Trump replaces Ric Grenell as head of the Kennedy Center

By Sunlen Serfaty, Kristen Holmes, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump is replacing Richard Grenell as head of the Kennedy Center, he announced on Friday.

The move comes as the arts and culture institution, which now bears Trump name on its façade, is expected to close for two years for renovations as the president seeks to remold it in his image.

Grenell’s tenure as interim president of the Kennedy Center since February 2025 has been marked by tumult, plagued by high-profile performance cancellations, protests, declining ticket sales and financial strain as he sought to execute the president’s vision for the arts center.

Despite earlier warmth between Trump and Grenell, a longtime loyalist who has served in various roles across the president’s two terms in office, the president had become frustrated with a slew of negative headlines about his revamp of the arts institution, multiple sources told CNN.

One source familiar with the White House view said that the president liked Grenell, but felt that he had fumbled when it came to his leadership of the Kennedy Center, including on managing the publicity.

Another White House official insisted that Grenell wasn’t being fired but that he was always intended to help during the Kennedy Center’s transition period and then leave the role. And a separate source said Grenell did not want to stay through a planned, lengthy renovation of the facility. He plans to transition out of the role in the next few weeks and finish up his work fundraising.

While leading the Kennedy Center, Grenell often bucked the trends of the arts world, defying traditions and stretching norms in place for decades. Critics contended that led to strain and brought irreparable harm to the institution.

Some of those who work with Grenell described him as combative, confrontational and headstrong. A source close to the Kennedy Center lamented that Grenell had no experience or grounding in the arts world and came in “with a sledgehammer” and “campaign schticks” that are moving the institution in the wrong direction.

But others contended that he was exactly the person to carry out Trump’s vision and that he brought a “no-nonsense mentality” to his work and brought in many new staff to the center.

In recent days, Trump has been “souring on him,” a source close to the Kennedy Center said.

“Ric worked really hard to keep in Trump’s good graces, but Trump got tired of turning on the news and hearing every day how bad the Kennedy Center was being run and (how) Trump is killing it,” the source said.

CNN has approached Grenell for comment.

The president’s ‘Swiss army knife’

From the beginning, Grenell was an unlikely choice to lead an arts institution as his professional experience has largely been in foreign affairs. He served eight years in the State Department, including as spokesperson to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration. There he waged a personal and public challenge to the institution he worked for after officials rejected his request to have his partner listed as his spouse in the United Nations Blue Book, a book that includes contact information for diplomats and other personnel.

After a stretch in California during the Obama years and then a return to politics and public affairs, he became close to Trump, and has an especially close relationship with first lady Melania Trump, sources say.

In Trump’s first term, he served as US ambassador to Germany and special envoy for Serbia and Kosovo, and in 2020, the president chose him to be the acting director of national intelligence (DNI), making him the first openly gay acting Cabinet-level official. His three months there proved controversial, with the firings of top career officials, a re-structuring of several parts of ODNI, a deeply acrimonious relationship with overseers in Congress and the declassification of documents from the Obama administration that fueled the “Obamagate” conspiracy theory. But Trump remarked at the end of it of Grenell: “I think you’ll go down as the all-time great ‘acting’ ever, at any position.”

In 2024, Trump made him a presidential envoy for special missions, a role he still holds even while at the Kennedy Center.

Trump trusted Grenell “implicitly,” said a source who has worked with Grenell in the past, and elevated him to interim president of the Kennedy Center in part due to his experience managing high-stakes diplomacy.

“The president’s almost used him as a Swiss army knife,” the person said. “When there’s a problem that he can’t quite figure out or he needs someone to figure out how to solve it creatively, he chooses Ric.”

An imperfect fit

But veterans of the Kennedy Center and arts management were skeptical of his ability to lead the institution given his lack of arts expertise or experience. “One of my very first questions to him was asking him what his connection was to the performing arts, why he took on this role, what this meant to him and how did the Kennedy Center connect to who he was in his identity,” a person close to the Kennedy Center who met with Grenell early in his tenure said, “one of the very first things that he said when I asked him that was he said, ‘I love celebrities.’”

Grenell has highlighted his time singing in a choir as a boy, that his partner was once a Broadway actor, his belief in arts education and his love of niche programming to boost up his arts bona fides.

But multiple people familiar with the Kennedy Center’s management said Grenell never showed much interest or took the time to understand what was required to run it, and turned down offers to educate or help him during his time there.

“He didn’t want to know in any way what was possible and what was not possible – he just wanted to do what he wanted to do,” a person closely connected to Grenell at the Kennedy Center said.

Months into his new job, Grenell proposed an unorthodox fundraising suggestion: to auction off conducting duties of the national anthem for the National Symphony Orchestra.

The idea was simple – anyone who would donate $50,000 would get an opportunity to take the baton and step on stage, into the revered role of conducting the symphony for one song.

While the idea never came into fruition – and it’s not clear how serious it was – just the suggestion set off dismay and embarrassment within the institution and among the musicians. Many felt the fundraising pitch threatened to cheapen the symphony, which has long been considered the crown jewel of the Kennedy Center.

But he could also articulate a clear, if divisive, agenda.

“You cannot have programming that is woke or not popular,” Grenell said in a recent PBS interview, “We cannot have unpopular programming. It doesn’t pay the bills.”

He made it a mission to revamp programming as part of a holistic approach to the financials of the institution, starting with bringing in, in his words, more family-friendly programming. He brought in “Dog Man: The Musical,” based on the popular kids’ graphic novel series, at the recommendation of second lady Usha Vance.

“This is not just an arts, left institution but one that all voices are able to come here and be a part of it,” Grenell said in an interview with Politico. “For a lot of time, conservatives didn’t feel welcome here.”

Grenell, as well as Trump, have attempted to beef up the pizzaz and glamour of the center.

In the past year, the center has been used for a high-profile FIFA World Cup event, the “Melania” documentary premiere and a Charlie Kirk memorial.

For the first Kennedy Center Honors, Grenell had wanted Dolly Parton to host the show, a source close to the Kennedy Center told CNN.

Parton declined the invitation, the source said, and Trump went on to host the show himself.

A temporary stop?

For all that, sources said Grenell did not spend much time at the Kennedy Center – often working from his home in California. When he is at the Kennedy Center, he is “secretive” and “pompous,” critics said. He never had an all-staff meeting, and a source close to the Kennedy Center said that a year into his tenure, many staff still had not met him.

Some held the view that Grenell did not truly want the job and was just biding his time to wait for something better to come up within the Trump administration.

Grenell himself told people he was there “very temporarily” and did not shy away from telling people that he felt passed over for the job he had always really wanted – secretary of state, multiple sources told CNN.

“He kept saying that he agreed to take on the Kennedy Center role because he was assuming that he would that he would be taking on the State job quite quickly, so he was just a matter of time,” a person close to the Kennedy Center said. “He felt like he was getting sloppy seconds of the Kennedy Center.”

A next chapter

Grenell’s departure will come amid tumult and continued challenges.

Multiple sources told CNN that attendance at the Kennedy Center had been so low that for months it had to “paper the house” – a theater term used to essentially fill seats – sometimes by offering tickets for free to federal workers to make the shows look fuller than what ticket sales could bring.

Critics of the administration have argued that much of this was caused by the Trump administration’s moves to entrench the traditionally nonpartisan institution in politics, after Trump fired the board, replaced it with hand-picked loyalists, installed himself as the chairman, and changed the name to the Trump-Kennedy Center – a change being disputed in court.

“The challenge is finding artists who will work with us, not because they are a Republican or Democrat, but more because concern that if they have a concert at the Kennedy Center they will be labeled as supporting the administration that is not that friendly to the arts,” a source close to the Kennedy Center said.

But Grenell did not do enough to address the problem, critics said. “They have an unwillingness to connect poor attendance numbers to the administration,” the Kennedy Center source said of Grenell and his team.

A source close to Grenell said: “Ric is remarkably loyal to the people he works with and willing to throw his head through a wall to make it happen or to do something on their behalf. So if the president’s got a mission – he’s remarkably loyal to him he’s going to do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

The move to close for renovations was seen by many within the institution as an attempt to save face amid these challenges. “Every day was just another negative thing hitting the Kennedy Center, and I think that they felt like the closing of the Center is really the only way to stop the hemorrhaging,” one of the sources said.

On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that Grenell would be replaced by Matt Floca, the center’s current vice president of facilities operations.

“Ric Grenell has done an excellent job in helping to coordinate various elements of the Center during the transition period, and I want to thank him for the outstanding work he has done,” Trump wrote, adding: “THE TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER will be, at its completion, the finest facility of its kind anywhere in the World!”

This story and headline have been updated with additional details.

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