Mark Warner says Trump would rather close the Kennedy Center because it cannot have his name on the building
U.S. Senator from Virginia and ex officio trustee of the Kennedy Center, in an official Senate press release
“With the president’s handpicked board voting to close the Center immediately, we are losing one of the country’s premier arts and cultural institutions. It is a shame the president would rather close the Center because it cannot have his name on the building, rather than work with Congress to renovate the building.”
Source and context
Official statement
About this source
Official press release on the senator’s Senate website, opened and read in full on 2026-09-19 (HTTP 200). Printed date September 15th, 2026; page metadata datePublished 2026-09-15T21:21:52Z (5:21 PM ET), which is after the board’s closure vote and Trump’s 2:54 PM ET post. The release says it is a statement on 'today’s board meeting' and identifies Warner as an ex officio member of the board of trustees; it does not mention the Truth Social post. The exactQuotation is the last two sentences of the release, contiguous in the third paragraph of the quoted statement.
Reporting
About this source
News report that quotes the same two sentences and says Warner gave them 'in a statement to Al Jazeera'; it also describes him as an ex officio board member. Page metadata: first published 2026-09-15T20:14:22Z, modified 2026-09-15T22:45:25Z, so the Warner quotation was added after the release went up (insertion time not visible). Used to corroborate wording, date and attribution, not as the primary source.
Before the quotation
Judge Christopher Cooper ruled on September 15 that the Kennedy Center board could not put President Trump’s name on the building, and the board then voted to close the main building immediately. At 2:54 PM ET Trump posted on Truth Social that the closing would take effect immediately and that, if the D.C. Circuit’s ruling on the board’s approved name is negative and is not overturned by the Supreme Court, the renovation “will not take place.”
After the quotation
Warner's release was issued on September 15, 2026, the day of the board meeting.
How this statement is classified
Case context: Donald Trump's statements linking the Kennedy Center's renovation to recognition for his administration
The label describes this statement’s response within the context above.
Why this label?
The case's fixed reference point is President Trump's stated position that the Kennedy Center's closure and renovation depend on recognition for his administration, as expressed in his September 15 Truth Social post and reaffirmed in his September 16 remarks in Charlotte. Warner's release, issued on the evening of September 15 after the board's closure vote and that post, rejects the linkage in his own words: he says the president "would rather close the Center because it cannot have his name on the building, rather than work with Congress to renovate the building." The closest competing label is mixed_or_conditional, because the release acknowledges that the Center "has its own challenges." That loses because the acknowledgment is the premise for the criticism that follows, not a competing position, and the release ends by faulting the closure itself.
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Donald Trump's statements linking the Kennedy Center's renovation to recognition for his administration
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More from this case
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