Trump Says He’s Only Renovating the Kennedy Center

Even though President Trump held a movie premiere for his wife’s new film there last week, he said the state of the building was “actually sort of dangerous.”

President Trump insisted on Monday that he was not going to tear down the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, one day after his abrupt announcement that he would shut it down for two years for major renovations starting in July.

“I’m not ripping it down,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “I’ll be using the steel. So we’re using the structure, we’re using some of the marble, and some of the marble comes down.”

They were Mr. Trump’s first remarks on his intentions for the Kennedy Center since his social media post about the renovations on Sunday night. For many, that post raised the specter of the East Wing, which Mr. Trump once suggested he would not touch but which now sits in piles of frozen rubble.

He gave his assessment of the building and explained how he arrived at this conclusion. “It’s funny, in real estate and building — I’ve done so much of it, I’ve done so well with it — you want to sit with something for a little while before you decide on what you want to do,” he said. “It’s in very bad shape. It’s run down. It’s dilapidated.”

Even though he had just held a movie premiere for his wife’s new film there last week, he said the state of the building was “actually sort of dangerous.” Things were falling out of ceilings, he said.

But Mr. Trump’s insistence that the center must be shut down struck his critics as little more than a face-saving maneuver, since the place has been in a downward spiral ever since he named himself chairman.

“America’s artists are rejecting this attempted takeover, and the administration knows it,” Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat from Ohio and an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board, said in a statement on Sunday. “That is why they are now scrambling for cover.”

The announcement also raises questions about whether Mr. Trump has the power to unilaterally shut down and renovate the arts center at all.

Because the Kennedy Center was created, named and funded in part by Congress, the legislative branch has historically had a lot of influence over its future. But Mr. Trump has taken steps to give himself an unusual amount of control over what happens at the facility.

When he took office last year, Mr. Trump replaced members of the center’s board and installed himself as chairman — the first time a president has taken such a step.

A report by the Congressional Research Service concluded that Congress could address Mr. Trump’s actions through oversight and funding. But both chambers of Congress are controlled by Republicans, who have shown little interest in crossing Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump estimated that the project will cost around $200 million. Last year, he secured $257 million from Congress to help with capital repairs on the building.

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Mr. Trump is still months away from enacting his plan to close the center and rebuild it. Even he says his proposal is subject to board approval, and any construction plans he wants to undertake would need to be reviewed by the National Capital Planning Commission, where Mr. Trump has installed his former personal lawyer as chairman.

Both that board and the National Park Service oversaw the most recent expansion of the Kennedy Center, and would need to sign off on any new construction.

Mr. Trump described his decision to close the Kennedy Center as a pragmatic one that was reached with the help of experts, and yet, even some of his own allies did not see this coming. Three Trump-aligned employees at the Kennedy Center, and two Trump-appointed members of the board, all said they were surprised to learn about the shutdown on Sunday.

Nonetheless, most hurriedly adopted the new party line: Mr. Trump is a master builder and if he thinks the center should close, well, he knows best.

“President Trump has a reputation for delivering large construction projects on time, under budget and beautifully finished,” Richard Grenell, the center’s Trump-appointed president, wrote on social media.

But in the months since Mr. Trump took over the institution, it has fallen on hard times. Artists stopped performing. Ticket sales nose-dived. The opera company departed. The president put his name on the building and hosted the honors himself. Ratings plummeted. Last week, the top official overseeing artistic programming quit after less than two weeks on the job.

In late September, several Kennedy Center executives sat for interviews with The New York Times and said there were no plans to close down the center at the end of the year. One of those executives was Matt Floca, the head of facilities, who has led Mr. Trump on walk-throughs of the building.

“Ambassador Grenell has told me directly the opposite,” Mr. Floca said when asked if the building might go dark. “I have to get the work done and keep the employees in the building.”

Asked then if there was ever a discussion about tearing down the building, Mr. Floca said, “Not seriously, no.”

But as the situation inside the Kennedy Center deteriorated and performers fled at a faster pace, the narrative around renovations started changing.

In an interview with NewsNation last week, Mr. Grenell called the center “decrepit” and described going “all the way down into the basement” with Mr. Trump, who personally inspected the floor, the “sewer system” and the pipes. As Mr. Grenell related it: “He immediately was like, ‘Why is that floor so dirty, and it’s never been cleaned, and that pipe has fallen apart.’”

Mr. Trump said on Monday that it did not make sense to renovate in a “piecemeal” fashion. “For instance, they have a play tonight, and you can’t do anything,” he said. “You have to pull out everything, and you can’t have stanchions all over the place, and people are walking in to see a play.”

There can be no denying that the Kennedy Center needs a lot of work. A recent budget document described elevators that were last upgraded more than 20 years ago, concert hall seats that were “at the end of their useful life” and an underground parking garage that showed signs of “potential structural failure from spalling concrete.” But the document, which was finalized under the Trump-appointed leadership, did not suggest an urgent need to shut down the center to complete the work. Budget documents predating Mr. Trump’s takeover of the center also outlined planned renovations in detail.

“My No. 1 suspicion is this is just a cover-up for the fact that he can’t operate it anymore and it can’t stay stable and that they’re draining what funds they already had,” Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, the top Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees funding for the Kennedy Center’s building, said in an interview after the president’s announcement.

Ms. Pingree said the subcommittee has been given little insight into the institution’s finances under Trump-appointed leadership. A spokeswoman for her office said the Kennedy Center has ignored the committee’s request for a meeting to discuss the budget and renovation projects.

“We’ve asked them a lot of questions, we’ve asked for meetings, we’ve asked for financial statements,” Ms. Pingree said. “And there was never a time in the history, with me or anyone in this role on appropriations, where you couldn’t get all the financial data that you needed.”

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