In Washington, Donald Trump’s acquisition of the Kennedy Center – the prestigious national hub for the performing arts – creates a strange, unsettling, and at times, darkly humorous scene. Just last month, he declared himself its new chair, ousting 13 board members and appointing a new interim president, Richard Grenell, who previously served as a foreign policy adviser. Earlier this week, the president arrived via motorcade at the venue, which houses an opera house, theatre, concert hall, and numerous smaller stages within its grand, chandelier-adorned foyers. By then, portraits of him and Melania Trump, along with those of Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha, had been mounted on the wall next to the concert hall’s stage door.
Trump, along with his newly appointed board members—including Usha Vance and Fox presenter Laura Ingraham—discussed modifications to the Kennedy Center Honors, an award established in the 1970s to celebrate notable figures in American culture. Trump criticized past honorees, who range from Fred Astaire to Francis Ford Coppola, calling them “radical left lunatics.” He suggested names like Andrea Bocelli, who has performed at Mar-a-Lago, and Sylvester Stallone, who has recently referred to Trump as a “second George Washington,” for future honors. Exhibiting the attitude of a slighted student, Trump expressed his lack of fondness for Hamilton, coinciding with news that the musical had canceled its 2026 run at the center. He also complained about a mouse infestation. This occurred just a day before he was scheduled to converse with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding Ukraine’s future. It’s enough to provoke a significant jolt in the intersection of politics and culture.
Employees at the Kennedy Center—home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, which offers a robust educational program and hosts touring productions—are grappling with a moral quandary. One high-ranking individual, speaking on the condition of anonymity, noted that the absence of immediate job threats in their programming has stopped them from resigning after the center’s bipartisan spirit was compromised. They feel a sense of duty to protect their colleagues’ livelihoods and cling to hope that circumstances might “swing back.” Nonetheless, this individual confided: “Every morning, I ask myself if I’m becoming like a French collaborator.”
If you think comparing the current situation to Vichy France is excessive, or dismiss the importance of it all, you are mistaken. This development aligns with efforts to intimidate the press and the recent executive order shutting down the Voice of America radio station, established during World War II to combat Nazism, now deemed “radical propaganda” by the current administration. Consider authoritarianism as a sickness: “an obsession with the details of the arts” appears on its symptom checklist, as authoritarian figures are often sensitive to the power of arts in influencing public sentiment. Historical figures from the poetry-loving (and poet-expelling) emperor Augustus to the opera-afficionado (and artist-executing) Stalin have demonstrated this phenomenon. In his characteristically blunt manner, Trump—who unabashedly branded his public humiliation of a foreign leader as “great television”—understands the influence of spectacle, showbiz, culture, and the arts. Typically, politicians in liberal democracies allow artists to operate independently, steering clear of harangues against, for example, drag shows, which seems to unreasonably occupy Trump’s attention.
In Washington, the worlds of politics and arts are physically intertwined: grand cultural institutions sit alongside the nation’s monumental government buildings. It’s no accident that political power resides in a city where Americans—and people from across the globe—come to absorb the narratives of U.S. identity, culture, and memory expressed by the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, and the remarkable Smithsonian Institution’s 17 museums located in D.C. But which narratives are being told? On Thursday night, I walked into the Kennedy Center and saw Vance’s motorcade pull up just ahead of me. As he and his party entered the concert hall, a chorus of boos erupted from the audience in a display reminiscent of the hostility faced by Roman emperors by the Colosseum crowds. The next day, the Guardian’s footage of the incident drew comments from Grenell, the center’s new leader: “It saddens me to see so many audience members appearing to be white and dismissive of diverse political views. Diversity is our strength.” He issued a similar message in an all-staff email. This is particularly ironic given Trump’s executive order that banned federal diversity programs earlier this year. To use the lack of diversity among Kennedy Center patrons as a tool is sheer Orwellian audacity.
Within Washington’s cultural landscape, there is a palpable sense of leaders ducking and dodging in an attempt to escape the gaze of those who threaten to dismantle their efforts. Due to his position, Vance is also one of the trustees of the Smithsonian. In a climate where even a celebrated Black war hero can be removed from the Department of Defense website, is it possible that the entire National Museum of African American History and Culture could be dismissed as a misplaced effort towards diversity and inclusion? Will exhibitions such as that of radical Cuban-born artist Félix González-Torres be overlooked, especially since the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery’s website conveniently omits references to his sexual orientation and the personal tragedy related to his artworks?
The National Gallery of Art (distinct from the Smithsonian, but with ex-officio trustee Marco Rubio as Secretary of State) has recently launched an exhibition dedicated to Elizabeth Catlett, labeled “a Black revolutionary artist.” Among her pieces, carved amidst the chaos of the 1968 race riots, is a sculpture titled Black Unity, shaped like a fist made from cedar. Will such courage in artistic expression continue? As time progresses, the specter of self-censorship might loom larger, as organizations may attempt to steer clear of undue scrutiny. The mere suggestion of a funding cut left one institutional leader feeling as though “the sword of Damocles is suspended above me,” they revealed. At another well-known cultural institution, this time in New York, I inquired about potential government threats. The leader’s honest response was, “I can’t say,” while acknowledging that even a privately funded institution could inadvertently face repercussions through alterations to donor tax incentives. Artists might also choose to distance themselves; Hungarian-born British pianist András Schiff recently announced he would not take part in any U.S. engagements next season, attributing his decision to “political changes” and insisting that “as artists, we must respond to the horrors and injustices of the world.”
At the Kennedy Center, artists like soprano Renée Fleming have severed ties with the institution. There may be more cancellations or refusals in the pipeline. A petition is urging donors to withdraw their support. Either way—whether by continuing under the morally corrosive influence of Trump’s chairmanship or via the exodus of audiences, patrons, and artists—the integrity of a great institution is jeopardized. Ultimately, this may be precisely what he desires, and this is only the beginning.
