When President Donald Trump started fixing up the Kennedy Center and started talking about shutting it down or even demolishing it, hundreds of activists rushed to Washington for the usual anti-Trump theatre. Last week, left-wing activists gathered at the center to form a human chain around it.
The group behind it, Hands Off the Arts, has staged multiple protests at the Kennedy Center this year. This one came in response to the facility's sudden closure, the security fencing now surrounding it, and what the group insists are political efforts to demolish parts of the presidential memorial.
Malory Miller, a former assistant manager of dance programming at the Kennedy Center who lost her job in 2025 during the administration's mass layoffs there, told ABC News, "The Kennedy Center can't be renamed for anyone else. It's a memorial to John F. Kennedy. It's like silly to suggest otherwise. And it's not just silly, it's insulting and it's degrading and it's un-American."
Like, totally, okay?
Miller added, "Artists are the risk takers in our society.... We are the people who create the world that comes next, and that is what the Kennedy Center means to all of us. This is a building that belongs to the American people, not one person and it's our Kennedy Center. We are the Kennedy Center."
Please take a moment to roll your eyes.
Okay, first of all, buildings named for one person get renamed all the time when the public decides it's warranted. Heck, when Barack Obama was elected president, lots of schools were renamed after him, even though they were originally named for someone else. And then there’s McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, which became Harry Reid International Airport in 2021. The Ariel Rios Federal Building became the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building in 2013. The idea that a name is sacred and untouchable apparently depends entirely on whose name it was, and whose name goes in its place.
But the naming fight really is just a distraction from the actual scandal here.
Trump has defended his intervention by pointing to the building's condition, not its name. "It's in very, very bad shape, very dangerous shape. You see steel falling down. You see plaster falling off ceilings. You see a lot of dangers," he said last week.
Trump is right about the building's condition, and Democrats know it.
In fact, according to a report from Just the News, two evaluations conducted early in the Biden administration laid out in plain detail just how bad things had gotten at the Kennedy Center, long before Trump ever got involved. The 2021 and 2022 structural and maintenance reviews found outdated fire safety systems, poor protection against terrorist attacks, water leaks in a transformer room, code-violating rusted wiring, and extensive cracks running through walls and roof panels.
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The reports also flagged health hazards: lead-painted steel beams, poorly ventilated bathrooms, and failing sealants containing a cancer-linked chemical. "The membrane is in fair to poor condition and near the end of its expected useful lifespan; each overhang roof has several urgent maintenance repairs," one 2022 memo warned after inspecting the terrace roofs. "Existing caulk and sealants contained polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) and the existing steel structure was coated with lead paint," the same report noted. A 2021 presentation added, "Many bathrooms are not properly ventilated."
Kennedy Center Vice President for Communications Roma Daravi confirmed those older warnings to Just the News in an interview. "They did not want to do the work that was necessary," Daravi said. "Actually, instead, they had $250 million that they used to build a separate complex just next to the main building."
Earlier this month, a chunk of the Grand Foyer ceiling came crashing down onto the red carpet. Before that, Justice Department lawyers told a federal court that the building's "dangerously dilapidated, outdated, and decrepit" condition, combined with millions of dollars in losses, had put the Kennedy Center in a "financial and structural death spiral." Fixing it, they said, will take two years of closure. Without that work, the lawyers warned, "the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years."
So why didn't Democrats care about any of this before Trump made them suddenly remember the Kennedy Center exists? For four years, the people now forming human chains to save the building had a Biden administration that inspected it, documented the rot in writing, and chose not to fix it.
The Kennedy Center didn’t just start rotting overnight. It took years, if not decades, of neglect. Where were the Democrats then? If the Kennedy Center is a sacred memorial to John F. Kennedy, why did it take Donald Trump to get the left to actually care about the building again?
