Allies of President Donald Trump are renewing calls to close the Kennedy Center after a small hole appeared in the venue's ceiling.

The Kennedy Center's official account posted photos on X showing dusty debris on the floor of the facility's foyer and the small, black hole above it.

"Another warning we can't ignore," the Kennedy Center account wrote. "Chairman President Trump has been right: America's cultural center needs to close, renovate, and be restored—now."

According to the Kennedy Center's account, a piece of the ceiling "collapsed" during storms in Washington, D.C., and "no one was hurt." The institution added, "Decades of deferred maintenance made this inevitable."

Trump became chairman of the Kennedy Center's board in February 2025 after removing board members appointed under former President Joe Biden and installing allies, a takeover that upended the institution's leadership and programming and set the stage for the current dispute over its future. The institution has since been at the center of a broader conflict over the role of federal arts funding and cultural institutions, with Trump also moving to dismantle the neighboring National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center's Trump-allied vice president for public relations, echoed the calls for a shutdown.

"This structural failure stems from decades of neglect and deferred maintenance by the previous leadership, and there's no justification for further delays in restoring America's cultural center," Daravi said in a statement, according to reporting by NOTUS. She described the partial collapse as "another example of the urgent need to close for renovation and revitalization, as our Chairman President Trump has championed."

Keep the KC, a community group fighting the Kennedy Center's closure, challenged that framing.

Grace Terpstra, the group's founder, said she suspected the Trump-allied board had seized on the limited damage "to make the point that the whole thing needs to be shut down, that it's going to fall on everybody," she told NOTUS.

"I think they'll try to make it into a bigger thing and show that they've found a lot of other things," Terpstra said.

A judge is currently weighing a vote by the Kennedy Center's Trump-backed board to return Trump's name to the facade of the building and move forward with $250 million worth of renovations. The outcome of that litigation, along with any further findings from inspections of the building's condition, is likely to shape whether the venue continues operating through its performance season or moves toward an extended closure.