Why did President Trump fire many of the board members of The Kennedy Center, and name himself chairman and his former Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell as president?
According to Grenell, it was to “make art great again.”
Grenell was interviewed at the CPAC conference in Washington D.C. Friday by Politico’s Dasha Burns, and his appointment to the Kennedy Center was one of the big questions. Grenell, who also served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence in his first term, framed the shake-up at the arts institution as being about its financial health.
“I think the frustration that President Trump had is that the Kennedy Center has no cash on hand, no reserves, and they have been paying for the salaries with the debt reserves, while taking around $40 million of public money,” Grenell told Burns, adding that the nature of taxpayers funding it means that they should have input on the productions that it hosts. “If you’re going to take public money, then you get to have public input.”
He also said that he is making “way, way, way less” than his predecessor.
“If you’re going to take public money, you have to prove that you actually can bring in revenue,” he said. “We don’t have any money.”
As for whether he and the new board will change the Kennedy Center’s programming, Grenell indicated that they will, with the most notable near-term change being a new show set for December.
“We have to do the big productions that the masses and the public want to see, we want to have really good programming,” he said. “So the first thing that we’re doing … you’ve got to be at the Kennedy Center in December, because we are doing a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas. How crazy is it to think that we’re going to celebrate Christ at Christmas with a big traditional production to celebrate what we are all celebrating in the world during Christmastime, which is the birth of Christ.”
Burns also asked Grenell about a performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus being canceled, and asked whether he was worried about big name artists dropping out of scheduled shows in protest of the changes at the Center.
“We don’t, because we already have them, and I think it’s a real misnomer,” Grenell responded to those concerns, adding of the canceled performance that the Kennedy Center “made this change before we came in.”
“Suddenly it was, the Gay Men’s Chorus was dropping out because of Trump. That wasn’t true,” he added. “It was replaced with with some other things, that happens all the time.”
