MAGA’s favorite—and essentially only—Capitol Hill restaurant is endorsing President Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center makeover.
Butterworth’s, a French-style bistro frequented by Steve Bannon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other prominent Trump allies and officials, is now offering a 10 percent discount for Kennedy Center ticket holders, staffers and performers, Axios reported.
The restaurant’s status as MAGA’s upscale mess hall was revealed by the Daily Beast’s must-read newsletter The Swamp and given a favorable review in The Washington Post. This month it received a laudatory feature in The New York Times. The Times also outed Axios’ Mike Allen as dining there with Bannon, days before the outlet revealed the Kennedy Center deal.
The beleaguered arts venue has been the subject of boycotts and protests—and has been hemorrhaging subscriptions—since Trump purged its bipartisan board of directors in February and took over as chairman of the new board.
The president is a long-time fan of “non-woke” musicals including Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera and Cats.
After taking over, he vowed to kill “DEI initiatives” and bring back “family-friendly programming that will attract large audiences once again,” which apparently included canceling all of this year’s pride programming.
Not surprisingly, though, purging the theater of all places of the LGBTQ+ community hasn’t produced the type of blockbuster financial returns Trump had promised.
The Washington Post reported this week that revenue from subscriptions for the upcoming season are down 36 percent compared to this time last year. Single-ticket sales also dropped 50 percent in April and May, compared with the same period last year, according to The New York Times.
A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center told The Hill the numbers were due to new subscription packages and deals, but the Post reported the organization’s revenue was down $1.5 million even with the new ticket models factored in.
The losses came as more than a dozen acts canceled their planned runs in the wake of Trump’s takeover, including the wildly popular musical Hamilton.
“The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center,” Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda told The New York Times in March.
Trump had also vowed to ban drag performances, though the 2025-26 season will include Chicago, Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Monty Python’s Spamalot, all of which typically feature male performers dressed as women.
The president appointed his longtime ally Ric Grenell—who according to Axios also happens to be a regular at Butterworth’s—as the theater’s interim executive director.
The restaurant is one of several that offer discounts to Kennedy Center patrons, and its owners say they don’t consider themselves an explicitly MAGA venue.
