A crowd of thousands closed in on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the evening of Friday, September 18, 2026. The demonstrators linked hands into a chain that encircled the Potomac River landmark, a rebuke to President Donald Trump after he threatened to tear the building down.
So many riders poured out of the subway that the crowd overflowed into the streets of the Foggy Bottom neighborhood and brought traffic to a standstill as it converged on the building for a rally billed as “Hands Around the Kennedy Center.”
Much of the message came on cardboard. “You’re No Jack Kennedy,” read one sign. “Hands Off the Arts,” read another. A third borrowed from the musical “Wicked” with the line “Wicked: Starring DJT.” One man’s hat read “Make America Intelligent Again.” Another demonstrator, in a crown and a Trump mask, carried a placard written in the president’s imagined voice: “Restore my name in gold, you sycophants.”
A Ring of Hands Around the Center
Hands Off the Arts, the coalition that organized the evening, lined up musical performances, testimonials and speeches on the center’s steps before the chain took shape. Some protesters turned up in costume, and boos went up whenever the president was mentioned during the program. Actor Lynda Carter, a vocal critic of the president, addressed the rally. Signs reading “hands off Kennedy Center” bobbed over the heads of the crowd, and demonstrators sang outside the facade where workers stripped Trump’s name in June under a court order. The crowd then ringed the building, joined hands and thrust them overhead. Their demand was that Trump be removed as chairman, having failed, they said, to protect and manage the institution.
Chalkboards, Hearts and Lost Opportunities
A chalkboard covered with Trump’s name, written out hundreds of times over, was hauled in by Bud Wilkinson, who belongs to the local arts community. One by one, protesters rubbed the names out and chalked hearts where they had been. “The Kennedy Center is vital to the arts in Washington. We need it. We need this,” he said at the September 18 rally, adding that the fight “is not just about putting the president’s name on the Kennedy Center. It’s about censoring the performances.”
Laura Steinberg has volunteered at the Kennedy Center for the last 10 years. “This reminds me of that picture from Tiananmen Square, where that young man stood in front of the tank,” Steinberg said.
Protester Alina Baciu, whose daughter attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, laid out what the school stands to lose. She said the school’s students had performed on the center’s Millennium Stage and that costumes for their productions at Duke Ellington came on loan from the Washington National Opera; all of that has gone away. A niece of the late President John F. Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy told the BBC that demolishing the center would be a tragedy.
A Judge Steps In
The rally closed out a week of escalation. The Trump-aligned Kennedy Center board voted on Tuesday, September 15, to shut the venue down for repair work expected to last about two years. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper had blocked the board’s effort to restore Trump’s name to the building only hours before that vote. Then, on Thursday, September 17, Cooper ordered the center to give 30 days’ notice before making any major physical change, demolition included, and to produce a detailed report on what it has called a temporary closure.
Attorneys for Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, who holds a seat on the board in an ex officio capacity, had pressed the judge to act. They cited the president’s warning that the center could be ripped down, and they submitted photographs taken through a cabin window of Air Force One on Wednesday night, once the plane had landed at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on September 16. Trump appears in them to be studying a placard that appears to read “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.”
What the President Wants
Dangerous condition and losses of hundreds of millions of dollars are what Trump has described at the center. Revenue, according to tax records, rose by millions in 2024, part of it coming from a federal allocation. The administration attributes the building’s finances and structural problems to conditions it says require extensive renovations; critics instead single out the performers and private funders who walked away once he took control.
Hours before the crowd assembled, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that he could save the Kennedy Center easily, then asked why he should keep raising money to sustain it without credit. “I think the Trump administration should be recognized as having saved the Kennedy Center,” he added.
The center opened in 1971 following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and it has been a focus of Trump’s remaking of Washington since 2025, when, weeks after his second inauguration, he removed its leadership, installed his own board and made himself chairman. A vote by that handpicked board in December 2025 added Trump’s name to the institution’s official title, a change the White House shorthanded as the Trump-Kennedy Center. The name went up on the building that same December, before Cooper found it had been added illegally and ordered it removed in May, saying only Congress could change the name. Among the early protesters in that fight was David Barrows, 77, who took to the street shortly after Trump became chairman.
Hands Off the Arts co-founder Chris Raleigh said in an interview that the rally would, he hoped, show how many people are prepared to fight the president’s plans for the building. His fear that the wrecking crews could arrive without any notice from the court has a recent precedent, he said at the September 18 rally, pointing to the White House East Wing. “Look at the East Wing,” he said. “We got up one morning and there was a giant hole there.” He does not believe the president fully understands why so many people are upset, he added — “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 coalition took shape after the leadership changes at the center and has mounted repeated protests outside the venue this year, describing its aim as reclaiming the building from what it calls authoritarian overreach. The venue remains closed, and Cooper’s order still requires 30 days’ notice before anything comes down. Trump retreated from the threat on Monday, September 21, telling reporters he is “not ripping it down” and saying he will reuse the building’s steel and some of its marble in a renovation he said requires about two years of closure.