Trollish Dickweed Ric Grenell Leaving Kennedy Center After Spending Full Year Wrecking It
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, f*ck off into the sun.
Let us now hold a requiem for Richard Grenell, the frying pan-faced asshole Donald Trump had the poor sense to put in charge of the Kennedy Center in February of 2025. Though we suppose saying Trump displayed poor sense implies that there was ever an occasion when he displayed good sense. He never has. Wonkette regrets the error.
Trump announced on Friday that Grenell will be leaving his position as head of the Kennedy Center after 13 months of wrecking everything good and decent about the place. In just over a year, Grenell and his patron have turned the Center from the nation’s premier performing arts space into an utter joke — feuding with artists, slapping Trump’s name on the building and rebranding it the Trump Kennedy Center, and watching ticket sales plummet so sharply that they resemble Trump’s plunging approval rating.
The problems started practically the minute Trump declared himself the chairman of the Kennedy Center board, which he then filled with his own flunkies, lickspittles, and people whose idea of great art is whatever gold shit Trump has slapped on the walls of the Oval Office.
The artist cancellations began immediately. Lin-Manuel Miranda announced he wouldn’t bring Hamilton to the Kennedy for a two-month run. This led to Grenell complaining that Miranda was “intolerant” of conservatives. This was a long-running theme for Grenell: anyone who didn’t like anything he was doing did not have a compelling aesthetic objection or a different view of what makes art. No, they were just woke bigots who had never made conservatives feel “welcome” at the Kennedy Center.
Why conservatives did not feel welcome watching the same symphony performances and jazz concerts that everyone else enjoyed was never explained, as it might detract from conservatives’ constant feeling that they are always the victims of everything.
Grenell fired the entire staff of the dance department and replaced the programming head with a guy who claimed ballet has become too “woke,” and he was the only one who could restore it to its previous manly, un-woke luster. One performer who was supposed to perform wrote Grenell a letter expressing concerns about the Center’s changes, and he responded by calling her vapid and bragging about how he and Trump were saving the Center from certain death after years of financial neglect and “woke” programming, whatever the fuck they even think that is. Probably a production of The Sound of Music that doesn’t rewrite the script to make the Nazis the good guys.
In between all this, Grenell kept claiming that the Center’s finances had been mismanaged. In what way? He could never say. At one point, he announced he had referred previous management to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
A CNN story on Grenell’s departure has all sorts of tidbits about his tenure that add up to one thing: he was a hateful jerk who barely ever showed up at the office, didn’t really want the job, and only took it because he thought eventually Marco Rubio would screw up and he would take over as Secretary of State, the job he wanted originally instead of being banished to the administration’s hinterlands:
“He kept saying that he agreed to take on the Kennedy Center role because he was assuming that he would that he would be taking on the State job quite quickly, so he was just a matter of time,” a person close to the Kennedy Center said. “He felt like he was getting sloppy seconds of the Kennedy Center.”
Poor Rubio. That guy can’t even get the president to gift him a pair of shoes that fit properly. But he’s better than Ric Grenell!
There is no word on what might have been the final straw that finally rid the nation’s cultural scene of this giant rock in its own shoe. Sources told CNN that Trump was “frustrated with a slew of negative headlines” about Grenell and his King-Kong-stomping-on-ants approach to management:
In recent days, Trump has been “souring on him,” a source close to the Kennedy Center said.
“Ric worked really hard to keep in Trump’s good graces, but Trump got tired of turning on the news and hearing every day how bad the Kennedy Center was being run and (how) Trump is killing it,” the source said.
Other sources told CNN alternately that Grenell wasn’t fired but always planned to stay only through a transition period; and someone else told the newser that Grenell didn’t want to stick around for the two-year shutdown of the facility that Trump is planning for a massive renovation, a shutdown that was definitely notinitiated to stop performers from embarrassing him by canceling so many shows that the place reportedly now resembles Janet’s boundless void in The Good Place. Pinkie swear!
In the end, who cares? The writing had been on the wall for Grenell for some time, but particularly in the month since this dishy, gossipy meow of a story that he was butting heads with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who reportedly “hates his fucking guts.” Once those stories start appearing, a person’s days are numbered.
On Monday, Trump tried to give Grenell a sendoff at a meeting of the Kennedy Center’s board. Naturally, this involved some rambling about both how great it was when Grenell pretty much alienated all of Germany while serving as America’s ambassador to it during Trump I, and how happy he was watching Grenell fire lots of people when he briefly served as the Director of National Intelligence.
In between the verbal handy, Trump kept drifting to his plans for the Kennedy Center’s renovation. And oh Lord, it sounds as if he’s going to turn it into one of his gilded, marble-heavy monstrosities that even Middle Eastern sultans would think should be toned down:
Please. We’ve all seen what Trump did to the Oval Office. The man has never seen a cheap gold he wouldn’t slap on every inch of wall space until the entire room looks like King Midas had a seizure. Our long national taste nightmare goes on.
Anyway, goodbye to Ric Grenell, one of the smarmiest, meanest, mouthiest, most unlikable assholes to ever slither across our consciousness. And considering Wonkette’s long and vast history, that is really, really saying something.
OPEN THREAD.
Don’t send your money to the Kennedy Center, give it to Wonkette instead so we may continue writing about conservatives making a shitshow of the Kennedy Center.
Monday Bear makes Monday bearable.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-228552748?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
Best meal I ever had:
Freshly caught shrimp, seasoned with garlic, grilled over an open fire on the beach on Cozumel island, Quintana Roo, Mexico. With ice cold cervezas with lime.
Watching the waves, sipping beer and peeling shrimp.