President Donald Trump’s allies are renewing calls to close the Kennedy Center after a small hole appeared in its ceiling.
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The Kennedy Center’s official account posted photos on X showing dusty debris on the ground of the facility’s foyer and the small, black hole above.
“Another warning we can’t ignore,” the Kennedy Center account wrote. “Chairman President Trump has been right: America’s cultural center needs to close, renovate, and be restored—now.”
According to the Kennedy Center’s account, a piece of the ceiling “collapsed” during storms in Washington, D.C., and “no one was hurt.” The Kennedy Center added, “Decades of deferred maintenance made this inevitable.”
The Trump-allied Roma Daravi, the center’s vice president for public relations, echoed the calls for the shutdown.
“This structural failure stems from decades of neglect and deferred maintenance by the previous leadership, and there’s no justification for further delays in restoring America’s cultural center,” Daravi said in a statement, per reporting by NOTUS. She called the partial collapse “another example of the urgent need to close for renovation and revitalization, as our Chairman President Trump has championed.”
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Keep the KC, the community group fighting the Kennedy Center’s closure, challenged the framing, however.
Grace Terpstra, the group’s founder, said that she suspected the Trump-allied board had seized on limited damage “to make the point that the whole thing needs to be shut down, that it’s going to fall on everybody,” she told NOTUS.
“I think they’ll try to make it into a bigger thing and show that they’ve found a lot of other things,” Terpstra said.
A judge is currently considering a vote by the Kennedy Center’s Trump-backed board to return Trump’s name to the facade of the building and move forward with $250 million worth of renovations.
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