Gaga, Britney, and a Moldovan Oligarch: A Cultural History of Ric Grenell, Trump’s Man at the Kennedy Center
Speaking of titles, Grenell’s is not, apparently, “interim executive director,” as has been reported. In his missives to staff, he’s referred to as “president, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” When he’s spoken about in meetings, sources said, it is almost always as simply “the ambassador,” a reference to his previous post as chief US diplomat in Berlin during Trump’s first term.
For all the tumult happening inside the Kennedy Center and in the swirl around it, the takeover appears to be slow going. That huge celebration of Christ that Grenell announced at CPAC to great MAGA fanfare? A source I spoke to said that they had conferred with several colleagues, and found that none had been privy to discussions of it internally; none had any indication it was going forward. Ditto for a Steve Bannon–hyped performance by the J6 Prison Choir, the collective of men prosecuted for their involvement in the deadly riots on January 6, a recording of which was coproduced and promoted by FBI director Kash Patel and played by Trump at rallies. (A rep for the Kennedy Center told the LA Times, “We do not have any information on this as a Kennedy Center–confirmed event.”)
Grenell’s first email to staff didn’t come until last Friday. He laid out some platitudes in a message riddled with syntactical errors. “I believe we must return to commonsense programming and upgrade our marketing strategy to include outreach to everyone,” he wrote. He also reiterated the claim, oft repeated by the administration, that the center was saddled with debt. (“If you go woke, you will go broke,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, discussing the matter in a statement to The Wall Street Journal last month.)
A brief note on the public-private finances of the Kennedy Center. According to The New York Times, the federal government does provide funding to the center, but specifically for the upkeep of the building. That amounts to 16% of the center’s total budget. Programming is funded in part by private donations and ticket sales. The Times reports that the center has a $163 million endowment, and a fundraising operation that took in nearly $141 million in contributions in 2023. There was a budget deficit of $1 million in 2024, according to the Times, but that’s not abnormal for a cultural institution—the Brooklyn Museum, by comparison, faces a projected $10 million deficit by the end of its fiscal year in June.
The early days of the purge included longtime Kennedy Center public relations executive Eileen Andrews, replaced by Roma Daravi, a hard-core Trump cheerleader and Fox News regular. Daravi’s office did not respond to questions for Grenell and the Kennedy Center for this story. On Thursday the newsletter the “Washington Reporter” published what it said was an “exclusive statement” from Daravi about the raft of cancellations.
Ric Grenell arrived in Washington in 1991, fresh out of the Harvard Kennedy School, to work on George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. He stayed in town after Bush lost, and at 28 found himself working as press secretary for Republican representative Mark Sanford at the peak of the Gingrich revolution in 1994. Around the time, The Washington Post published a profile of the young Grenell, a romp that highlighted his Logan Circle bachelor pad. At the time, according to the profile, he was hanging with liberal friends such as Arianna Huffington, admiring Hillary Clinton, worshipping Kathie Lee Gifford, and slamming beers on the bar-heavy strip of 18th Street in Adams Morgan. The headline was “Republican Party Animal.”
He left DC for Albany and then San Diego before returning once Republicans took back the White House in 2000, then spent eight years as a spokesperson to the US delegation to the United Nations. Once Obama came to town, he was ready to get out, especially after the State Department refused to name his partner, Matt Lashey, in the UN’s Blue Book, a guide to diplomats and their spouses, because they were gay and didn’t fit the State Department’s legal definition of “spouses” at the time.
Grenell moved to Los Angeles to try to get a job in Hollywood, and boasted of the Tinseltown bona fides he had honed in the public sector. He made a big deal out of the fact that he had worked in close contact with Ryan Gosling, through the actor’s involvement with the UN-affiliated Ugandan genocide group the Enough Project. He said he worked with George Clooney, and indeed the superstar did speak to the UN Security Council alongside UN ambassador John Bolton while Grenell was his spokesperson. (A rep for Bolton—whom Grenell has referred to as a “mentor” but is now on Trump’s enemies list—said he was not able to speak for this story.)
“He conflated brief, inconsequential meetings with A-listers like George Clooney and Ryan Gosling to bolster his credentials in Hollywood, but to very little success,” Brad Chase, Grenell’s former business partner, said.
Grenell ended up flacking for DaVita, a decidedly unsexy firm that makes kidney dialysis machines, not hit movies. There was a ton of money, but it was nowhere close to even the periphery of fame. He eventually founded his own communications firm, Capitol Media Partners, bringing Chase, his deputy at DaVita, along with him. And he finally got his celebrities, if not exactly the cream of the crop: Suzanne Somers, Gary Sinise, Sophie B. Hawkins, the telenovela star Kate del Castillo, who later connected El Chapo with Sean Penn. A close friend at the time was Bettina Sofia Viviano, a producer of the Adam Sandler cross-dressing comedy Jack and Jill. In 2021, Herschel Walker was forced to cancel a campaign appearance at Viviano’s house after she posted an almost impressively offensive image to her Twitter account: an anti-vax illustration that showed syringes in the shape of a swastika.
