Several board members of the MAGA-fied Kennedy Center were against the push to rename it after Donald Trump but did not want to speak out, according to a report.
The idea to rename the D.C. institution the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts came from Sergio Gor, a top Trump ally and a member of the center’s board of trustees who also serves as the U.S. ambassador to India.
Gor proposed renaming the arts center after Trump during a meeting at the home of fellow board member Andrea Wynn, the wife of casino mogul Steve Wynn, according to The Wall Street Journal.
No other board member spoke out against the idea at the meeting, but several reportedly “expressed frustration privately” afterward, a source told the Journal.
The board, which now includes Trump loyalists like Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles following the MAGA takeover, ultimately unanimously agreed to the name change in December 2025.
The detail about Gor’s push for the name change appeared in a wider Journal report about how overhauling the Kennedy Center has become a “fixation” for Trump.
The report also makes clear how disastrous the president’s takeover has been for the venue, amid dwindling ticket sales and artist boycotts that threaten its entire existence.
During one week this year, ticket sales were down more than 70 percent compared to the same week in 2025, 2024, and 2023, according to data reviewed by the Journal. The National Symphony Orchestra’s performance of “Brahms X Radiohead” is only just over 20 percent capacity ahead of its scheduled run next week.
Elsewhere, the entire run of The Sound of Music at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House is averaging less than 60 percent capacity.
Trump, a former real estate developer with a history of failed ventures, announced earlier this month that the struggling Kennedy Center will be closed for two years starting in July as part of a renovation project estimated to cost nearly $300 million in taxpayer funds.
The closure is also expected to force mass furloughs and layoffs for some of the Kennedy Center’s 2,000 staff members.
MAGA loyalist Richard Grenell, a former diplomat with no experience in the arts or musical performance who was parachuted in as head of the Kennedy Center, warned staff about the reality of “skeletal teams” beginning in July in a Tuesday night email.
“There is no way to read this message as anything other than preparation for mass layoffs and institutional contraction,” one anonymous staffer told The Washington Post. “The language of ‘renovation’ masks a leadership failure that has driven down ticket sales, donor confidence, and artistic participation. The crisis is self-inflicted.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the Kennedy Center and Gor’s office for comment.
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