to have taken on a number of foreign clients at CMP—a Moldovan oligarch, according to ProPublica; a British company that struck a deal with an Israeli billionaire who controls copper mines in the Congo, according to TPM; a nonprofit that, according to Hungarian outlet Atlatszo, was funded by Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government—and continued to tweet. An early online adversary was Susan E. Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, who later said that Grenell is “one of the most nasty, dishonest people I’ve ever encountered.” (This is something of a motif among those who have dealt with Grenell. “He’s a horrible, horrible human being,” Chase told me. “Ric is driven by the impotent rage of a man who dreamed of conquering DC and Hollywood despite never having an original idea in his life.”)
As the Republican presidential field started to take shape in 2015, Grenell was initially an adversary of Donald Trump, spitting out tweets that attacked him for his opposition to NATO. (They’ve all been deleted, but Politico dredged them up.) He also attended a fundraiser with Trump adversary John McCain in June of 2015, weeks before Trump said, “I like people who weren’t captured.” He switched sides early enough though, and earned enough MAGA bona fides to land the top diplomatic spot in Berlin shortly after the 2016 election.
His Instagrams from the period are of particular note for those looking to discern the cultural tastes of the man now sitting atop the most prestigious performing arts center of the nation’s capital. Among the pictures of him with the Trump family, his nieces and nephews, his dog Lola, and his partner Matt Lashey, there are a lot of concert shots.
He had great seats to see Britney Spears during her Vegas residency in May 2017, thanks to Mikey Pesante, a Spears backup dancer Grenell’s been tagged with on his feed. He was a regular attendee of Elton John’s Oscars party, and posted multiple pictures of Lady Gaga performing at the AmFAR gala in Los Angeles in October 2015. Here’s a sampling of the Broadway musicals and plays he’s posted about attending: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Hamilton—he was an OG fan back in June 2015, when it was a phenomenon downtown at the Public Theater and had yet to bow on Broadway—and Hand to God. In recent years he’s attended the music festivals Coachella and Stagecoach. In February 2021 he was a guest conductor of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra.
As for his interest in fine art, what hangs on his walls may be a surprise to the commander in chief, whose stated reasoning for the Kennedy Center leadership steamroll was, in part, its programming of drag shows. In multiple Instagram shots Grenell reveals that hanging on his wall in Palm Springs is a print by the artist Magnus Hastings, a photographer who shoots drag queens almost exclusively. (The performer in the shot is styled as Dorothy Gale.) “Drag is the fuel to my creative passion. It’s everything times 10!” Hastings has said.
Even before the Kennedy Center announcement, Grenell had a lot on his Trump II plate. He was in Venezuela February 1 to negotiate with Nicolás Maduro—whom the US still officially deems to be an illegitimate president—for the return of Venezuelan migrants in the US illegally. According to the Financial Times, two weeks later he was in Munich during a security conference when he met with the Romanian foreign minister and discussed the travel ban on Trump-loving influencer Andrew Tate, who has been accused of rape and human trafficking by prosecutors in Romania. (Grenell told the FT, referring to the Romanian foreign minister, “He saw me in the hallway and asked for a meeting. I didn’t know who he was,” and stated, “I support the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets.” Tate has denied the allegations.)
With so much programming scrapped or in limbo, staffers say the new regime has focused on matters it can control. Kennedy Center sources told me that Daravi must personally approve all marketing and communications texts to make sure they’re sufficiently devoid of what she deems to be DEI. “Speaking as a former professional ballet dancer, I cannot wait to see what [Trump] does there,” Daravi said on Fox News February 16. “There’s no more DEI pushed down America’s throat. That’s not what the American people want.”
So far, Daravi has announced at least one thing: Single-use plastic straws have returned to the Kennedy Center.
As for Grenell, his first public comments on programming choices came at CPAC, where he was interviewed onstage by Politico White House correspondent Dasha Burns.
“Well, we want to make art great again,” Grenell said.
“And what does that mean, sir?” Burns asked.
“Look, I, um, I don’t know for sure,” Grenell said.
He went on to repeat the same claim that the Kennedy Center “has no cash on hand and no reserves.”
Putting partisan reads of the center’s finances aside, fundraising will continue to be one of its greatest needs. Trump didn’t do himself any favors in this department by jettisoning Rubenstein, who gave more than $100 million himself in his years at the center, and was by all accounts a prodigious fundraiser. (A rep for Rubenstein said he wasn’t available for an interview.) There are no plans as to how the new board chair, Trump himself, will raise the funds that are needed to put on programming. At CPAC, Grenell mentioned that he’ll bring in blockbuster productions that will increase the box office: “We have to do the big productions that the masses and the public want to see,” he said.
On Thursday Grenell hosted a meeting of visiting foreign diplomats in the Kennedy Center’s REACH sector, in a place called the Skylight Pavilion, attended by second lady Usha Vance and RNC co-chair KC Crosbie. And on Wednesday came not the announcement of the new raft of programming, but instead the news that Grenell’s new colleagues had been coming to him with recommendations of what he could do to make the Kennedy Center great again. And he was ready to make one of them happen.
“I have heard your concerns and am happy to share that, beginning April 1, free parking will be provided to our full-time administrative employees,” he wrote in an email to staff.
The response among workers was positive, though the skeptics remained incredulous. If the Kennedy Center was broke, how could it afford to make the expensive parking free for hundreds of employees? Why is this the first priority? And will it actually go into effect on April Fools’ Day?
Later, a source sent along a copy of the email Grenell dispatched to his staff this week.
“We welcome your thoughts on how to implement additional commonsense reforms,” he wrote.
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…Ahead of last week’s Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Vanity Fair teamed up with Baby2Baby to support fire recovery in the city, with the hosts of the magazine’s Oscar party livestream encouraging viewers to donate to the organization’s fire relief efforts. VF wasn’t the only organization helping out the nonprofit, which has been distributing diapers, formula, clothing, and other necessities to families in the wake of the January fires. Artist Sterling Ruby donated a massive 8-by-7-foot canvas to be sold to benefit Baby2Baby, with some logistics handled by adviser Meredith Darrow and Ruby’s gallery, Gagosian. Bidding on the work opened last Thursday on Loic Gouzer’s groundbreaking one-lot auction app, Fair Warning, and before, the paddle raise had a high estimate of $550,000. It sold for an astounding $649,600, with 100% of the hammer price going to the charity.
…Also in Los Angeles: Madonna cohosted her annual Oscar party at Guy Oseary’s house—not that you would have seen it on your Instagram feed. The bash, sponsored by Gucci, is typically a phones-are-verboten shindig. But the host committee made a very specific exception this year for the artist JR, who created on-the-fly artworks at the event by orchestrating pure-JR moments with guests such as Demi Moore, Mikey Madison, and Ben Stiller—but sadly no Timothée Chalamet, with whom the artist once did a funky project at The Frick.
…Shawn Martinbrough—the curator, comic book author, and esteemed Vanity Fair contributor—is opening a show next week in conjunction with the Phillips Collection, which to this DC native may be the best museum in the nation’s capital. The exhibition, “The Artist’s Experience: From Brotherman to Batman,” features work by 20 important Black comic book authors, and will take place at the Phillips pop-up at THEARC, the nonprofit on the edge of southeast DC. It opens March 12 and is on view until July 24.
…Art-dealer-slash-Democratic-congressional-candidate Esther Kim Varet came to Manhattan for a fundraiser Thursday evening, as various other gallery owners fêted the founder of the gallery Various Small Fires, which opened in LA in 2012. The host committee for the fundraiser included artists Josh Kline, Jill Magid, and Liz Magic Laser; art dealers and gallerists such as Nicola Vassell, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, and Gordon VeneKlasen; collectors Michelle Rubell and Sarah Arison; and Cultured magazine editor in chief Sarah Harrelson. Varet is running in a crowded primary to flip the Orange County seat held by Republican Young Kim.
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The post Gaga, Britney, and a Moldovan Oligarch: A Cultural History of Ric Grenell, Trump’s Man at the Kennedy Center appeared first on Vanity Fair.
