Thousands of demonstrators ringed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the evening of Friday, September 18, 2026, clasping hands into a chain around the Potomac River landmark to defy President Donald Trump’s threat to tear it down.
So many rode the subway in that the overflow filled the streets of the Foggy Bottom neighborhood and stopped traffic cold, with everyone moving toward a rally billed as “Hands Around the Kennedy Center.”
Most of the argument was made on cardboard. “You’re No Jack Kennedy,” said one sign. “Hands Off the Arts,” read another. A third borrowed from the musical “Wicked” with the line “Wicked: Starring DJT.” One man turned up in a hat reading “Make America Intelligent Again.” Another, wearing 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
Before the chain took shape, Hands Off the Arts, the coalition behind the gathering, lined up musical performances, testimonials and speeches on the center’s steps. Actor Lynda Carter, a vocal critic of the president, addressed the rally. Signs reading “hands off Kennedy Center” bobbed above the crowd, and demonstrators sang beside the facade where workers stripped Trump’s name in June under a court order. A human ring then closed around the building as arms went up overhead, and the demand carried from it was that Trump lose the chairmanship for failing to protect and manage the institution.
Chalkboards, Hearts and What Has Been Lost
Bud Wilkinson, a member of the local arts community, hauled in a chalkboard on which Trump’s name had been written hundreds of times over. One by one, protesters wiped the names away and chalked hearts where they had been. Performances and programming are being censored, Wilkinson said, and that, not merely whose name goes on the facade, is what the fight concerns.
A starker parallel came from Laura Steinberg, who 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.
Alina Baciu, a protester whose daughter attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, counted up the losses facing the school. Its students used to appear on the center’s Millennium Stage, and the Washington National Opera supplied costumes on loan for the productions staged at Duke Ellington, she said, adding that none of it remains. A tragedy is how Kerry Kennedy, a niece of the late President John F. Kennedy, described the prospect of demolition in remarks to the BBC.
A Judge Steps In
A week of escalation led up to the demonstration. 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, a decision that landed only hours after the board’s bid to restore Trump’s name to the building was halted by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper. The center must give 30 days’ notice before any major physical change, including demolition, Cooper ruled on Thursday, September 17, and he also required a detailed report on what the institution has called a temporary closure.
The judge had been urged to act by attorneys for Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex officio member of the board. They cited the president’s warning that the center could be ripped down, and they filed 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 conditions and losses of hundreds of millions of dollars are what Trump has described at the center. Tax records, however, show revenue climbing by millions in 2024, a figure that includes a federal allocation. His administration attributes the building’s finances and structural problems to conditions it says demand extensive renovations; critics instead blame the departure of performers and private funders after he took control.
Hours before the crowd assembled, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that saving the Kennedy Center would be easy for him, and he went on to ask 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.
Trump has made the center a focus of his remaking of Washington since 2025, when he ousted its leadership, seated his own board and took the chairmanship himself weeks after his second inauguration; the institution was inaugurated in 1971 following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In December 2025, that handpicked board voted to write Trump’s name into the institution’s official title, and the White House condensed the new name to the Trump-Kennedy Center. The name was mounted on the building in December, and a judge later found the addition illegal and ordered it taken down. David Barrows, 77, went out into the street shortly after Trump became chairman, one of the early protesters in that fight.
Chris Raleigh, a co-founder of Hands Off the Arts, said in an interview that he hoped the rally would show how many people are prepared to fight the president’s plans for the building. Formed after the leadership changes at the center, the coalition has mounted protest after protest outside the venue this year, describing its aim as reclaiming the building from what it terms authoritarian overreach. Closure continues at the center, and Cooper’s order holds: nothing comes down without 30 days’ notice. Trump backed away from the threat on Monday, September 21, telling reporters he is “not ripping it down” and will reuse the building’s steel and some of its marble in a renovation he said requires about two years of closure.