As more and more artists protest Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Arts, “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg could not help but join in. The ABC moderator revealed on Thursday that she has “no plans” to return to the Kennedy Center until it’s restored to “what it was supposed to be.”
Whoopi’s announcement came during Wednesday’s episode of the talk show, as she and her co-hosts discussed the “Hamilton” producers canceling the Tony Award-winning musical’s spring 2026 run at the Kennedy Center. In canceling, the producers explicitly cited Trump’s takeover as the reason.
“I understand why they did it, and I have no plans to go back to the Kennedy Center, until the Kennedy Center becomes what it was supposed to be,” Whoopi said. “And that was a welcome place for all artists, no matter what your groove is. You know, they did not make judgements about the people they put in there.”
The ABC host also voiced her own discontent with how the takeover happened, lamenting “the fact that it was not a discussion.”
“It was a big smack to the arts, which do not have a politics,” she said. “The politics are, look at the differences in the actors. That’s the real statement. That’s why they came out and made those statements, because people were messing with them, because Hamilton did not look like Hamilton.”
Indeed, when “Hamilton” first hit the stage, some criticized it for the fact that people of color were cast to play the Founding Fathers.
Of course, one of the central messages of “Hamilton” is that immigrants were key to the creation of America, and Trump has made his stance on immigrants perfectly clear. Combining that with how the president took over the Kennedy Center, the creators of the show explained their choice to cancel.
“This latest action by Trump means it’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it,” the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, said on Wednesday. “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we are not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center. We are just not going to be part of it.”
You can watch the full discussion from “The View” in the video above.
