By Robin Givhan / The Washington Post
President Donald Trump’s takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is at first glance a demonstration of pettiness that would, in the past, have been nearly unbelievable. But in this second Trump era, the move was inevitable. He’s declared his plan to rule over the center and to transform America’s singular cultural institution into an expression of his philistine tastes and urges.
“I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” Trump wrote on social media. “We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!”
He will not be serving as chairman, which is how one might typically frame his recent announcement about taking on the unpaid role. Instead, his move suggests he may lord over its musicians and dancers to make sure they comply with his definition of patriotism and his ratings-driven instincts. He seems to want a scrutiny of performances to ensure that they are appropriately non-diverse and anti-inclusive. The Kennedy Center will become a meritocracy based on Trump’s personal standards of greatness.
The president doesn’t merely want to break the government bureaucracy. He wants to reprogram what the arts mean to the American people.
He is coming after their heart. Their imagination. Their elusive spirit.
He already has purged the board of folks recently appointed by President Joe Biden. He has enlisted his ally Richard Grenell as interim executive director. Trump has done this, he said, because he believes the center is poorly run and found that the shows are terrible, mostly because they are too “woke.” If the good Lord could just purge the word “woke” from the English language, the Almighty will have done the country a fine service. But for now, woke is the word. Which in this instance, references to a handful of drag shows that people could choose to attend or simply ignore. Trump did neither.
He has never attended a Kennedy Center performance, but he could not resist an opportunity to be indignant. He admitted his lack of familiarity with the Kennedy Center to reporters on Air Force One. “I didn’t want to go,” he said. “There was nothing I wanted to see.”
During his first term, which began alongside the center’s 2017-18 season, Trump never took in the National Symphony Orchestra. He did not attend a performance of “Hamilton” or “The Book of Mormon.” Over four years, he did not take an opportunity to relax with a comedy performance. He never took his grandchildren to a performance of “The Nutcracker.” He was so incurious that he ignored the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which is one of the most acclaimed and successful troupes in the world; its classic “Revelations” tells a story of American history.
Trump did not attend the Kennedy Center Honors. He did not sit in the presidential box and applaud the honorees, those men and women who have given their professional lives to the arts and who are exemplars of talent, tenacity and merit. Some of those honorees made it clear that they had no desire to be celebrated by Trump. In 2017, dancer Carmen de Lavallade, singer Lionel Richie and television producer Norman Lear all signaled their reticence to attend the traditional White House reception during Honors weekend, after Trump’s tepid denunciation of the white supremacy march in Charlottesville that year. In return, the White House announced that Trump and the first lady would skip that year’s Honors.
He continued to avoid the Kennedy Center for the rest of his term and thereafter. He was never the bigger man. He never allowed the public to see him lean on the arts for solace, balm or enlightenment. He has never given any indication that the arts have touched his soul or opened his mind. What the country knows about the president’s cultural tastes is that he loathes drag performances and can’t get enough of Lee Greenwood, the Village People and cartoon wrestlers. So be it. The president isn’t raising his hand to be a cultural critic.
Instead, Trump is setting himself up to be the culture police. That’s tantamount to regulating the degree to which people are encouraged to think broadly, to conceive of ways to make the impossible a reality, to marvel at the fragile majesty of nature, to protest, to laugh, to find cathartic release. To dream with abandon. That is the power of the arts, after all.
The government, through its laundry list of policies and proposals, can depress the arts in myriad ways, by making it more difficult for arts organizations to sustain themselves, by pricing artists out of their communities, by making audiences jump through needless hurdles of taxes and fees to engage with expressions of creativity. But that’s all paperwork, budgets and real estate. What Trump is taking aim at is the way in which people think about themselves and others; about everyone’s place within this country.
At their best, the arts help people to think more deeply and more broadly. They help people grasp commonalities across expansive divides. Sometimes they highlight the greatness of man, but more often and more powerfully, they remind people of their fallibility. And for Trump, with his jaw set and his eyes focused solely on greatness, fallibility is unthinkable.
It’s impossible to consider Trump’s desire to control the Kennedy Center without thinking of his recent bullying tactics that had the National Endowment for the Arts cut a grant fund aimed at supporting underserved communities and instead prioritizing those projects aimed at celebrating the country’s 250th birthday. The overarching message? Inclusivity and patriotism are mutually exclusive.
He has purged the Smithsonian Institutions of references to diversity. Harangued the National Gallery of Art out of mentioning inclusivity. He wants to delete modernist and contemporary architecture from the federal city, which is to say that he is not simply concerned with how and where citizens work but the way in which they think about themselves in relationship to the state. He wants his buildings to be grand, so that its occupants feel small and inconsequential.
But his assault on the Kennedy Center is different. It’s not about a change in policy or a rewriting of grant requirements. He’s not complaining about budgets. It’s really not even about disliking the art, because Trump hasn’t actually seen or heard it. He just doesn’t like the idea of it. The thought of it.
The thinking.
Follow Robin Givhan on X @RobinGivhan.
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