Thousands of demonstrators ringed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the evening of Friday, September 18, 2026, clasping hands in a chain around the Potomac River landmark to protest President Trump’s threat to tear the building down. So many riders poured out of the subway that the crowd overflowed into the streets of Foggy Bottom and stopped traffic as it converged on the building for a rally billed as “Hands Around the Kennedy Center.”
A Ring of Hands Around the Center
The center’s steps hosted musical performances, testimonials and speeches organized by Hands Off the Arts before the chain took shape. Actor Lynda Carter, a vocal critic of the president, addressed the crowd, and boos went up whenever Trump was mentioned during the program. Demonstrators, many in costume, carried signs reading “You’re No Jack Kennedy” and “Hands Off the Arts,” then joined hands around the building and raised them overhead, calling for Trump’s removal as chairman.
Chalkboards and Hearts
Bud Wilkinson, a member of the local arts community, carried a chalkboard scrawled with Trump’s name hundreds of times over; protesters took turns rubbing the names out and chalking hearts in their place. “The Kennedy Center is vital to the arts in Washington. We need it. We need this,” he said, framing the fight as about more than whose name is on the facade — also, he said, about censorship of performances and programming.
A Judge Steps In
The demonstration capped a week of escalation. The Trump-aligned board voted Tuesday, September 15, to close the venue for renovations expected to last about two years, hours after U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled the board could not restore Trump’s name to the building. On Wednesday, Trump told reporters the complex could be “ripped down” if his administration didn’t get “recognition” there — remarks made the same day he was photographed aboard Air Force One appearing to study a printout that read “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.” Attorneys for Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, who sits on the board in an ex officio capacity, submitted both the remarks and the photos to Cooper’s court. By Thursday, September 17, Cooper had ruled the board cannot demolish or significantly alter the building without 30 days’ advance notice.
A Longer Fight Over the Building
The venue has sat at the center of Trump’s remaking of Washington since February 2025, when he ousted its leadership, installed his own board and made himself chairman weeks after his second inauguration. That board voted in December 2025 to fold Trump’s name into the institution’s title; Cooper ruled in May that only Congress could authorize such a change, and Trump’s name came down by mid-June. The White House says the 55-year-old building needs the overhaul funded by the $257 million Congress appropriated in 2025; critics instead point to the wave of performers, board members and private funders who left after Trump’s takeover.
Hands Off the Arts co-founder Chris Raleigh said he hoped the rally would show how many people are prepared to fight the administration’s plans. “Look at the East Wing,” he said, referring to the White House wing’s demolition in October 2025. “We got up one morning and there was a giant hole there.” He said he doesn’t think the president fully understands why people are so upset — “but that’s our job, right? This may be the line that no one expected, but this is where the line is going to be.”
The main building will stay closed at least through September 30, Executive Director Matt Floca said in a September 24 court filing citing corroded exterior ceiling panels, water damage near electrical equipment, and a roughly 150-pound section of ceiling plaster that fell in the building’s foyer on September 4. Floca framed this closure as separate from the board’s longer-term renovation plan and said he’d reassess weekly whether it’s safe to reopen. Trump had said in February that he was “not ripping it down” and would reuse the building’s steel, but has more recently warned that without recognition for his administration, the center will “end up being ripped down.”
The safety case for the closure is now itself under fire. In a letter to Congress reported September 25, former Kennedy Center employees alleged that Floca halted a funded plan to repair the building’s leaking roof in April. Floca said the approach to the work had changed, not the need for it: “The Kennedy Center has known for years that the roof overhang leaked. What we did not know until this summer was how far the damage had spread inside it.”
