As firings at the Kennedy Center became frequent, staffers began to use the encrypted chat application Signal, building an underground information network out of fear that management was monitoring internal messages on Microsoft Teams There, they shared job leads, pieced together what official chann els wouldn’t say, and tracked who had been let go. Cathleen O’Malley, who produced contemporary music, jazz, and comedy shows at the complex as an artistic-programming manager from March 2024 until February of this year, describes the Signal chats as “snarky, intimate, dismayed, disgusted, sad, mutually supportive, angry, gobsmacked.” Messages were “darkly funny at times,” she says. “Did we have another choice?” For a while, staff had viewed President Trump’s designs on the center as an absurdity—what could he really do? After all, the arts complex, established as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy, had operated independently for more than 50 years. But Trump had already telegraphed his intentions on Truth Social, saying he wanted to “make the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. GREAT AGAIN,” vowing to purge board members who didn’t share his “Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” and singling out a series of drag shows that he insisted were “targeting our youth.” Trump had reason to fixate on the center. During his first term, television producer Norman Lear announced he would skip a White House reception tied to his Kennedy Center Honor in 2017, followed by another recipient pulling out after Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” following the death of a protester at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Trump canceled the reception and shunned the awards ceremony—and the center—for the rest of his term. Then last February, Trump seized the board, and the floor shifted. One person who worked in advertising communications at the center for almost nine years before resigning last June, recalled one of the first staff meetings after the takeover. The wry humor typical of those gatherings was gone. Staffers, the ex-staffer says, appeared to realize that things were starting to spin out of their hands. Photograph by Evy Mages. Quickly, Trump fired longtime president Deborah Rutter, who had led the institution for more than a decade and had already announced her retirement. Other board members, including David Rubenstein, were out, too. In Rutter’s place, Trump installed Richard Grenell, a former ambassador and longtime Trump loyalist with no background in arts administration. Grenell didn’t communicate with staff for almost two weeks before sending a long email that blasted the institution’s former leadership. He claimed he was “shocked to see that we have no cash on hand, nothing in reserves and salaries paid from the debt reserves”—a characterization former staffers say isn’t accurate. Indeed, Rutter challenged many of Grenell’s statements, saying that when she left, the center “fiscally sound, on track to balance its budget for the year, and positioned to grow its endowment significantly.” The email “was very accusatory in tone” as well, says Paige Lester, who spent nearly eight years at the center—most recently as director of innovation programs, overseeing its arts and technology initiatives and leading the development of new programming—before resigning last September. The new administration laid off scores of seasoned employees and filled their ranks with outside hires, few of whom had any arts experience. Roma Daravi became the center’s vice president of communications last February after a stint as an outside adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign. She sat in a wing mostly emptied of people who had been either fired or had left. There, Daravi “would play Trump speeches and talk radio,” says a former staffer who worked on the same floor. Daravi declined to comment on the record about any of the claims that former staffers made in this article. Firings at the Kennedy Center became frequent and surprising, both for those who lost their jobs and veterans who saw the ranks of their colleagues start to thin. The new leadership rarely afforded humanity or grace to longtime staff, O’Malley says, and some of the people dismissed had been there decades but were nonetheless walked out under the gaze of security personnel. One former colleague, an ex-staffer says, came back to work after a long weekend only to find that their badge didn’t work when they tried to scan into the building. They hadn’t received any notice that they’d been fired. The first artists to leave the Kennedy Center after Trump’s takeover were people with whom it had forged long artistic collaborations: Renée Fleming and Ben Folds, as well as board treasurer Shonda Rhimes. The comedian and actress Issa Rae canceled a planned performance in February. Then the Kennedy Center canceled a children’s play about a shark who learns to follow his heart as well as a concert planned to coincide with last year’s WorldPride celebrations. As 2025 proceeded, more open dates appeared on the calendar: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Philip Glass were among the artists who moved productions elsewhere. More longtime employees left, replaced with people like Stephen Nakagawa, a self-described “MAGA former dancer” whom Grenell appointed to run dance programming after Nakagawa sent a letter complaining about “radical leftist ideologies in ballet.” Last December, Trump hosted FIFA’s World Cup draw at the center, as well as the Kennedy Center Honors, and, a few days later, professed surprise and gratitude that his handpicked board decided to put his name on the building. Ticket sales and subscription revenue plummeted to levels not seen since the Covid pandemic. Rumors swirled among staffers that the center lacked the funds for paychecks. “They were scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find money to make payroll certain weeks,” Lester says. Many of the artists scheduled to appear were spooked. “It all changed when [Trump] slapped his name on the building,” O’Malley says. “Because it became such a national story, artists became sort of called to the carpet by the public to, I guess, defend or explain their decision to perform there.”  When jazz artist Chuck Redd pulled out of a Christmas Eve concert, Grenell threatened a million-dollar lawsuit. (Redd recently asked a judge to dismiss the suit, contending that it triggered a DC law designed to discourage frivolous court actions.) The center’s offerings continued to recede. In January, Washington National Opera said that, after 55 years in residence, it would leave and become an independent entity. Finally, in early February, Trump declared he would shut down the center for two years for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” beginning July 4, 2026. That meant the National Symphony Orchestra would soon be effectively homeless. For those who had spent careers there, the center had felt like bedrock. “We thought it was as solid as the marble building,” says violist Uri Wassertzug, 63, a member of the Washington National Opera and Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra for 28 years. “It’s devastating.” O’Malley likens her last year on the job to frantically “scooping buckets of water from the lower deck” while leadership, she says, steered the boat toward an iceberg. She jumped ship in February. Around 5 PM on her last day, she started to make the rounds to say goodbye to her colleagues. She figured she’d find the usual end-of-day bustle—the building coming alive the way it always had before the evening shows. Instead, empty halls greeted her. “I was expecting production, box office, my usher friends, people to be in the building,” O’Malley says. “It was so eerie.” The only show planned for that evening was the anodyne crowd-pleaser Shear Madness. The halls felt hollow. Photo by a former Kennedy Center staffer. “It’s the kind of place where the quiet is very sad,” says Lester. “Like if you’re at an airport and nobody is there. … It feels wrong.” O’Malley says she left when leadership, after laying off two key members of her already decimated artistic-programming team, immediately asked her for help. “They were completely shameless in exploiting the veteran staff members and then kicking them to the curb.” she says. “I was not willing to lend my expertise to these vandals.” Of the approximately 40 people who worked with O’Malley and Lester on the artistic-programming team before the Trump takeover, only three remain. In a bizarre twist, Kevin Couch, the center’s newly hired head of artistic programming, resigned just two weeks after his hiring was announced. Even Grenell announced in March that he was stepping down—just over a year after his appointment. Soon the Kennedy Center will be the neighborhood’s second building bearing Trump’s name that sits empty. Trump says the closure is necessary for renovations, but staffers past and present have other theories. “All of us who worked in that building know that closing it is a cover-up for ruining the institution so much that they could not sell tickets,” a former staffer says. A Kennedy Center spokesperson told Washingtonian in an email, “Staffing decisions will support the broader move toward a successful closure for renovations.” Last Friday, the Kennedy Center laid off more people, including some involved in programming. O’Malley believes the closure serves another purpose: “It’s an opportunity to break the unions,” she contends. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees’ locals—which represent the Kennedy Center’s stagehands, box office workers, wardrobe workers, makeup artists, and others—have new contract negotiations coming up in September. The Metropolitan Washington D.C. Federation of Musicians, which represents the National Symphony Orchestra as well as the Washington National Opera Orchestra/Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, planned to renegotiate its agreement next summer. Representatives of these unions declined to comment. A new effort, the Kennedy Center United Arts Workers, has been organizing the unrepresented production and administrative staff for more than 300 days without recognition. “At the time that we filed in May of 2025, there were approximately 180 staff members that fell under the umbrella as the union wanted to define it,” says Kelsey Mesa, a theatrical-education and Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival manager at the center. “As of today, it’s less than 60 people out of those.” Jenn Chang, who served as chief of staff for the National Endowment for the Arts until Trump took office, sees the President’s decision to shutter the center as a concession. “The actions of artists—-whether loud or soft—-in protest and indicating that they’re not okay with what is happening has helped to push the administration in a direction of sort of failure on this particular front,” she says. Trump repeatedly targeted the center, she believes, because he understood its power as a cultural flashpoint. But as it turns out, she says, “he can’t actually run the Kennedy Center.”The post Kennedy Center Staff Open Up About a Year of Turmoil first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less