trump took the kennedy center because a drag queen blew bubbles for children. this week he was photographed holding a poster that says demolish.

via the Associated Press, Washingtonian, the New Republic, Washington City Paper, the Washington Blade and the Advocate

She blew bubbles. She read a picture book out loud. She lip-synched a couple of show tunes, a drag king called Pretty Rik E handed out lollipops, and everybody went home.

That was the Dragtastic party, a free, non-ticketed afternoon at the Reach in 2024 for families with queer and questioning kids, and according to Washington City Paper it is the specific thing the President of the United States meant when he announced he was taking the Kennedy Center. Writing on Truth Social in February 2025, he said the building had "featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth," and that "THIS WILL STOP." Then he fired the board, removed chairman David Rubenstein and installed himself as chairman of a national arts center.

On Wednesday night, nineteen months later, he was photographed on Air Force One looking at a large posterboard about demolishing it.

what the judge ordered

The picture, shot by AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski according to the New Republic, is not quite the smoking gun the internet wants it to be, mostly because nobody can agree on what it says. The New Republic reads the board as KENNEDY CENTER DEMOLISH. Washingtonian and CNN say it "appeared to read" Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED. Somewhere between those two renderings is a man on a plane looking at a picture of a building coming down.

It was enough for Rep. Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and board member who has been fighting this in court for months. Her lawyers went in Thursday morning asking for an emergency hearing and argued that the board's stated reason for a temporary closure was "a plain pretext to justify shutting down the Center permanently." US District Judge Christopher Cooper said no to the hearing. But he agreed, per the Associated Press, to their request to "make crystal clear" that his order already prohibits demolishing the building without 30 days' notice, a clarification he said would "avoid any confusion on that score given more recent events."

Read that sentence again, because the shape of it is the story. A federal judge did not stop anything on Thursday. He restated an order he had already written, because the president had been photographed with a poster. There is also a legal observer's sworn declaration, cited by both the New Republic and the Advocate, that she watched a forklift "run into and hit the pillars on the building several times." The Advocate names her as Bridget Kennedy-Bailey. The Kennedy Center's executive director, Matt Floca, says the closure is about "acute risks to public safety resulting from continued structural deterioration," and points to a partial ceiling collapse this month.

The board voted to shut the main building for roughly two years on Monday, about an hour after Cooper ruled that only Congress can put anyone's name on the place. So the sequence, laid end to end, is: he cannot have his name on it, and now it may not be there at all.

the drag show he meant

Here is the part the wire copy leaves out. Tara Hoot, the longtime D.C. performer at the center of that 2024 afternoon, describes her act as "Mr. Rogers in a dress." She told City Paper that "my version of drag is to lift people up and to bring joy." There was no sexual content. There was no money changing hands. There were snacks and arts and crafts and short sets for children whose parents had brought them somewhere they would not have to explain themselves.

This is the recurring trick and we have watched it run all year, most recently when a Texas politician named a favorite drag queen and the vice president tried to make a scandal of it. A drag performer is never actually the target. She is the permission slip. You point at the bubbles, you say the word youth, and then you go and do the thing you wanted to do to the institution.

friday on the steps

Hoot is one of the organizers of the rally that starts at 6:30 on Friday evening on the Kennedy Center steps, where Hands Off the Arts expects somewhere between 400 and 800 people to link up into a human chain around the building. The group says it is protesting "the president's defacing of JFK's memorial, his removal and censorship of art, and the threat to demolish the center if he can't remake the site in his image."

She has performed inside that building. On Friday she will be standing outside it, holding hands with strangers, in a line around a national monument to keep it from being knocked down by a man who found out about her in the first place because she was reading a story to somebody's kid.

Update, September 19: She did it, the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington sang, and the national coverage of the night mentioned neither of them.

"Immoral," she called all this, back in 2025. "Shameful, and it is weak."