Béla Fleck, the 18-time Grammy Award-winning banjoist and bandleader, announced on Tuesday that he has withdrawn from an upcoming engagement with the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts amid a spate of controversial changes to the long-running arts organization by President Donald Trump and his administration.
“I have withdrawn from my upcoming performance with the NSO at The Kennedy Center,” the post from Fleck reads. “Performing there has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music. I look forward to playing with the NSO another time in the future when we can together share and celebrate art.”
An update posted on the Kennedy Center’s official event page reads, “Please note: Due to personal issues Béla Fleck regrettably has to withdraw from his performances with the National Symphony Orchestra on February 19, 21 & 22, 2026. American Mosaic will now feature NSO Principal Clarinet Lin Ma performing Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. The rest of the program will remain the same.”
In an additional statement issued to The New York Times, Fleck explained, “It has become less and less a musically and artistically based situation and more of a highly politicized and divisive one. This pushes against the deepest motivations of why I want to be a musician.” He also noted that playing at The Kennedy Center at this moment in time is a “no-win situation,” adding, “I also am cognizant that not performing punishes the symphony for something they have nothing to do with, which is why it has taken me a while to decide what to do here.”
In his post on X on Tuesday night responding to Béla Fleck’s withdrawal from the February NSO engagement, the Trump-installed Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell leaned into divisive political rhetoric, underscoring the banjoist’s reservations about the gig as he aimed to dismiss them: “You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties. This mob pressuring you will never be happy until you only play for Democrats. The Trump Kennedy Center believes all people are welcome – Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics. We want performers who aren’t political – who simply love entertaining everyone regardless of who they voted for.”
The NSO’s executive director, Jean Davidson, also responded to Fleck’s announcement in a more measured statement shared with The New York Times: “Our audience will miss him, and we hope to welcome him back in the future.”
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The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, often referred to simply as the Kennedy Center, has existed for more than half a century as the U.S. government’s most prominent cultural institution. The organization, which has long steered clear of politics and focused on celebrating the diverse spectrum of the arts, presents a year-round program of performances at its Washington, D.C. facility and annually designates legendary musicians and artists as official Kennedy Center Honorees.
In February 2025, days after Trump took office for his second presidential term, the Kennedy Center issued a press release announcing “executive leadership changes, effective immediately.” In addition to replacing the center’s longtime president, Deborah Rutter, in favor of Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany during his first term, the statement noted that “[in a] meeting this afternoon, the Board elected President of the United States Donald J. Trump as Kennedy Center Board Chair, replacing former Chair David M. Rubenstein,” who had held the position since 2010.
The same press release also noted that 14 new members had been added to the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees— including Trump himself as well as a number of his political allies—immediately casting public suspicion on his election to the Board Chair position.
In the time since, Trump has taken a particular interest in the Kennedy Center as a personal and political mouthpiece. As he actively gutted diversity measures across the government in the early months of his term, he noted on various occasions that his stewardship of the Kennedy Center would align with a “vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” adding that his selections for the organization’s honors and programming were “not going to be ‘woke.'” At the time, he openly disparaged the center’s current programming despite admitting that he had never attended a performance at the facility.
Trump, who largely ignored the annual Kennedy Center Honors throughout his first term, was reportedly closely involved in the selection of 2025 honorees George Strait, KISS, Michael Crawford, Gloria Gaynor, and Sylvester Stallone. Per a December 2025 report by CNN that cites a former Kennedy Center employee, “The president, who unveiled this year’s honorees in August, said he was ‘98% involved’ in picking the awardees, who would typically be determined through an artist committee, board recommendations and solicitation of the public.”
The president’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” which was signed into law this past summer, allocated $256,657,000 over the next three years for “capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures of the building and site of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.”
The Trump-helmed Kennedy Center stirred up new controversy in late December of 2025 when its Board of Trustees voted unanimously to rename the institution The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, or the Trump Kennedy Center. The center’s website was quickly updated to reflect the name change, and new signage was installed on the exterior wall of the center the following day—indicating that said signage had already been produced prior to the board’s vote.
Even with the unanimous vote by the Trump-installed Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, many opponents of the move argue that changing the name of the Kennedy Center is technically illegal. “Congress named the performing arts center as a living memorial to Kennedy in 1964, the year after he was assassinated,” a breakdown of the controversy by CNN explains. “The law explicitly prohibits the Board of Trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior.”
“The Kennedy Center was named by law. To change the name would require a revision of that 1964 law,” Ray Smock, a former House historian, said in a statement to The Associated Press. “The Kennedy Center board is not a lawmaking entity. Congress makes laws.”
As Joe Kennedy III, a former congressman and the great-nephew of the late president, said on X. “The Kennedy Center is a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law. It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial, no matter what anyone says.” House lawmakers have already begun to file suits over the legality of the name change.
The Kennedy Center is the latest building in Washington to have Trump’s name added to it, after the U.S. Institute of Peace was recently renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.
Béla Fleck is far from the only artist to withdraw from an engagement at the Kennedy Center amid its ongoing authoritarian turn. As The New York Times notes, “The performers who have withdrawn from events at the Kennedy Center over the past few weeks include Stephen Schwartz, the composer of the musicals Wicked and Godspell; Chuck Redd, a jazz musician who had long hosted a free Christmas Eve concert; and the jazz septet the Cookers, who canceled two New Year’s Eve concerts.”
In September 2025, Allman Brothers Band kin Duane Betts and his group, Palmetto Hotel, used a performance at the Kennedy Center to call attention to the unjust actions of its new figurehead by debuting a cover of Buffalo Springfield protest anthem “For What It’s Worth”.
“For decades, The Kennedy Center has been an institution for artistic expression,” Betts told Live For Live Music via text after that performance. “We took our opportunity to play a free show for our fans in the area also as a chance to express ourselves through our music, by adopting Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ for the evening. We hope that those watching and listening appreciated the moment as much as we did. I think, as Americans, it’s a right and obligation to dig in and work to change things you find horribly unjust. For us, on Wednesday night, that meant singing songs at The Kennedy Center.”