Kennedy Center Audience Boo as JD Vance and Usha Vance Get Seated
Usha Vance was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Kennedy Center after Presdient Donald Trump became chairman
March 14, 2025
Last evening, audience members, at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., booed as U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and wife Usha Vance took their seats. The booing, which reportedly lasted more than 30 seconds, drowned out the pre-concert announcements.
Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos, accompanied by the National Symphonic Orchestra. performed Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No.2 and Petrushka.The performance was held at the concert hall, with a capacity of roughly 2,500, the largest of four event halls at the Kennedy Center.
Reporting on the booing, The Guardian noted, "Such a vocal, impassioned political protest was a highly unusual event in the normally polite and restrained world of classical music.” The audience members were expressing their disapproval of recent changes at the center initiated by President Donald Trump.
Last month, Trump took over as Chairman of the center's Board of Trustees and several board members were replaced. Usha Vance was one of fourteen new members appointed to the board.
Around that time, Trump posted on Truth Social, “At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center...GREAT AGAIN. I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees…who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP! ...For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”
The Kennedy Center, which is home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, annually presents more than 2,000 performances, events, and exhibits, in over 12 genres and stages — including free events and exhibits – which attract a total of more than two million visitors.
The vision of the center is to be “the nation’s beacon for the performing arts, engaging artists and audiences around the world to share, inspire, and celebrate the cultural heritage by which a great society is defined and remembered.”
In 2024, the center’s fundraising team raised more than $90 million, the federal government contributed about $45 million and ticket sales and other proceeds covered the rest of the budget, according to CBS News.
In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy and his wife launched a $30 million fundraising campaign for the construction of the National Cultural Center in Washington D.C. Preceding President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, and his wife participated in the event, demonstrating bipartisan support. The Congress renamed the center, which opened in 1971, after Kennedy.
(Kennedy Center, Washington D.C., photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
During the 2016 presidential elections, J.D. Vance, 40, was a “never Trump” Republican calling Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” for office. ABC News reported that “Vance, whose wife, lawyer Usha Chilukuri Vance, is Indian American and the mother of their three children, also criticized Trump’s racist rhetoric, saying he could be ‘America’s Hitler.’”
From J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in a poor rust belt town, the publisher’s site notes, “we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.”
J.D. Vance, a Christian, and Usha Chilukuri, a Hindu, met while studying at Yale Law School, 2010-13. They married in 2014 in Kentucky, separately holding a Hindu ceremony. In 2019, J.D. Vance converted to the Catholic faith, which decision was supported by Usha Vance. “…(F)rom the beginning, she supported my decision,” J.D. Vance wrote in his essay on conversion to Catholicism, according to the National Catholic Register.
Last year, following Trump’s nomination of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate, Usha Vance, 39, resigned her job as a litigation associate at the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. Earlier, she clerked for John G. Roberts Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh, who are both Republican appointed judges on the Supreme Court. She also attended Yale as an undergraduate and received a Masters’ degree in history from the University of Cambridge.
Usha Vance grew up in San Diego, California. Her father Krish Chilukuri is a lecturer in aeronautics engineering at San Diego State University, while her mother Lakshmi Chilukuri is a professor in biology and a college provost at the University of California, San Diego. The university profiles of Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri do not list details of their early careers, if and where they earned their PhDs, and their other education. Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri immigrated to the U.S. from Andhra Pradesh, India.
In 2022, Vance switched to becoming a fervent supporter of Trump and his policies. That year, he apologized to Trump for his earlier criticisms and won a seat to the U.S. Senate from Ohio due to Trump’s backing.
The Kennedy Center site acknowledges “that we are standing on the traditional land of the Nacotchtank and Piscataway peoples past and present, and honor with gratitude the land itself and the people (Native Americans) who have been the stewards of this land throughout the generations.” This and some other content on the Center’s website are expected to be removed under Trump’s chairmanship, according to CBS News.
“Elites use different words, eat different foods, listen to different music – I was astonished when I learned that people listened to classical music for pleasure – and generally occupy different worlds from America’s poor,” J.D. Vance told The New York Times in 2016, while discussing his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. “Unfortunately, this can make things a little culturally awkward when you leap from one class to the other.”
Richard Grenell is the interim Kennedy Center President under Chairman Trump. Commenting on the booing of Vice President Vance, Grenell told Fox News Digital, "The intolerant Left are radicals who can’t even sit in the same room with people that don’t vote like they do.” Vance's team did not respond to a request for comment, according to Fox.
Several artists, who were to perform at the Kennedy Center, have withdrawn following Trump's take over as Chairman. They include the Pulitzer Prize-winning folk musician Rhiannon Giddens and the cast of Hamilton. The musical was to be performed next year as part of the center's celebration of the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
Hamilton, which continues to be a massive box office hit since it was first performed in New York ten years ago, has won a Pulitzer, several Tony’s and other awards. Currently it is being peformed in five locations, including New York, London, and Australia.
Last week, in a post on X/Twitter which has gotten more than four million views, Hamilton’s producer Jeffrey Sellers stated, "The recent purge by the Trump Administration of both professional staff and performing arts events at or originally produced by the Kennedy Center flies in the face of everything this national center represents."
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