Under the stewardship of Donald Trump, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts is seeing a ticket sales collapse not experienced since the year following the Covid pandemic.
In fact, current numbers are worse.
According to a Friday morning report from the Washington Post, since Trump ousted the center’s board and installed his own people vowing to rid the facility of “woke” productions, attendance has gone into a death spiral and longtime donors have disappeared, creating a cash crunch with no end in sight.
With the Kennedy Center refusing to comment or provide current financial data, the Post used outside sources to document theaters sitting almost half-empty for acts that traditionally sold out.
“Since early September, 43 percent of tickets remained unsold for the typical production. That means that, at most, 57 percent of tickets were sold for the typical production — and some tickets may have been 'comps,' which are given away, often to staff members or the press," the report stated.
"That compares with 93 percent sold or comped in fall 2024 and 80 percent in fall 2023. Overall, the center could have sold tickets to roughly 143,000 seats during this time period. Of those, more than 50,000 have remained vacant.”
Using spending data “drawn from 40 million credit and debit cards analyzed by the consumer data and analytics company Consumer Edge, less than half as much money was spent on tickets in September and the first half of October 2025 as during that same period in 2024,” the report continued.
More alarming about the numbers is the comparison to 2021, the year following the Covid pandemic when the public was still leery about returning to public spaces.
“In 2021, as the center was reopening during the coronavirus pandemic, 34 percent of seats went unsold — a bit less than this year, when the median production had about 43 percent of seats available,” the report states.
According to one former Kennedy Center official, when shown the Post analysis, “Given the unprecedented takeover of a nonpartisan arts institution combined with the inexperience and rhetoric of the new management, I expected a decline in sales; however, it is truly shocking to see that these actions have been worse for business at the Kennedy Center than the aftermath of a global pandemic.”
A current staffer agreed, adding, “This downturn isn’t just about pricing or programming — it feels directly tied to the new regime’s leadership shift and the broader political climate. I’ve heard from ticket buyers who say they’re choosing not to attend because of what the Kennedy Center now represents. The brand itself has become polarizing, which is unprecedented in my experience.”
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