The Kennedy Center simply misplaced one other patron. Whoopi Goldberg introduced on right this moment’s The View that she’s going to now not attend Kennedy Center performances in gentle of the Donald Trump board takeover that has prompted a raft of adjustments on the venue together with firings and present cancelations.
During right this moment’s Hot Topics phase of the ABC daytime discuss present, Goldberg and the remainder of the panel have been discussing yesterday’s announcement by Hamilton producers Jeffrey Seller and Lin-Manuel Miranda that they’ve scotched a deliberate 2026 Kennedy Center engagement of Miranda’s hit musical. The choice, they stated, was a response to the “recent purge by the Trump Administration of both professional staff and performing arts events at or originally produced by the Kennedy Center…”
Last evening, Richard Grenell, the Trump-appointed interim government director of the Kennedy Center, posted a response to the Hamilton producers on X, calling the cancelation “a publicity stunt.”
“The American people,” Grenell wrote, “need to know that @Lin_Manuel is intolerant of people who don’t agree with him politically. It’s clear he and Sellers [sic] don’t want Republicans going to their shows. Americans see you, Lin. Let’s be clear on the facts. Seller and @Lin_Manuel first went to the New York Times before they came to the Kennedy Center with their announcement that they can’t be in the same room with Republicans. This is a publicity stunt that will backfire. The Arts are for everyone – not just for the people who Lin likes and agrees with.”
(In producer Seller’s assertion yesterday, he proactively countered Grenell’s argument, writing, “Hamilton was proudly performed at the Kennedy Center in 2018 during the first Trump administration. We are not acting against his administration, but against the partisan policies of the Kennedy Center as a result of his recent takeover.”)
On right this moment’s View, the panel took up the topic, with Republican cohost Alyssa Farah Griffin bemoaning the top of bipartisanship on the Kennedy Center and Sunny Hostin noting, “If you fire everyone [on the board] that was there, and it was a bipartisan group, and replace them with sycophants that are just going to toe the Trump line, is that really the mission of the Kennedy Center?”
Goldberg had a very sturdy response to the state of affairs, saying that Trump’s firing of the Center’s earlier bipartisan board “was a big smack to the arts, which don’t have a politics.”
Goldberg went on to counsel that Hamilton makes it statements with its nontraditional casting. “Hamilton doesn’t look like Hamilton,” she stated.
“I have no plans to go back to the Kennedy Center until the Kennedy Center becomes what it was supposed to be – a welcome place for all artists no matter what your groove is.”