An actress with a record of likening the “Christian right” to the Taliban had some explosive suggestions as to what she’d like to see happen to the “Trumpified Kennedy Center.”
Vandalism, assaults, a bombing, and assassination attempts have been among the many acts of violence that have been directed toward conservatives, all while public figures on the left have refused to temper their rhetoric. Among them was Broadway star Patti LuPone, who, during an interview with The New Yorker, repeated her belief that Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “should get blown up.”
Peppered in as though it were little more than a passing fancy in a lengthy profile of LuPone, after reminiscing about a pre-corporate, “gritty old New York” where she was certain she’d heard a “scream of death” from her window and “knew that somebody was getting murdered,” writer Michael Schulman detailed, “She’s even angrier at the rest of the country. She told me, more than once, that the Trumpified Kennedy Center ‘should get blown up.'”
He went on to write, “In the S.U.V., apropos the current Administration, she pronounced, ‘Leave. New York. Alone. Make it its own country. I mean, is there any other city in America that’s as diverse, as in-you-face? It’s a live-or-die city, it really is. Stick it out or leave.”
Since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, amid his efforts to reinvigorate the economy and reassert national sovereignty, the GOP leader has taken on the project of revitalizing the Kennedy Center.
“It’s in tremendous disrepair, as is a lot of the rest of our country, most of it because of bad management,” the president said in March during a tour of the facility, having named himself chairman of the center’s board. “This is a shame, what I’ve watched and witnessed. They spent a fortune — $250 million — and they built these rooms that nobody is gonna use; rooms underground.”
Trump not pleased with things at Kennedy Center after tour, vows to fix: ‘This is a shame’ https://t.co/0XL2jBFd5e via @BIZPACReview
— BPR based (@DumpstrFireNews) March 18, 2025
The president’s involvement in the Kennedy Center inspired performers suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome to boycott appearances there as the GOP leader continued to be demonized as a “fascist” and “worse than Hitler.”
Meanwhile, it remained everyday Americans who paid the price for the virtue signaling of elitists as violent extremism became part of the zeitgeist and played out in deadly fashion. Earlier in May, mere weeks after the president had expressed his interest in bolstering IVF, a California clinic was bombed, leaving at least 19 people injured in what was considered a “war against pro-lifers.”
Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell reacted to LuPone’s rhetoric in a statement to Fox News Digital and expressed, “The far left has morphed into violent extremists. This is completely unacceptable — from the same people who claim to be for tolerance and diversity. Everyone should condemn these radicals.”
The actress’s history of “hate” toward Trump saw her insisting at the 2017 Tony Awards that she would never perform for the president, “Because I hate the motherf*cker, how’s that?”
Further, in 2023, LuPone appeared on “The View” and insisted, “I have said this before and I’m going to get in trouble. I’ve said this before, and it’s been in print. I don’t know what the difference between our Christian right and the Taliban is. I have no idea what the difference is.”
Actress says she can’t tell difference between ‘Christian right’ and Taliban, Twitter helps her out: ‘For starters…’ https://t.co/PZ60htyZci pic.twitter.com/2aEopnVmnZ
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) April 21, 2023
As for Trump, he’d made clear his intentions for the Kennedy Center during a recent dinner in the White House State Dining Room with the board, “Instead of putting forward programming that tears our country down and tears our country apart, the Kennedy Center should be the nation’s premier venue for lifting up the best of our country and lifting up the American arts, theater, music, and culture.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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