John F. Kennedy may have had a flawed character, but he was an iconic president. Trump has a flawed character, but the resemblance stops there.
Talk about cancel culture. Trump wants to cancel the very pillars of our cultural heritage. He just dismissed most of the workers in the General Services Administration’s fine arts and cultural units. These are the guardians and conservators of 26,000 U.S. artworks, many dating back to before the Civil War.
You would think Trump would want to spare Michael Lantz’s dramatic sculpture outside the Federal Trade Commission building, entitled “Man Controlling Trade,” if only to claim that the artist was depicting him.
Other iconic works by Alexander Calder, Ben Shahn, and Jacob Hashimoto are also in play.
Anything reminiscent of the Camelot of John and Jacqueline Kennedy is targeted for destruction in the ruthless way angry mobs deservedly felled the statues of Vladimir Lenin in Moscow and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Trump seeks to rake up the Jackie O’s Rose Garden, renovate the White House to make it more like the garish Mar-a-Lago, and redo Air Force One with a décor similar to Trump’s private plane.
Then, there is the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, better known simply as the Kennedy Center. The President of the United States appoints the 36 center’s trustees. The board provides oversight and guidance for its operations and policies. Its membership includes accomplished sorts from various walks of life, including business, arts, education, and philanthropy, reflecting a range of expertise and perspectives. The Kennedy Center is one of Washington’s most revered cultural institutions, its history dating back to the early 1960s.
The center has been a non-partisan testament to the enduring importance of the arts in American society and a vital part of the cultural landscape. It was conceived as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy, an energetic advocate for the arts, as was his wife, who did much to showcase the arts at the White House. In a speech at Amherst College shortly before he died, Kennedy set the tone: “I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens.”
Like so much after Trump’s second term commenced, the federally funded beacon of the arts was thrown into chaos through the pique and predilections of one man. Board trustees were replaced with Trump loyalists, most of whom would qualify for the Palm Beach social register. The public was aghast. According to a report in The Washington Post, the Center’s box office took a 50 percent hit in the first week after Trump’s takeover.
The trustees elect the chairman. Until February, the chairman was the acclaimed philanthropist David Rubenstein, whose bipartisan credentials are impeccable. A Jimmy Carter appointee, he was tapped by President George W. Bush to chair the Kennedy Center. The leader of the Carlyle Group, Rubenstein, is noted for financing renovations of the Washington Monument, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and James Madison’s plantation house, Montpelier. I have interviewed him several times about his books and generous acts of patriotism, and I can tell you he has the right stuff. You may have beefs with private equity, but you can’t have anything but respect for the bespectacled Washingtonian’s philanthropy.
So, naturally, the new MAGA board fired Rubenstein and replaced him with Trump, who hardly qualifies as an advocate for the arts. (There’s no Trump wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) It cannot be established that Trump attended a performance at the center. His cultural interests seem to end with golf and the Village People.
The board also fired longtime director Deborah Rutter. No one could find anything particularly wrong with Rutter; everyone said the accomplished arts administrator had run a tight ship and was the first woman to lead the Kennedy Center.
Will Trump participate in the Kennedy Center’s programmatic choices? Over 80 percent of its budget comes from private funding. Will Trump contribute his funds, some of that crypto meme coin? Based on his track record, it is highly doubtful.
Why did he do it? “It got very wokey, and some people were not happy with it,” Trump told the Kennedy Center’s staff in a recorded phone call, “I think we’re gonna make it hot. We made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.”
The truth be told, it’s hot already.
The Kennedy Center opened in September 1971, featuring the premiere of a Requiem mass honoring the slain president, a work by legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who conducted the orchestra. Since then, there has been a delicious smorgasbord of cultural events, including ballet, grand opera, theater, and popular music, including Tina Turner, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, and Carole King.
In America, the arts have never been politicized. We have seen political art, but the expression is that of the artist, not the government—that is, until now.
Following the Soviets, the Nazis politicized art because, in a totalitarian nation, nothing is left unpoliticized. They relished the “Germanic” music of Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, and Haydn (Mozart, Haydn, and Bruckner were Austrian, and Beethoven spent most of his life there). They rejected the music of Schoenberg, Klemperer, and Kurt Weill, Jewish composers who were blacklisted. The anti-Semite Richard Wagner, whose pagan atonal themes were in line with the cultural predilections of the Third Reich, was the Fuhrer’s favorite.
Trump appointed Richard Grenell, previously his acting director of national intelligence, to replace Rutter as the center’s director.
Nate Freeman, writing for Vanity Fair, takes a deep dive into how Grenell is expected to MAGA-fy the Kennedy Center from top to bottom: Just last month, Grenell suggested at CPAC that the center would host an extravagant December celebration of Jesus’s birth, while Steve Bannon has floated a choral performance by prosecuted January 6 rioters. The organization’s staffing changes have also been jarring. “There are a bunch of new people on our floor that nobody really knows what they are doing,” one employee tells Freeman. “They have weird titles at the Kennedy Center, positions that never existed before.”
One might say Grenell’s path to the Kennedy Center was odd. His employment history includes making kidney dialysis machines, and he worked for Mitt Romney for a brief but memorable few weeks. He’s also reportedly taken on some questionable clients, including a nonprofit funded by Viktor Orbán’s autocratic Hungarian government.
Scheduled performers are canceling appearances and the Trumpified forum. Issa Rae and Rhiannon Giddens nixed their shows, and Ben Folds resigned as the center-affiliated National Symphony Orchestra adviser. Comedian W. Kamau Bell played a previously scheduled set as a protest, vowing to “turn the ‘wokey’ up to eleven!”
Then came the clincher. Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that a run of Hamilton tied to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence would be canceled. The hit musical’s creator said it would be “untenable for us to participate in an organization that had become so deeply politicized,” Miranda told The New York Times. “We’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center.”
Lee Greenwood, the “Proud to Be an American” crooner, is now on the Center’s board. It remains to be seen how many artists remain proud to be associated with the Kennedy Center.
