It’s been more than a year and a half since Donald Trump seized control of the beloved Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and, with credit lines maxed, donor monies stolen, and every financial cushion the venue had dried up, one arts manager is now describing the once-revered entity as “in free fall.”
The news hails from a bombshell new Washington Post report, in which the outlet reviewed a trove of confidential board documents and tax filings that pull back the curtain on the damage the venue has sustained under President Trump’s purview, including a maxed-out line of bank credit and a significant amount of money taken from an endowment that donors had expected to remain untouched. Tax filings showed that the center has also written off tens of millions of dollars in pledges from donors who have stopped paying since Donald Trump came on the scene.
Monday morning, the Trump Era Department of Justice filed an appeal, claiming the performing arts center “was only able to pay its bills thanks to the 17 million dollars raised by President Trump” and warning that the money “is fast being expended.” Internal documents reviewed by the Post confirmed that the $17 million figure is linked to the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation, a charity rebranded after the president’s takeover that has not disclosed the names of its donors.
Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the performing arts center was in dire straits, “losing hundreds of millions of dollars” when he took it over, but those claims have been repeatedly disproven. Experts who spoke with the Post stated that the previous leadership left the venue in far better shape than it was in the years prior to the pandemic. A recent review of tax returns further proved that the president was flat-out lying about the financial state of the Kennedy Center.
“This was a pretty stable — large, complicated, but stable — organization,” said Karen Gahl-Mills, director of Indiana University’s arts administration program.
That quickly fell apart when Donald Trump took the reins.
In the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in September, ticket revenue at the Kennedy Center fell 15 percent while donations plummeted nearly a quarter. Ticket income is expected to plummet by more than two-thirds in this fiscal year, and at the beginning of 2026, donations to the center, while under Trump’s leadership, had already fallen roughly 40 percent from the previous quarter.
Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell told the board back in March that fundraising staff had been slashed from 94 to just 16. Since Donald Trump’s takeover, the center has had to write off a staggering $48 million, almost all of it from donations it no longer expects to receive with the president at the helm.
With donations and ticket sales tanking, the performing arts venue has had no choice but to rely heavily on its credit to stay afloat, which has now run dry. Reporting confirmed that last September, the center doubled its credit line to $21 million and has already borrowed it all. The center’s debt reserve has been in freefall, from $18 million to an expected $9 million by the end of the fiscal year this week. Roughly $9 million of the venue’s debt reserve exists as collateral for the loan connected to the Reach expansion—which means, thanks to Donald Trump, the Kennedy Center is quite literally skint. No spendable money remains, which may be why they’ve begun dipping into money that doesn’t belong to them.
The Post confirmed that the center pulled $10 million from the Washington National Opera’s $10.3 million endowment. Before Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center coup, the venue used about 5 percent of that endowment annually. Under Trump’s leadership, the opera has cut all ties with the Kennedy Center, leaving the two sides sparring over who owes whom a significant amount of money.
Gahl-Mills told the Post that the financial figures alone serve as a stark “sign of something going wrong.”
The Kennedy Center was “less stable as of Sept. 30, 2025, and it seems that it is in free fall now,” she said. “This is unusual, that this organization has gone this far south, this fast. It’s not the thing we typically see. It is an organization clearly in distress.”
The venue has yet to release its audited 2025 financial statements, which should have come out by March, leaving Gahl-Mills to question whether the trustees are actually providing any oversight.
“Where is the board?” she questioned.
Short of Rep. Joyce Beatty, who continues to viciously go head-to-head with the president to save the Kennedy Center, the board panders to the president every moment of every day.
