Kennedy Center Appoints Director Role to Entertainment Executive Rick Canny

JIM WATSON / AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump’s deserted Kennedy Center has given a longtime insider a plum artistic-director job, even as the president threatens to tear down the shuttered landmark.

Rick Canny, an entertainment executive who began advising the Trump-controlled institution last April, will now run its programming, according to the Washington Post .

Canny will not join the payroll directly and has instead landed the promotion through an updated contract with his consulting firm.

Officials have not revealed his pay, though the job was advertised internally with a $270,000 to $290,000 salary bracket.

The appointment formally recognizes an adviser already deeply involved in the 80-year-old president’s plan to either remake the center in his own image, or, failing that, raze it to the ground.

Internal correspondence obtained by Democratic Sen.

Sheldon Whitehouse’s office shows Canny pressing for sweeping changes to how the venue sells tickets, markets performances, and chooses which events deserve support, the Post reports.

“We don’t need passion projects,” he told then-finance chief Donna Arduin in a March email.

“This is business.” An anonymous official at the Kennedy Center also told the Post that Canny had repeatedly criticized the institute’s box office.

“He had always said that… they’re useless, they’re not good at it,” they said.

“We don’t need people.

We can put out kiosks.

It should all be done online.” Trump’s crusade to overhaul the Washington cultural landmark began just weeks after he retook office last January, when he installed himself as board chairman, filled its leadership with allies, and pushed to put his name alongside that of the slain president the center commemorates.

A federal judge later ordered Trump’s name be removed from the building and blocked further efforts to restore it without congressional approval.