Trump Basically Wants the Kennedy Center to Be Like His Shuttered Casino

A revival of Cats? Awards for Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth? Marble columns? Where else have we seen this kind of campy entertainment and over-the-top exteriors??

By Lauren Tousignant | March 21, 2025 | 4:15pm

Photo: iStockphoto

Trump Basically Wants the Kennedy Center to Be Like His Shuttered Casino

I feel very confident that there’s a parallel universe out there where a non-Republican is currently president, reproductive rights aren’t a headline because everyone agrees they’re a given, Elon Musk never left South Africa, and Donald Trump—instead of becoming a fascist—is the Broadway star he’s clearly always wanted to be.

While Trump and Musk continue to steamroll over every inch of the federal government, Trump’s also taken a wrecking ball to the Kennedy Center of Performing Arts. In February, Trump fired the board of trustees and appointed himself as chairman, and on Monday, Trump made his first visit and held his first meeting, and someone, bless them, sent the New York Times an audio recording.

Most Popular

Among Trump’s big ideas to recreate the Kennedy Center into a place where “EVERYONE is welcome” (aka, people who criticize him are not welcome) is to stop celebrating “radical left lunatics,” give awards to dead people, give honors to sports, politics, and business stars, instead of just artists, and bring back musicals like Cats, which Trump clearly has many fond memories of.

“I walked in, I saw all these bodies, and then I noticed those bodies were gorgeous,” Trump said at the meeting of seeing the original Cats in 1982. “They had silk tights on, and they were all ballerinas, and women from Broadway. And men.” He then quickly clarified about the men’s bodies, because of course: “I didn’t find those particular bodies as attractive to be honest.” Sure, Jan.

The Trump Taj Mahal Casino opened in 1990 (and closed in 2016), and his entire mood board here feels very Atlantic City heydey-esque. As the meeting continued, Trump suggested that casino mogul Steve Wynn—a major GOP donor whose wife was appointed to the Center’s board by Trump—could be a potential honoree; said Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth could get awards; talked more about Cats and Betty Buckley (I’m telling you, born to be a Broadway Baby, but chose to be a fascist); and suggested he could be the host of the next Kennedy Center Honors show. “I didn’t like it. I couldn’t watch it,” he said of the yearly CBS broadcast. “And the host was always terrible.” Queen Latifah hosted the show in 2024, Gloria Estefan hosted in 2023, and David Letterman hosted in 2021.

“Believe me, I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it,” he said of hosting the show, after suggesting he should host it. “I have enough publicity. They’ll say, ‘Trump wants to be the host.’ I don’t want to. But I want this thing to be successful.” What a martyr. He also added—because he never misses a chance to call himself a king—that he’d be “the king of ratings, right? Whether we like it or not, the king of ratings.”

Finally, Trump railed against the Center’s privately funded $250 million expansion in 2019, calling the added gardens, classrooms, a café, and series of rooms for rehearsals and performances “crazy rooms” and “nonsense.” He also balked at how big it was, saying he toured the entire vicinity, which, “believe me, Biden couldn’t have done it. He would not have been able to walk the place.”

His idea for a redesign? “I think the I-beams should be covered with some incredible stone—probably marble, but marble’s a bad outdoor stone, but looks better than granite. But it should be covered. And we’ll do that. We’ll add that in. But it’s not a small job.” Neat! Let’s gut the federal government while dressing the government’s cultural hub in marble. God bless this mess.