A tarp covers the facade of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 2026. —Daniel Heuer—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesThe Kennedy Center Board of Trustees on Tuesday voted to immediately close the lauded arts institution’s main building, according to multiple media outlets. Hours before the vote, a district court ruled against the Board’s latest effort to add President Donald Trump’s name back to the building—this time, in recognition of his purported role in the planned renovations. The closure decision also came one day after leadership claimed that the cultural center was on the brink of bankruptcy.The Board’s vote was informed, in part, by a 57-page packet provided Monday as preparatory material for their meeting. It claimed that keeping the main building open endangered both visitors and staff of the institution, according to the Washington Post.Read More: All the Things Trump Has Put His Name and Face on as PresidentThe packet included a two-page memorandum from Executive Director Matt Floca, who was installed by Trump in March. According to the Post, the letter points to an incident on Sept. 4 wherein a chunk of the ceiling in the grand foyer fell after heavy rains, spreading debris in front of the Concert Hall. A copy of the resolution to close the building was also filed in court Monday as part of ongoing litigation to keep Trump’s name off the front portico. It said that the Virginia-based firm Delta Consulting Group performed an independent assessment in August and found that the Kennedy Center was in an escalating state of disrepair.“Both Delta Consulting Group and the Center’s own Executive Director consider the main building to be unsafe for continued occupancy, and anticipate further risk to the public and employees if the building is not immediately closed and renovations begun,” the resolution said.The claim, however, has been disputed by Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex officio Kennedy Center Board member who first brought a lawsuit against Trump for his attempted rebrand in December 2025 and subsequently challenged multiple prior motions to close the Center. Beatty’s lawyers argued that Delta Consulting Group had “expressly disclaimed providing any such opinion.” TIME has reached out to both Beatty’s counsel and the Delta Consulting Group for comment.When asked about the closure, a Kennedy Center spokesperson pointed TIME to a statement given by Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s Vice President of Public Relations, in the aftermath of the falling ceiling plaster incident. She called the incident “another example of the urgent need to close for renovation and revitalization.”“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 at the time.The closure is just the latest episode in the Trump-related turmoil that has afflicted the storied arts center located on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. How Trump reshaped the Kennedy CenterAfter President Donald Trump returned to the White House, he promptly staged a takeover at what had formerly been a nonpartisan institution. In February 2025, he dismissed all Board members appointed by former President Joe Biden and replaced them with his own appointees. The newly formed Board then unanimously named him its Chairman. Deborah Rutter, who served as Kennedy Center President for over a decade, was also ousted.Soon after, Trump dissolved the Center’s Social Impact division. The move came amid broader Trump Administration efforts to roll back diversity initiatives at federally supported cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, which closed its diversity office following his executive orders.Trump also said he became “very involved” in choosing nominees for the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors, an annual award given to performing artists for their lifetime of contributions to American culture. Traditionally, they are selected by members of the Board with input from the public and past honorees.“I turned down plenty. They were too woke. I had a couple of ‘wokesters,’” Trump told reporters in August.After Trump’s takeover, some performers and art enthusiasts vowed to boycott the performances, and in June 2025, the Washington Post reported that subscriptions had already fallen 36% from the year prior and were down by about $1.6 million.Kennedy Center leadership warns of bankruptcy On Tuesday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down the Board’s latest attempt to add the President’s name to the front of the Kennedy Center. It was their second such effort after their previous renaming effort was struck down in May, when Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that it violated a 1964 statute requiring congressional approval. Congress repurposed its planned National Culture Center in 1964 as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy.Cooper ordered the signage removed, and the lettering came down in June.Amid that legal battle, the Department of Justice filed emergency stay arguments, warning that removing Trump’s name would “impede the Center’s fundraising efforts and contribute to the financial decline of the Center.” However, when the D.C. Circuit denied the stay on July 8, it said the defendants had provided no evidence of financial harm. On Aug. 13, the Board passed a resolution to a new inscription to the building “to recognize and honor President Trump’s current and future existential and unprecedented contributions to the survival of the Center.” The plan involved adding new lettering to the marble facade, just below the building’s name, in an area that has been blocked by scaffolding and tarp since Trump’s name was removed. Trustees also determined that the plaza would be dedicated to Trump. The Board argued that the proposed changes did not constitute an institutional name change and therefore complied with the earlier ruling. But the court rejected both the renovation inscription and the plaza renaming, while declining to rule on the contingent endowment inscription.“Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing ‘renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump’ on the main building or renaming the campus the ‘President Donald J. Trump Plaza,’” the court order said. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing.”The ruling addressed the Board’s August plan, but another potential naming effort was already taking shape.In response to the ruling, Beatty’s co-counsel Norm Eisen posted a statement on X saying, “2 times the court has told Trump the same thing: You are not above the law. Legal sanity has once again prevailed over Trump’s vanity. This is a victory for the memory of Pres. Kennedy & our nation.”On the day of the decision, the Board had been scheduled to consider yet another resolution saying that it would “undertake all legal means to effectuate one or more of the following." It listed 10 options for consideration, including “Renovation and endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund” and “A Legacy protected through the Generosity of President Donald J. Trump.” However, Joe LaFauci, the Vice President of Board Relations, informed the Board overnight Monday that, “[d]ue to the recently exacerbated structural emergencies,” the Tuesday meeting “is now focused exclusively on the necessary closure of the Center,” according to ABC News.Whether the Board will reschedule a vote on the resolution, despite the latest court ruling, is to be determined. The resolution itself had painted an alarming picture for the institution in its justification for a new inscription.That proposal also made explicit how closely the Board had linked the naming fight to the Center’s financial future.The Kennedy Center is “in a dire financial position” and could be weeks away from bankruptcy, it said. It went on to claim that the center cannot be saved without support from Trump—which may be contingent on public acknowledgement.“The Board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the Center,” the resolution said. The proposed Trump Kennedy Center Fund had not raised any money as of Sept. 15, according to NPR.Charlotte Canning, a professor and theater historian at the University of Texas at Austin, believes that the claims were part of a bold if desperate strategy to force the courts to allow the inscription to go forward.“I think it's an expression of Trump’s continuing frustration that he can't sort of hold the Kennedy Center's reputation under his own, and therefore benefit,” Canning tells TIME. “It’s the Trump Administration saying: ‘If you don't let us do what we want, we will declare bankruptcy.’”Can the Kennedy Center afford a two-year closure?The path to Tuesday’s immediate closure decision has involved repeated attempts at intervention from both the court and the Board.On March 16, after determining that vast renovations were needed, the Board voted to completely shutter the main building after the July 4 celebrations and proceed with planned renovations. A federal judge invalidated that decision in May; however, most scheduled programming was canceled and its stages have been largely silent this summer. After considering full, partial, and phased closure options, the Board again approved a two-year closure on Aug. 13. While budgetary constraints were a factor in the decision, the Board was looking at a set of financial conditions entirely separate from the compromised operating budget. Congress appropriated $256,657,000 in restricted funding to the Center in July 2025, with the condition that the funds must be used for “capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures” and are available through Sept. 30, 2029.The two-year closure puts the Kennedy Center within that established timeline. Renovations were projected at approximately $257 million, matching the allocated taxpayer funding.But even with that federal money in place, the scope and urgency of the proposed work remain contested.Canning questions the two-year renovation plan, saying that while the almost-60-year-old building likely requires maintenance and renovations on a regular basis, current assessments of its condition seem like hyperbole—especially when it comes to matters of life and death.Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose wife Allison serves on the Board, posted a video of the ceiling collapse Monday on X and wrote, “If a performance had been underway, patrons could have been killed.”“It’s all a part of this bamboozling plan to create a dire situation and then swoop in as the savior,” Canning says.In Beatty v Trump, Beatty’s attorneys argued that both of the board’s resolutions are an attempt to capitulate to the president, with one of them calling the resolutions a “hostage taking” of the Center.“Pay up or the Kennedy Center closes, & the price is Trump’s name on the building,” Eisen wrote Monday on X, commenting on the information that had been given to the Board.A Kennedy Center spokesperson, however, told TIME that adding “Trump’s name to the building attracted new donors and was crucial to raising additional funds for the Center's renovation.” Previously, the Washington Post reported in October 2025 that ticket sales for the three largest of nine performance spaces had fallen to their lowest level in years. The Kennedy Center counts ticket sales among its significant revenue sources; in fiscal year 2024, the most recent year for which filing data is available, ticket sales and other operations-driven revenue accounted for over 34% of the Center’s reported $306.88 million revenue. The spokesperson said that assets and income were actually “up significantly” for fiscal year 2025. The institution is behind on filing its Form 990 for that fiscal year, and did not provide supplementary documentation to that effect. “It makes no sense at all,” says Philip Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former counsel for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) who specialized in tax-exempt organizations. “If a nonprofit is planning to go bankrupt—and I don't know why a memorial to a former president that has a line from Congress would propose such a thing—but if you're planning to go bankrupt, you really shut down all activities.”“It's nonsense,” Hackney says.Cooper separately rejected the government’s claims about financial harm tied to Trump’s name.He wrote on Tuesday that the government offered “no proof that current or future donations hinge on President Trump’s name being on the building” and “no competent evidence that removing the Trump name would prevent the Center from fulfilling its artistic mission, as it has done for the last sixty years.”In fact, there is evidence that Trump’s involvement may have caused some additional harm. After announcing the renaming earlier this year, the prestigious cultural center faced multiple performance cancellations—which Canning says has prevented the institution from making as much money as it could have before the planned closure.“Large-scale institutions like this book well over a year out. So it means that starting at the beginning of 2025, when they would have been booking for now and the future, they weren't,” she says. “In fact, what they were doing instead was having to deal with cancellations.”Canning says the Center’s financial problems are unsurprising after a year of cancellations, diminished bookings, and litigation.“Any claims that the Kennedy Center is in financial trouble, I believe,” she says, “but they're all problems of their own manufacturing.”What comes next for the embattled Kennedy CenterAny future efforts to add Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, in whatever form they may take, will almost certainly be challenged in court.Even as that legal fight continues, however, the closure will not halt all of the Kennedy Center’s activities.While the cultural center’s main building—which includes the Concert Hall, the Opera House, and the Eisenhower Theater—is closed, certain programming elements will continue at REACH, an indoor and outdoor campus expansion that opened in 2019. The center also said that it will still be “maintaining educational outreach to the community” and that it will continue presenting the Kennedy Center Honors and awarding the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor—even if those events take place offsite.There will be “sufficient continuing engagement with the artistic community, thedonor base, and patrons, that a two-year closure of the main building will not unduly affectits ability to ramp up programming in a revitalized main building in 2028,” according to the resolution put before the Board.Those programs may preserve some continuity, but reopening the main building will present a different challenge. Canning says that much of the damage to the Center’s reputation has already been done.“The cost is to everyone, not just folks in D.C.,” Canning says. “The loss is bad now, but it's going to get increasingly worse in the future.”Because ticket sales are an important source of revenue, Canning says financial recovery after a prolonged closure will take time. That recovery will also depend on rehiring staff and rebuilding the programming calendar.“All the expert employees they had—the best ones—have all found other jobs and may be very unwilling to return to a much more tenuous employment situation like the Kennedy Center,” she says. “And the artists that they routinely booked will have adapted their schedules.” “It's very easy to destroy something—that can be done in literally a year,” Canning adds. “Rebuilding is much, much, much more difficult.”