Trump’s Kennedy Center Debut: Les Mis and Six-Figure Checks

President Donald Trump’s promised cultural renaissance will begin with misery—specifically, Les Misérables.

Trump plans to attend a showing of the musical at the Kennedy Center next month and host a private fundraising reception beforehand, marking the first performance he will attend at the center as president and his first effort to raise funds for the institution he now runs, two people familiar with the fundraiser told us.

In his first term, Trump rejected Washington’s most celebrated cultural institution, after artists protested his administration and threatened to boycott Kennedy Center–related events at the White House. But after returning to office this year, Trump took over the Kennedy Center, replacing board members and making himself chair—prompting questions about whether the donations that sustain the institution would dry up. Now Trump, a prolific political fundraiser, is raising money for the center, which, like much of the rest of the city’s institutions, he hopes to remake in his image.

A letter sent to Kennedy Center board members announcing the June 11 pre-show fundraiser, which we obtained, urges each member to contribute $100,000. Weeks after taking office, Trump dismissed the Biden appointees on the board, replacing them with a group of his own supporters and staff, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Second Lady Usha Vance, Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, and Allison Lutnick, the wife of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

[Read: The Kennedy Center performers who didn’t cancel]

The Kennedy Center declined to comment on the fundraiser. “President Trump cares deeply about American arts and culture, which is why he is revitalizing historic institutions like the Kennedy Center to their former greatness,” the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement.

As part of the effort to raise money for the Kennedy Center, Trump allies have held private discussions about possibly asking that any settlement Trump reaches with CBS News include money earmarked for the Kennedy Center, one of the people familiar with the June fundraiser told us. Trump has sued CBS News for $20 billion, claiming that 60 Minutes selectively edited an interview this past fall with then–Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s 2024 opponent. Paramount, CBS’s parent company, declined to comment.

The first three months of Trump’s tenure overseeing the institution have been rocky. And it remains unclear just how Trump’s vision for a MAGA-inflected “Golden Age of Arts and Culture”—as he put it on TruthSocial when he announced his takeover—will fare. Several artists—including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Issa Rae—have canceled scheduled performances for the upcoming 2025–26 season since Trump announced his takeover.

In March, Miranda, whose award-winning Hamilton was expected to appear at the Kennedy Center as part of its 250th-anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence, declared in a joint New York Times interview with Jeffrey Seller, the show’s lead producer, that the “latest action by Trump means it’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it.”

“The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center,” Miranda said. “We’re just not going to be part of it.”

The Kennedy Center under Trump’s purview has also begun canceling some shows, including the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC’s performance with the National Symphony Orchestra, which was slated to be part of the center’s Pride celebration.

In late March, the Kennedy Center proceeded as planned with its Mark Twain Prize for American Humor ceremony, honoring comedian Conan O’Brien, who prompted applause when he used his speech, in part, to thank the Kennedy Center’s outgoing president and board chair by name. Trump’s takeover of the venue was a regular punchline throughout the event. The late-night host Stephen Colbert joked that the ousted Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad and the cartoon villain Skeletor had also recently joined the board. The comedian Sarah Silverman told O’Brien from the stage, “I miss the days when you were America’s only orange asshole.”  

Earlier in March, Vice President J. D. Vance and his wife, Usha, were booed as they took their seats for a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra. Several days later, Trump made his first visit to the center for a board meeting, touring the space and declaring it to be “in tremendous disrepair.”

“As is a lot of the rest of our country, most of it because of bad management,” Trump said at the time.

Weeks later, Yasmin Williams, a guitarist who has performed at the Kennedy Center, emailed Richard Grenell, the interim president installed by Trump, with concerns about performance cancellations. Grenell responded by saying that the performers who had cancelled bookings did so because “they couldn’t be in the presence of republicans,” according to screen grabs of the exchange that she posted online.

“Your people also booed and harassed the vice president who simply wanted to enjoy music with his wife for a night. Who is the intolerant one?” Grenell wrote back.

[Ryan Miller: Why I played the Kennedy Center]

The Kennedy Center typically receives annual federal appropriations of about $45 million, though it is not clear if that funding will continue in future Trump-signed budgets. The Office of Management and Budget, in a discretionary spending proposal last week, called for entirely cutting funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, but it did not mention the separate funding streams for the Kennedy Center.

Philanthropic donations have long formed a major part of the Kennedy Center’s operating budget, and have been a point of concern among some supporters of the institution since Trump took over. In 2023, the center reported taking in about $85 million in contributions, grants, and other support beyond ticket and other sales.

In many ways, seeing Les Misérables is a fitting start for Trump’s official Kennedy Center debut. He has long been a fan of the musical’s soundtrack, which he has featured at his political rallies dating back to 2016. In February, the U.S. Army Choir performed Les Misérables’s “Do You Hear The People Sing?” at the 2025 White House Governors Ball.

At the time, the song selection prompted a range of reactions on social media, as people debated whether the song—a protest anthem against tyranny—was chosen as an ironic troll of the new president or a genuine celebration of his return to power.