And, finally, when there’s nothing left, when you can’t borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. — 1990 Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas
Nineteen months ago, things were complicated at the Kennedy Center for the Arts, but it was not bankrupt, contrary to Donald Trump’s claims.
The Center runs as a nonprofit, and we all know this is something the president can’t understand or respect. Trump was handed an institution “that was better off financially than in most years before covid,” according to a new report from the Washington Post.
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And then Donald Trump took over and gave it the mafia-style Bust Out treatment.
Trump Tapped Out the Kennedy Center
Under Trump’s leadership, the Kennedy Center has “borrowed everything its bank would lend it, dipped into money donors had given on condition it never be spent, and written off pledges from supporters who stopped paying, according to confidential board documents and tax filings reviewed by The Washington Post.”
“This was a pretty stable — large, complicated, but stable — organization,” an expert in arts management, told WaPo. “It had a hard time during the pandemic, lots of people did. And it was pretty stable at September 30, 2024.”
The arts management expert told WaPo it now appears to be “in free fall.”
Trump has claimed that he took over a bankrupt Kennedy Center, but the Post’s review of the documents show that after Trump’s takeover, “both donors and audiences walked away. Ticket income fell by 15 percent in the financial year that ended in September 2025, and gifts dropped by nearly a quarter. The center expects ticket income to fall by more than two-thirds this year, and gifts in the first four months of 2026 were down about 40 percent on the previous quarter, according to an internal report from June.”
The staff was cut from 94 to 16. “The center has also written off $48 million, according to its latest tax filing, and most of it appears related to pledges it no longer expects to collect.”
The Kennedy Center “had long kept a $10 million line of credit that it sometimes dipped into during the year and paid back by year end, according to its audits,” but by September 2025 “it doubled the line to $21 million and has since borrowed against all of it, according to an internal June report.”
It’s giving mafia bust-out. When all is destroyed and taken, burn it down.
