Richard Grenell: From Trump Cabinet Hopeful to Ex-Kennedy Center Manager

Richard Grenell once hoped to be President Trump’s secretary of state. Instead, Mr. Trump just replaced him as Kennedy Center president.

Richard Grenell worked hard during the 2024 election to be considered as secretary of state in a second Trump presidency, the culmination of years spent in big national security jobs.

Less than two years later, President Trump has taken away the only full-time administration job Mr. Grenell landed in this term, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and said that for now he has no other role in mind for Mr. Grenell.

“I’m looking for your next venture,” Mr. Trump told him at a news conference on Monday shortly before Mr. Grenell’s final Kennedy Center board meeting.

“You know there was a story he got fired,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “He didn’t get fired. He was here for a short period of time, for a year.”

Mr. Grenell’s comedown is in contrast to his status in Mr. Trump’s first term, when the president tapped him for a series of top policy roles, among them ambassador to Germany, special envoy to the Balkans and acting chief of national intelligence. Although Mr. Trump lavished praise on Mr. Grenell on Monday, his comments were laced with sentiments from critics of Mr. Grenell, who say that he is an energetic but caustic ally with a history of losing good jobs over bad behavior, online and otherwise.

Mr. Trump noted that Mr. Grenell “fired the whole room” while trying to root out a government leaker when he was chief of national intelligence. It was apparently a reference to Mr. Grenell’s purge of officials at the agency whom Mr. Trump accused of undermining him when they shared evidence that Russia sought to influence elections in his favor.

The president also mused that at the Kennedy Center Mr. Grenell “was a little rough with a couple of the people” and that some artists “took a pounding from Ric.” The attacks generated a torrent of negative headlines, some of them criticizing Mr. Trump.

Mr. Grenell did not respond to a question on whether he will remain in government. In his remaining administration role, special missions envoy, including to Venezuela and North Korea, administration officials say he has repeatedly clashed over Venezuela policy with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who won out over Mr. Grenell in his quest to be America’s top diplomat.

Mr. Grenell also did not respond to questions about his future and his turbulent year. Instead, he sent a text message criticizing The New York Times’s coverage of Republicans and conservatives.

Mr. Trump replaced Mr. Grenell with his underling at the Kennedy Center, Matt Floca, a Biden-era hire and the center’s vice president of facilities operations. Mr. Floca shares a love of building-related ephemera with Mr. Trump, who hailed him on Monday as “a pro at construction.”

Mr. Floca, 38, briefs Mr. Trump regularly on items like theater seat replacements, and led him on a tour of Kennedy Center infrastructure last year. “It was a wild experience to have the president commenting on the chillers and boilers of a building,” Mr. Floca told The New York Times then. On Monday the Kennedy Center board, stacked with Trump loyalists, voted to shutter the center in July for a two-year renovation that Mr. Floca will lead.

“I think Matt would like to run the facility, he’s fallen in love with it, and I think he’d do a good job,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he will fire Mr. Floca if he does not.

David Novy, who serves on the board of the National Symphony Orchestra, called Mr. Grenell a “polarizing” figure at the Kennedy Center, whose management fueled an exodus of supporters, artists and top officials, among them the symphony’s executive director, Jean Davidson. The symphony, the only classical music anchor at the Kennedy Center after the departure of the Washington National Opera in January, is currently looking for new spaces for their 175 annual events while the center is shut down.

With Mr. Grenell gone, Mr. Novy said that “my hope would be that there is far greater transparency with the public on how taxpayer funds are being spent on the Kennedy Center.”

The center became a target for Mr. Trump during his first term after some artists celebrated at the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors event snubbed his invitation to the White House. After retaking office, Mr. Trump gutted the center’s board, packed it with loyalists, installed Mr. Grenell as president, added his own name to the building and, after donors and artists took flight, announced its closure. Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, an ex officio member of the center’s board of trustees, is suing to reverse the name change and closure.

As director of the center, Mr. Grenell declared war on what he deemed “woke” programming and D.E.I. initiatives and accused the center’s former leadership of financial malfeasance and allowing the facility to deteriorate. On X, where he frequently posted on Balkans politics and the Senate race in Texas, he lambasted artists for canceling performances and the media for covering the chaos. Over the past year, the composer Philip Glass, the Grammy-winning banjo player Béla Fleck, the San Francisco Ballet and the traveling production of “Hamilton” have all canceled appearances.

Mr. Grenell continues to court the president’s inner circle. After Mr. Trump praised Mr. Rubio during his State of the Union address last month, a Times photographer captured Mr. Rubio reading an adulatory WhatsApp message on his phone from Mr. Grenell that said, “Class act!!!”

A former Trump critic, Mr. Grenell has worked for a decade to woo the president and his family. After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election Mr. Grenell ensconced himself, his dog Lola, lawyers and a crew of supporters in a Las Vegas hotel suite, where they ran a sham effort to challenge the election results. He has teamed up with Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, to pursue hotel development deals in the Balkans, where he has connections as Mr. Trump’s former envoy.

In 2022 he helped the first lady, Melania Trump, secure $500,000 for two speeches on two consecutive days to groups he is involved with.

But Mr. Trump’s second term has brought a deeper, and deeper-pocketed, bench. Mr. Kushner, one of the administration’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, is simultaneously working to raise $5 billion for his investment firm from the region’s governments. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon paid the first lady’s production company $40 million for the rights to “Melania,” a documentary about the run-up to her husband’s second inauguration.

Mr. Grenell helped organize the premiere of “Melania” at the Kennedy Center in late January. It was one of the last times he was seen in the building, say two people who are there regularly.

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