In Washington, Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center – the US’s imposing national centre for the performing arts – presents a bizarre, unnerving and, at times, bleakly comical spectacle. Last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president, foreign policy adviser Richard Grenell. On Monday this week, the president’s motorcade disgorged him at the building – which contains an opera house, theatre, concert hall and a plethora of smaller venues off its towering, chandelier-hung foyers. By this point, his and Melania Trump’s portraits, alongside those of vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha, had been screwed to the wall beside the concert hall stage door.
Trump and his new trustees – who include Usha Vance and Fox presenter Laura Ingraham – then discussed changes to the Kennedy Center Honors, founded in the 1970s to recognise the greatest figures in American cultural life. Trump called previous honorees, who have ranged from Fred Astaire to Francis Ford Coppola, “radical left lunatics”. Men such as singer Andrea Bocelli, who has performed at Mar-a-Lago, and Sylvester Stallone, who recently called Trump a “second George Washington”, were floated for future honours. With the truculence of a slighted schoolboy, Trump opined that he had never much cared for Hamilton – this, after the news that the musical has withdrawn from a 2026 run at the centre. He also complained about an infestation of mice. All this, the day before he was due to speak to Russian president Vladimir Putin to haggle over Ukraine’s future. It is enough to give you a political-cultural attack of the bends.
Those who work there – it is the home of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, sustains a large educational programme and hosts touring productions – are faced with a moral dilemma. One senior figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that what is keeping them from resigning after the ripping away of the centre’s bipartisan heart is the fact that their own section’s programming has yet to be targeted; a feeling of responsibility towards employees’ livelihoods; and a hope that things will one day “swing back”. Nevertheless, the figure told me: “I’m asking myself every day when I get up, am I being like a French collaborator?”
If you imagine that a comparison with Vichy France is a bit much, or all of this is unimportant, you are mistaken. This is of a piece with the intimidation of the press and the closing, by executive order, of the radio station Voice of America, set up during the second world war to counter nazism, now considered by the White House “radical propaganda”. Think of authoritarianism as a sort of disease: you’ll find “preoccupation with the minutiae of the arts” is on the symptom checker, because authoritarians are prickly and afraid of the potency of the arts, how they affect hearts and minds. Sufferers have gone all the way from the poetry-loving (and poet-banishing) emperor Augustus, to the opera-going (and artist-murdering) Stalin. In his blunt and brutish way, Trump, who characterised his and Vance’s public bullying of a foreign president as “great television”, understands the power of spectacle, of showbiz, of culture and the arts. Politicians in liberal democracies generally let artists get on with it – without indulging in diatribes against, say, drag shows, something with which Trump is weirdly preoccupied.
In Washington, politics and the arts are physically indivisible: grand, pedimented cultural institutions stand shoulder to shoulder with the nation’s imposing government buildings. It is no coincidence that the centre of political power is also the place where Americans, and the world, come to absorb the narratives of US identity, culture and memory that are projected by the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, and the mighty Smithsonian Institution museums, 17 of which are in DC. But what narratives? On Thursday evening, Vance’s motorcade advanced ahead of me as I walked into the Kennedy Center. When a wall of booing from the concert-hall audience greeted the vice-president as he and his party filed into their seats, he let loose a wave as ironic and unconcerned as a Roman emperor acknowledging the Colosseum crowds. But next day, the video that the Guardian shot and published alongside our news story was commented on, on X, by the centre’s new leader, Grenell: “It troubles me to see that so many in the audience appear to be white and intolerant of diverse political views. Diversity is our strength.” He sent a similarly worded all-staff letter. Given that Trump banned federal diversity programmes by executive order in January, it takes an Orwellian chutzpah to use a lack of diversity among Kennedy Center patrons as a weapon.
Elsewhere among Washington’s cultural institutions, there is a sense that leaders are keeping their heads down in hope of evading the gaze of the destroyers. Vance, by virtue of his office, is one of the trustees of the Smithsonian. In a context in which even a Black war hero can be removed from a Department of Defense website, will the entire National Museum of African American History and Culture be regarded as a diversity and inclusion folly? Will exhibitions such as that by the radical Cuban-born Félix González-Torres pass unnoticed, even though the website for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery fails to mention, perhaps carefully, that the artist was gay, or that one work relates to his lover’s death from Aids, or that he himself died of an Aids-related illness?
The National Gallery of Art (not part of the Smithsonian, but Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is an ex-officio trustee) has just opened a show devoted to Elizabeth Catlett, subtitled “a Black revolutionary artist”. One of her works, made amid the turmoil of the 1968 race riots, is a fist carved from cedar, titled Black Unity. Will such boldness continue? As time moves on, self-censorship may become evident, as organisations seek to minimise negative attention. The possibility of a casual swipe at funding made one institutional director feel “like the sword of Damocles is dangling over my head”, they told me. At another famous cultural institution, this time in New York, I asked its leader what would happen if the government came for them. “I don’t know,” he said frankly – while acknowledging that even an institution generously supported by philanthropists, which receives no federal funds, could easily be targeted through changes to donors’ tax benefits. Artists may also vote with their feet. On Wednesday, Hungarian-born British pianist András Schiff cancelled all his US engagements for next season, citing “political changes”, insisting that “as artists, we must react to the horrors and injustices of this world”.
At the Kennedy Center, artists such as soprano Renée Fleming have cut ties with the centre. There will probably be more cancellations, or refusals of invitations. A petition calls on donors to stop supporting it. Either way – by carrying on under the corrupting shadow of the Trump chairmanship, or through the fleeing of audiences, donors and artists – a great institution is weakened. That, in the end, is probably what he wants. And this is just the beginning.
