President Trump announced on social media Friday that Richard Grenell, the former ambassador to Germany who Trump appointed as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts more than a year ago, is stepping down. Grenell will be replaced by Matt Floca, the vice president of facilities operations at the center.<\/p>\n
Change has been the only constant at the Kennedy Center since Trump fired the center\u2019s board in early February of last year<\/a> and had himself appointed chairman. A week later amid mass artist defections<\/a> that included Shonda Rhimes and Ren\u00e9e Fleming, Trump appointed Grenell, a close ally, as interim executive director, a post Grenell held until now.<\/p>\n \u201cRic Grenell has done an excellent job in helping to coordinate various elements of the Center during the transition period, and I want to thank him for the outstanding work he has done,\u201d Trump posted on Truth Social<\/a>, adding that after an upcoming two-year closure for renovations, the center \u201cwill be, at its completion, the finest facility of its kind anywhere in the World!\u201d<\/p>\n News of the center\u2019s imminent closure came as a surprise to employees and arts fans still reeling from Trump\u2019s announcement late last year that the board had voted to rename the venue the Trump-Kennedy Center<\/a>, which prompted another wave of performance cancellations, including by composer Philip Glass.<\/a> The Washington National Opera also announced<\/a> in early January that it would leave the center. <\/p>\n Grenell\u2019s tenure was marked by controversy every step of the way, which Grenell met with combative defiance, often slamming artists that criticized the center\u2019s decisions<\/a>. He also was known for not granting interviews to press that he deemed unfriendly, instead speaking on the record only to right-leaning news organizations<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment on Grenell\u2019s departure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Trump announced on social media Friday that Richard Grenell, the former ambassador to Germany who Trump appointed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[8108,100551,1581,8010,100548,100552,828,66018,48,52,51,47,50,49,100549,100,3020,100550,100553,1519,72],"class_list":["post-219557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-announcement","tag-art-fan","tag-board","tag-center","tag-controversial-tenure","tag-early-february","tag-employee","tag-grenell","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-matt-floca","tag-news","tag-president-trump","tag-renee-fleming","tag-shonda-rhimes","tag-trump","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}