Fears have risen that President Donald Trump’s fresh team at the Kennedy Center will usher the cultural hub into a dark financial hole, even as the White House‘s allies have said the institution’s former leaders already pulled it into a quagmire of fiscal ruin.

For the arts institution, which receives only a small portion of its budget from federal funding, the perennial challenge is to raise additional revenue through ticket sales and private donations.

The president's comments came at the end of a 30-minute press conference while en route to Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans.