President Trump's favorite musical is the acclaimed Les Misérables, but few fans have stormed the barricades to enter the Kennedy Center this season.
The Washington Post reports this. that sales of the current season of music, dance and theater at the Washington, D.C. cultural institution have declined sharply since the presidential inauguration and subsequent takeover of the Kennedy Center.
The Post cited data showing the Kennedy Center sold only 57% of its tickets from September to mid-October, many of which were believed to be free. This contrasts with 93% ticket sales in the same period last year.
Venues surveyed include the Opera House, Concert Hall and the Eisenhower Theater, home to National Symphony Orchestra performances and Broadway musicals and dance troupes. Of the 143,000 possible seats for the current season, 53,000 have not yet been sold. When fans bought tickets, they spent half as much money from September to the first half of October 2025 compared to the same period last year – the lowest since 2018, not including the height of the 2020 pandemic.
After Trump's election, he appointed Republican diplomat and former State Department official Richard Grenell to head the Kennedy Center, whose board elected Trump as its president. New management fired several longtime employees, and prominent board members and leaders such as Ben Folds left the organization.
“I couldn't be a pawn in this,” Folds told The Times. “Should I have called my buddies like Sara Bareilles and said, 'Hey, do you want to come play here?'
Artists performing at the Kennedy Center have noted a change in the audience. Yasmine Williams, a singer-songwriter who performed in September after a controversial email exchange with Grennell, said that “during my performance at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night, a group of Trump supporters insulted me when I mentioned Rick Grenell and seemed to be there to intimidate me” but “playing a video of Malcolm X at this point and forcing the current administration to reckon with the damage they have caused while promoting joy and the power of music among an audience… that's why I do what I do.” (Kennedy Center spokesman Roma Daravi told the Post that “this is an absolutely ridiculous claim.”)
Grennell, for his part, said in X that “We're doing big things that people want to see. We're seeing huge changes because people are realizing that they want to be part of something that is common sense programming.” In August, Trump announced his nominees for the Kennedy Center Honors, including actor and director Sylvester Stallone, glam rockers KISS, singer Gloria Gaynor, country music star George Strait and English actor and comedian Michael Crawford.
