The Hall of Nations at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Column by Philip Kennicott
February 14, 2025 at 4:53 p.m. EST
Until a week ago, it was unthinkable that the president of the United States would take direct control of the nonpartisan Kennedy Center for the Arts, fire board members not deemed personally loyal to him, replace them with members of his inner circle and install a widely disliked political operative with little experience in the arts as interim director. But now the thought has been thought, so two more previously unthinkable things must also be considered: Can Donald Trump destroy the Kennedy Center? Or will he use it in the usual way that authoritarians have used the arts in the past, as a vehicle for Trumpian propaganda?
The answer to the first question is decidedly yes, he can destroy the center and relatively quickly, according to arts leaders, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feel it is no longer safe to speak freely about art and culture in the United States. Although the center has been through hard times before, notably an almost 18-month closure during the global coronavirus pandemic, it survived with an infusion of government money and staff reductions. But Trump could present a broader, existential crisis as head of the Kennedy Center. He can alienate donors, artists and audiences, or he can simply let the center languish by not working assiduously, as the previous chair of the board David Rubenstein did for years, to raise funds for the organization. The Kennedy Center received only about $45 million of its $268 million budget in 2024 from the federal government, and that is mainly to keep the building operational. Last year, $95 million came from donations, and it now falls to Trump to keep those gifts coming.
He doesn’t have a great track record at this sort of thing. Much of the money he has raised for his presidential library — an idea that seemed mostly dormant until he was reelected last year — has come from settlements in legal cases he has pursued to harass and intimidate the media, including $15 million from a defamation case against ABC News. His own foundation was shuttered by New York State in 2018 for misuse of funds and Trump was ordered to pay $2 million in court-ordered damages.
If current regular donors to the Kennedy Center stop giving, can the difference be made up with new supporters?
“The arts community probably breaks down like the rest of America,” says Jamie Bennett, the interim co-CEO of the national advocacy group Americans for the Arts. “There is a lot of arts money that is held by Republicans who voted for President Trump.”
But it will take work to actually get that money to the Kennedy Center, which is now in chaos, with cancellations and voluntary and involuntary staff departures.
“I can’t think of a significant arts organization where overnight everything has changed so much,” says Christopher Denby, founder and CEO of the Advisory Board for the Arts, an international arts consultancy group.
Cultural organizations, like the Kennedy Center, exist because they are supported by interconnected communities of people who believe passionately in their mission, including audiences, artists, administrators and donors. Demoralizing or alienating any one of those groups can have cascading consequences for the health of the organization. Trump’s takeover is already leading to artists and entertainers canceling shows, including comedian and actress Issa Rae, who canceled her sold-out show “Evening with Issa Rae” scheduled for March 16. The national tour of a popular children’s musical produced by the center that explored issues of self-discovery common to the LGBT community has also been canceled. The center said the reason is financial, but it was widely seen as a sign that the new leadership will extend the administration’s hostility to LGBT people into programming decisions at the arts center.
The loss of key artistic advisers and board members, including board treasurer Shonda Rhimes, National Symphony Orchestra Artistic Advisor Ben Folds and Artistic Advisor-at-Large Renée Fleming, may have financial implications, too. Their celebrity and record of artistic accomplishment attracts to them communities of people who may not donate to or patronize the center now that artistic leaders they admire have left.
“They will need a huge amount of replacement of donor money for this to work,” said Denby.
And then there are ticket sales, which account for the greater part of the Center’s budget. People may protest Trump, the first president to make himself chair of the center’s board, by avoiding the Center. The Center, previously a nonpartisan haven from the usual rancor of Washington politics, now has Trump’s name attached to it, and people transfer their feelings about Trump to the venue he now leads.
And while replacing the current schedule of performances with more populist fare could recoup some ticket sales and audience, artistic planning is done months or years in advance. The losses in the interim may be devastating, and replacing the current loyal audience with a new one interested in Lee Greenwood and Village People seems unlikely.
The most optimistic observers speculate that now he is in control of the organization, Trump will likely lose interest and the center will simply drift for a few years. But comments made by Stephen K. Bannon, a prominent and voluble supporter of the president and chief strategist and adviser during the first Trump administration, are troubling.
“It’s the high church of the secular, atheist administrative state that runs the imperial capitol,” Bannon said after the takeover was announced. “That’s their playground. President Trump ought to fire them all and reprogram the whole thing.” He proposed scheduling a performance by the J6 Prison Choir, an ensemble of convicted criminals who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol. But the J6 Choir has a relatively limited repertoire and doesn’t make music at a professional level.
Bannon’s comments are strikingly reminiscent of the anti-elitist, anti-bourgeois rhetoric of Mao Zedong, and China’s Cultural Revolution may be a better model for understanding Trump’s attempt to seize cultural power than that of the fascist dictatorships of the 1930s and 40s. Humiliating elites may be the main purpose, rather than dogmatic control over the content of arts in America.
But the authors of a report on the successful efforts to seize control of cultural organizations by the right-wing authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, caution that control over content often proceeds slowly, over years. While Orban’s party came back to power in 2010, it took five to eight years before “things really began to blow up,” says Sanjay Sethi, co-executive director of the Artistic Freedom Initiative, which has also studied the descent into illiberal democracy in Poland and Slovakia. Orban’s party now has wide control over the main arts institutions in Hungary, with pliant leaders at the top of most if not all of them.
Administrative control, and sometimes seemingly benign organizational changes and consolidation, are the first steps. He and his co-author of the report on Hungary, Johanna Bankston, note some other similarities: That several prominent cultural assaults in democratic countries have happened when a populist party is returned to power with a more aggressive agenda, and that attacks on expressive freedom often begin with attacks on LGBT people, with a toxic fusion of homophobia, dehumanization and nationalism.
Curiously absent from the national conversation about Trump’s Kennedy Center putsch is any trace of the old, principled conservative argument against government involvement in the arts: If the government pays the piper, it can call the tune. Whether you agreed with that or not, that was for decades the argument that supporters of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kennedy Center had to answer when trying to justify government funding. Now, it is roadkill on a cultural highway to who knows where.
With the nation’s cultural center firmly under the control of the president the government is definitely beginning to call the tune. But it isn’t clear if the new leadership, which has no expertise or experience in the arts, can figure out how to pay the piper.
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