The embattled Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is suspending public tours after an article spotlighted Trump’s “gutting,” per reporting by the New York Times.
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According to a memo reviewed by the Times, the Kennedy Center’s director of the volunteer program said that the tour program will be put on a “temporary pause,” effective Friday. Tour guides were told to stop reporting for duty “until further notice,” the Times added.
The Kennedy Center memo halting public tours didn’t offer any reasoning, per the Times. However, the suspension comes after a volunteer tour guide told the Times about what the paper described as “President Trump’s gutting of the iconic cultural institution.”
When a Times reporter called the director of the volunteer program, Brooks Boeke, to confirm the suspension, Boeke responded, “How did you find out?” and declined to give further comment.
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“We are conducting a review of campuswide tour routes to ensure they provide the best possible experience for our visitors,” P.J. Elliott, a Kennedy Center spokesperson, told the Times in an emailed statement.
In the article about the gutting, which came out on July 27, a longtime tour guide showed the Times how the Kennedy Center Opera House “no longer has an opera” but only “an empty orchestra pit scattered with trash,” and the grand terrace overlooking the Potomac River is filled with flower beds that “are wilting and weedy.”
It also noted how the Trump administration purged and cut programming across the institution, oversaw staff losses of roughly 90 percent, lost 100 percent of the paying audience, and downgraded the volunteer recognition gala.
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Trump also tried to rename the center after himself before courts stopped him.
