The KC Mafia

On September 30, The Washington Post reported that the Kennedy Center, the iconic performing arts space on the Potomac River, had burned through a $21 million line of credit, a $10 million endowment, a $257 million congressional appropriation from the One Big Beautiful Bill, and an undetermined quantity of art, antiquities, and ticket revenues since Donald Trump’s inauguration, despite having axed all but a handful of the venue’s 2,500 staffers and stiffed the Washington National Opera of an alleged $17 million.

The Center’s since-ousted executive director Ric Grenell boasted late last year of having raised $117 million in donations from well-heeled MAGA-world loyalists in 2025, but Trump’s handpicked Board of Trustees appears to be hoarding that money in a secret fund called the “Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation” that is inaccessible to the current operators until a federal judge reverses his prohibition against adding “Trump” to its name.

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This crusade to implant his name on the venue possibly reached Trump’s brain when Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda told The New York Times that the show was “not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center.” That declaration, accompanied by a mass exodus of profitable performers and loyal patron-donors, came in response to the president’s seemingly impulsive decision a few weeks earlier to declare culture war against the venue on Truth Social, fire its executive director, and replace all 18 Democratic appointees to the board of the performing arts center with 14 Republican loyalists, somewhat inexplicably including his (presumably quite busy) chief of staff Susie Wiles as well as her stepmom Cheri Summerall. But by law, the Democrats were still permitted to attend the meetings on Zoom, which is how the theretofore obscure Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) became a resistance folk hero, revealing in a December lawsuit that someone on the new board had muted her when she attempted to ask a follow-up question about the decision to add Trump’s name to the building’s facade, and then later on MS NOW, the full-on “tantrum” the president had thrown six months later when a federal judge ordered the board to remove it.

“It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed,” the congresswoman marveled. “President Trump is holding the Kennedy Center hostage unless he can put his name on this sacred memorial.”

You may be aware of the rest: the odd videos of Trump officials discussing the beloved building in words a housing inspector might use to characterize a crack house; the forklifts repeatedly ramming into the building in the manner of an ICE vehicle; the disappearance of the towering blue stick figure outside and other priceless artworks and artifacts; and the wire service photograph of Trump, in a MAGA hat, staring at a placard in roughly 300-point type with the words KENNEDY CENTER DEMOLISH.

But was something more calculated than unbridled spite behind the drive to feed the Kennedy Center to the woodchipper? This isn’t, after all, the Barack Obama Rosie O’Donnell Center for the Performing Arts he is trying to rename; his own HHS secretary and JFK’s nephew has conceded he’s not crazy about the name change.

A motion to compel filed by Beatty’s team last week homed on the apparent central role billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—whose wife Allison is on the board—has been playing in the Kennedy Center’s closure, especially with regard to his relationship with a “construction industry expert” named Darin Buchalter, whose team of $300-an-hour analysts have been formulating fat reports documenting the structural deterioration of the facility in service of justifying the decision to abruptly shutter the venue. Lutnick is the subject of enduring fascination among Trump’s political opponents, having lived for years next door to Jeffrey Epstein, and having apparently caused such anguish to a former employee who reported his entanglements with the sex trafficker to the FBI that the man last week was reported to have hanged himself. The words “Ankura Consulting” don’t mean much to almost anyone reading this, but my heart filled with dread when I saw that Buchalter had operated from the C-suite of this entity for two years before nabbing the CEO post at his current outfit, Delta Consulting.

Among Ankura’s specialties is shielding corporate assets from unpaid workers and vendors and people who have won wrongful death lawsuits against their owners, and generally obfuscating acts of insider plunder or casting them as rational business decisions, as it is currently accused of doing for a convicted fraudster named Bradley Heppner, a client the consultancy took on, for what it is worth, during Buchalter’s stint at the firm. I have watched Ankura clients bring the “Texas Two-Step” bankruptcy of a fake entity called Tehum to effectively liquidate the wrongful death and malpractice lawsuits of a diabolical prison health care contractor. Lutnick and Buchalter have already threatened to shove the Kennedy Center into the jurisprudential no-fly zone of bankruptcy court, whereupon unions and other creditors like the Opera could be busted, assets transferred to some unaccountable new corporate structure, and litigation challenging the (plainly nonexistent) legality of everything that had just happened stayed and settled secretly in mediation by an off-duty bankruptcy judge.

Legal scholar Adam Levitin recently assured readers of his bankruptcy law blog that a Kennedy Center bankruptcy would be almost certainly illegal. The danger, of course, is that the Center’s board reads like a who’s who of “people who could care less what the law says.” It takes a village to raze a skyline, and what is most compelling about the sad saga of the riverfront palace where Washingtonians go to see The Nutcracker are the 30 conspirators in his quixotic revenge crusade, all of whom have their own agendas and motivations for defiling a memorial to an ex-president who boasts an astonishing 90 percent approval rating. In fact, I’d even argue that the criminals represented by the Kennedy Center board, and perhaps the overlapping extended universe on the list of billionaire ballroom donors, serve as a kind of cheat code for understanding the crimes of Trump 2.0.

ABOUT A HALF DOZEN OF THE TRUSTEES on the Kennedy Center board represent something I’ll call the “Paul Manafort wing” of the Trump foreign-policy coalition, by which I mean professional mercenaries who dabble in foreign policy primarily as a means of lining their pockets, representing and/or brokering deals with regimes deemed unsavory by polite (warmongering) Washington society. This faction generally identifies itself ideologically in anti-interventionist or “America First” terms, principally because the states against which their neocon rivals are likeliest to advocate military intervention generally need more and costlier assistance navigating the various institutions Washington has developed—namely, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control—to undermine its enemies. But the liberal liquidity comes at a social cost: The Paul Manafort wing frequently finds itself in pseudo-exile from the Washington mainstream.

Ric Grenell, for example, was named executive director of the Kennedy Center in 2025 just a day or two after returning from Caracas, where he had been negotiating a prisoner swap with Nicolás Maduro with logistical assistance from Harry Sargeant, an asphalt mogul with a history of sanctions-dodging. The appointment was probably a favor to Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller, who had little interest in allowing negotiations to get in the way of their plot to overthrow Maduro. Days later, Trump named Sergio Gor, his Uzbekistan-born, Malta-raised chief personnel officer who was on his way out after running afoul of the neocon establishment and getting booted for vibes of antisemitism, to the board alongside Mary Helen Bowers, a ballerina turned fitness influencer who happened to be married to Project 2025 architect Paul Dans, who had been fired from the Heritage Foundation the summer earlier for unclear reasons that possibly involved his involvement in a video about the project produced by a covert Russian propaganda outfit called Tenet Media.

The board meeting that triggered the federal lawsuit the Center now hopes to discharge through bankruptcy was held at the Palm Beach home of Andrea and Steve Wynn, the former a member of the Board of Trustees, the latter the casino mogul whose former salon manager claimed in a lawsuit she was fired for telling human resources that he had raped and impregnated one of her manicurists. She was also repeatedly warned “there may be people buried in the desert because of him.”

One of the few well-heeled new donors Grenell convinced to underwrite the lounge formerly known as the African Room was Gaurav Srivastava, a California-based Democratic mega-donor who had raked in tens of millions of dollars marketing his services as a CIA-endorsed “fixer” to traders of Russian and Iranian oil, with help from a pair of ex-CIA officers involved in a previous labyrinthine billionaire shakedown. A year earlier, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Biden campaign had frozen $340,000 in donations from Srivastava after a Swiss commodity trader convincingly accused him of running one of the most mind-bendingly elaborate international cons of all time. This sent Srivastava burrowing into “America First” circles, appearing as a keynote speaker at the America First Ground Zero Conference and underwriting “a tribute to America’s intelligence community” at the Kennedy Center.

Other members of the shadow diplomacy brigade include MAGA uber-lobbyist Brian Ballard, whose firm has in recent years represented Qatar, Liberia, Turkey, and the Dominican Republic; the wives of Duke Buchan and Billy Long, respectively the ambassadors to Morocco and Iceland; and Paolo Zampolli, Melania’s Italian-born former modeling agent who now serves in the State Department as “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships” and was last month sued for drugging and raping a woman he met at Mar-a-Lago.

Shortly after he was first named to the board in 2020, Zampolli became notorious for throwing bacchanalian parties featuring inappropriately young women and “lobbyists for disreputable industries and diplomats for countries with lackluster human rights records.” True to form, he hosted a party over the summer featuring both the Tate brothers and the foreign minister of the country that has repeatedly attempted to prosecute them for sex trafficking. But his most iconic events coup may have been convincing his old friend Gianni Infantino to relocate the World Cup draw from the Sphere in Las Vegas to the Kennedy Center last December, bringing luminaries, from Heidi Klum and Tom Brady to Claudia Sheinbaum and the Village People, to Washington to watch Infantino bestow upon one of modern history’s most gratuitous warmongers the so-called “FIFA Peace Prize.”

The weekend was a prelude to a year of Trump-FIFA collaboration that included the soccer federation’s agreement to subsidize the construction of a football stadium in Gaza for the so-called Board of Peace, announced exactly a week before the administration murdered more than a hundred elementary school children along with dozens of teachers, parents, and staffers in the Minab double-tap massacre; an abortive April lobbying effort to swap out Iran for Italy in the tournament; the unusual repeal of the red card penalty imposed upon Folarin Balogun during a match against Bosnia; and of course the since-scrapped deal, hatched in concert with the Kushners and media mogul Greg Maffei, to sell the World Cup tournament itself off to a private equity consortium at a deep discount to its market value. But the event was actually a fiscal apocalypse for the Kennedy Center, which accelerated $12 million in dubious renovation projects to meet its deadlines; canceled a long list of holiday performances and parties, including numerous National Symphony Orchestra concerts; and then gave FIFA 20 days of exclusive access to the facility in exchange for no rental revenue whatsoever, only a $2.4 million donation and an additional $5 million in supposed “sponsorship opportunities.”

A cursory look at some of the contracts unearthed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who has been investigating the Kennedy Center’s controlled demolition for more than a year, shows that Trump Inc. has been doling out hefty discounts for venue usage to everyone from CPAC to NewsNation to Melania (to screen her “biopic”). In January, a group called Republicans for National Renewal held a fancy cocktail party featuring a large Greenland-shaped cake decked out in stars-and-stripes frosting. Annexing Greenland is another project that is close to home for the board; trustee Barbara Long’s ambassador husband has joked about seizing the territory so many times he was summoned to the office of the foreign minister in Reykjavik last month. And Paul Dans’s identical twin brother Tom Dans—trustee Mary Helen Bowers’s brother-in-law—is the intellectual godfather of the Greenland project and leader of an astroturf pro-annexation lobby. He’s also an investor in various specialty shipbuilding concerns seeking to exploit the vast mineral reserves there.

About 2,600 miles south of Reykjavik, trustee Hannah Buchan’s husband Duke unveiled over the summer the fruit of his recent diplomatic labors, the 655-mile “Donald J. Trump Highway” linking Morocco with the rare earth mineral–rich Western Sahara, a semi-autonomous territory the Trump administration is pressuring its king to annex ever more rapidly despite United Nations opposition.

THROUGHOUT HIS STINT AS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, Grenell continued to scheme with bondholders, extraction entrepreneurs, and, fatefully, mercurial MAGA influencer Laura Loomer to undermine Rubio’s draconian Venezuela policy for the sake of ensuring “that the Chinese are not coming in and taking oil and minerals and gold and keeping us on the outside,” as he put it in an interview on Steve Bannon’s podcast. But while he was working the back channels to avoid regime change war in Venezuela, Grenell was steering the Kennedy Center toward a nuclear option.

“He really just thought he should have been named secretary of state,” remembers Mallory Miller, who was axed from her job as assistant manager of dance programming nine months into the coup. “It generally seemed like he had profound disdain for performing artists, but he also seemed extremely insecure around us.”

Grenell installed a failed Nevada county commissioner candidate named Ryan Hamilton as a programming executive, who kept telling Miller she needed to book acts that were “more popular.” He suggested she look into booking a show from Las Vegas that he called “Strip Wars”; after some quick research, she determined he was talking about a Star Wars–themed burlesque called “The Empire Strips Back” that was already scheduled to play in D.C. at a venue called The Showroom. At another point, Hamilton suggested booking the reality show So You Think You Can Dance, which had previously done tour stops at the MGM Casino at National Harbor, but Miller was pretty sure the reality show hadn’t done a national tour in years, and indeed it was about to be canceled altogether.

Hamilton wasn’t hostile and contemptuous like Grenell; in fact, he was so enamored of a Cuban performance put on by a troupe called Acosta Danza that he told Miller the dancers “ought to be on a cruise ship.” But none of Grenell’s minions seemed to grasp that the Kennedy Center had spent 55 years building relationships with highbrow performers and fans, and changing the formula made about as much sense as trying to serve Big Macs at a Michelin-starred omakase table.

Nevertheless, Miller was actually surprised by how thoroughly unsuccessful Grenell’s team was, especially after he was named to the board of Live Nation, the music behemoth the Biden administration had sued for monopolizing the concert industry. Even before Trump, some of the Kennedy Center’s executives had been lobbying to swap out the venue’s longtime ticketing platform Tessitura for Live Nation’s Ticketmaster, and everyone assumed it would be easy for Grenell to outsource the venue’s booking to Live Nation, which ought to have little trouble “convincing”—or outright forcing, given its market dominance—some of the thousands of performers it represented to play gigs at the Kennedy Center.

Because Grenell had more than just Live Nation in his corner. The other big faction on the Kennedy Center board is the moguls’ wives: New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s wife Dana Blumberg Kraft is a trustee, as are Allison Lutnick (wife of the commerce secretary) and Mindy Levine, whose husband Randy is the president of the New York Yankees, a minority owner of the Italian soccer club AC Milan, and a co-founder of Legends Hospitality, the stadium management firm the Yankees co-own with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

Just last month, Robert Kraft demonstrated to the world the degree of leverage a billionaire stadium owner can exercise over even an ultra-famous pop star like Ed Sheeran; surely one of these women could have called in a favor? And trustee Laura Perlmutter and her husband Ike, the reclusive Israeli-born billionaire who parlayed the ownership of a struggling toy company into the most consistent cash cow in Hollywood when he bought Marvel Comics out of a bankruptcy he had indirectly caused in 1998, surely have one of the deepest celebrity rolodexes in the world. Andrea Wynn’s husband Steve’s Las Vegas properties virtually own the talents of Lionel Richie, Diplo, Tom Jones, and others who play residencies at his casinos. And even trustee Emilia May Fanjul, whose husband Pepe is the president and vice chairman of his family’s multibillion-dollar sugar and hospitality empire, owns a resort in the Dominican Republic where the Kardashians, Jennifer Lopez, and countless other top-shelf performers frequently vacation and film reality show episodes.

Miller says the team Grenell recruited was either hopelessly incompetent—like fundraiser Lisa Dale, a friend of right-wing TV host Kari Lake—or preoccupied with activities other than trying to make it work. “They did a lot of day drinking,” she told the Prospect. “And a lot of what seemed like just, looting. They immediately cleared out every piece of art in the building, and no one knows where it went.”

Perhaps the media scrutiny and litigation that accompanied Trump’s wrecking crew had dissuaded the extended Live Nation universe from wanting to be seen conspiring too closely with the White House. Or perhaps Grenell, who had served as Trumpworld’s designated envoy to Muslim voters during the 2024 campaign season, then as his back channel to Maduro during the months before Trump murdered 80 of his bodyguards and had him abducted to a maximum-security prison, was simply the guy Trump detailed to people and places he intended to screw over at a later date.

Whatever the case, an early-January tweet from his old co-conspirator Laura Loomer sealed Grenell’s fate. A few months earlier at an event to commemorate October 7th, Grenell had entreated donors to open their checkbooks to “save” the venue’s Israeli Lounge from being rebranded by some corporate sponsor. The week after the Maduro abduction, Loomer weighed in on the Center’s fiscal troubles with a shocking and absurd “scoop” that Grenell had brokered a deal with Qatar during the World Cup draw whereby the wealthy petrostate would finance the venue’s renovation, so long as he acquiesced to the “destruction and removal” of the Israeli Lounge, and its replacement with “a lounge dedicated to the funders of the Muslim Brotherhood.” The post was followed by incredulous follow-ups in Jewish Insider and elsewhere. The following month, Trump fired his handpicked antitrust chief Gail Slater, and Live Nation CEO Mike Rapino paid a visit to the White House for a one-on-one meeting, in advance of what would be the Justice Department’s settlement of the company’s monopolization case.

Within a week, Grenell was out of a job as well, and the week after that Trump addressed the monthly board meeting personally, with a characteristically rambling speech boasting about how he had “literally obliterated” the “Iranian regime,” and poking fun at his favorite billionaires for following their wives around. “Boy oh boy, what great relationships! The biggest guys in the country travel with their wives to come to a meeting!” he joked.

All the assembled billionaires had their own ulterior motives for visiting the White House, of course. Kraft also sat on a Trump-appointed body chaired by Randy Levine called the “Saving College Sports Roundtable” dedicated to reining in the frenzied competition for college athletes that the advent of NIL compensation had unleashed and restoring hegemony to the boss class in the college sports industry. The legislation to do so, the Protect College Sports Act, passed the Senate on a bipartisan vote in September. Levine via his stake in AC Milan is a bigwig with RedBird Capital Partners, which had pledged some $6 billion to financing the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, a deal that at the time was still being blocked by every remaining antitrust enforcer with a pulse. Howard Lutnick was working with Sergio Gor, recently dispatched to Delhi as Trump’s ambassador to India, to hammer out a deal with a troubled Indian mining conglomerate repped by perennial scandal-plagued Trumpworld operative Jason Miller that would ultimately agree to develop a steel mill in Iowa in a last-ditch effort to save the midterm elections. During his speech, Trump even teased Ike Perlmutter, who served as a bizarrely micromanagerial shadow czar at the Veterans Administration during his first term, that surely he was up to “something to do with the White House?” if he had traveled so far from Palm Beach just to see him.

And if Grenell had been put out to pasture for a month or so, his minions were still networking, scheming, updating LinkedIn. His soon-to-be-ousted director of membership Casey Flores was already preparing for a new challenge heading business development at Qorvis, an international lobbying firm recently depicted in a Bloomberg profile as the institution secretly driving the Trump administration’s unorthodox wartime energy policy behind the scenes—in a scheme weirdly reminiscent of Srivastava’s fake CIA oil buying program. Perhaps everyone was simply too distracted by some more urgent grift to pay the Kennedy Center coup the attention it required, and that is the real reason the board decided unanimously to shut it down for two years.

Or perhaps the truth is something closer to an observation Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) made almost offhandedly on a podcast appearance in May, two weeks before he lost the most expensive primary election in history, when his interviewer Tucker Carlson asked why he thought Trump had folded so quickly to the hyper-warmongering preferences of the donor class. The Kennedy Center, he theorized, was part of a mechanism Trump’s billionaire donors were using to maintain his beholdenness to them.

“I think they’ve convinced him that he needs a ballroom, that he needs an arch, that he needs a Kennedy Center renamed after him and that these take private money, and that the order of magnitude of private money that you need for these things obligates you to those individuals.”

By that logic, then, the more elaborate and intrigue-filled and distracting the Kennedy Center saga becomes in public, the more the billionaire stagehands are getting away with behind the scenes.