Gay Trump administration Ric Grenell claimed his X account was hacked over the weekend by leftist enemies intent on undermining his boss’s promise for a new “golden age” in the arts at the Kennedy Center.
On Friday, the Washington National Opera (WNO) announced they’re leaving the once-revered cultural institution due to poor ticket sales and attendance after President Trump’s takeover of the institution last year.
Related
The next day, Grenell said that he fired the opera company —not the other way around — and claimed he had already announced it in posts that were deleted in a hack.
“The Trump Kennedy Center has made the decision to end the EXCLUSIVE partnership with the Washington Opera so that we can have the flexibility and funds to bring in operas from around the world and across the U.S.,” Grenell wrote on X.
Insights for the LGBTQ+ community
Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
“We have spent millions of dollars to support the Washington Opera’s exclusivity, and yet they were still millions of dollars in the hole – and getting worse.”
A resolution to leave the Kennedy Center was approved by the opera’s board of trustees on Friday afternoon. They said in a statement that the company would “seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity.”
“I am deeply saddened to leave the Kennedy Center,” Francesca Zambello, who has been the opera’s artistic director for 14 years, said in a statement reported by The New York Times. “I have been proud to be affiliated with a national monument to the human spirit, a place that has long served as an inviting home for our ever-growing family of artists and opera lovers.”
In November, Zambello broached the possibility of leaving the center as ticket sales dried up. The director said the
The final straw for the opera company may have been Trump renaming the living memorial to President John F. Kennedy after himself in December.
The WNO was a founding arts organization at the Kennedy Center, first taking the Opera House stage in 1971, the year the center opened. The company entered its current affiliation agreement with the center in 2011, when high attendance wasn’t enough to keep the company financially solvent. The WNO ceded some programming and management decisions to the center in exchange for financial support. That decision is coming back to haunt them under the weight of Trump and Grenell’s politically charged control.
The company has a new website and says it’s lining up alternative venues around Washington for its planned spring season. How those shows are paid for may hinge on what happens to the WNO’s $30 million endowment, which is already a matter of dispute. Grenell will doubtless use it as leverage in negotiating the opera company’s exit from the center.
But the opera company’s departure is far from the only drama unfolding at the Kennedy Center. Grenell is already under investigation for corruption at the beleaguered cultural institution.
“The Left continues to try and silence people they don’t agree with,” Grenell said in his post claiming a hack and the pursuit of its perpetrators.
“But they will never succeed,” he added, a tragic hero’s prediction if there ever was one.
Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.