Mark Warner
Role at the time: U.S. Senator from Virginia and ex officio trustee of the Kennedy Center, in an official Senate press release
Statement summary
In an official Senate press release on the Kennedy Center board’s September 15 meeting, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), an ex officio trustee, said the board’s vote to close the Center immediately means the country is losing one of its premier arts and cultural institutions. He said the president would rather close the Center because it cannot have his name on the building than work with Congress to renovate it.
“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.”
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.
Why we used 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.