On Wednesday, President Donald Trump obtained himself declared chair of the John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts after purging the board of everybody appointed by President Joe Biden. Of their stead, he appointed his personal political allies, donors, and their wives, together with second girl Usha Vance and White Home chief of employees Susie Wiles. He additionally appointed loyalist Ric Grenell as interim government director. Different celebrities affiliated with the Middle, together with Shonda Rhimes (appointed by former President Barack Obama), have introduced their resignation within the wake of Trump’s announcement.
Though usually not a hotbed for controversy, the Kennedy Middle, because the US’s nationwide cultural heart, is a crucial software for the nation’s cultural delicate energy. In the course of the top of the Chilly Struggle, the Kennedy Middle hosted American and Russian ballet dancers performing collectively, a symbolic act that paid huge diplomatic dividends. It’s run in public-private partnership, which implies all presidents have the best to nominate members to the board of trustees.
These members oversee the administration of the middle’s federal funding and assist select every year’s Kennedy Middle honorees, that means that whereas they haven’t traditionally had a granular concentrate on particular person programming, they do have the flexibility to assist form the course the middle is taking. Trump is the primary sitting president to unilaterally fireplace board members appointed by the opposing occasion, a lot much less to take action for the categorical objective of putting in himself as chair.
But this sort of transfer is attribute of Trump, along with his intuition for making strikes which might be technically authorized however that different presidents would keep away from out of a way of disgrace or decorum — and the notoriously skinny pores and skin that makes him so vindictive to anybody who has ever insulted him.
Trump reportedly desires the middle to maneuver away from “woke” programming. He has brazenly expressed his disdain for the middle having hosted drag exhibits prior to now, a continuation of the violent anti-LGBTQ fearmongering that helped get him elected and which is now guiding his coverage selections. “Simply final 12 months, the Kennedy Middle featured Drag Exhibits particularly focusing on our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” wrote Trump on TruthSocial. (The Kennedy Middle did certainly host a collection of drag exhibits final 12 months, though all of them had been focused at grownup audiences.)
But this sort of transfer is attribute of Trump, along with his intuition for making strikes which might be technically authorized however that different presidents would keep away from out of a way of disgrace or decorum.
Trump’s want to censor drag performances is threatening in and of itself, indicative of the right-wing want to deal with all queer artwork as pornography and queer folks themselves as obscenities. Furthermore, it’s solely a small a part of Trump’s bigger assault on the humanities. Final week, the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts introduced that underneath Trump, it will likely be eliminating grants for underserved communities and prioritizing patriotic artwork in celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary subsequent 12 months, successfully swapping untold tales for jingoistic nationalism.
All of that’s regarding sufficient, however there’s one other wrinkle that makes Trump’s hostile takeover of the Kennedy Middle seem significantly petty. A largely forgotten side of Trump’s first time period was that it got here proper on the heels of the Hamilton phenomenon, when the theater world was holding uncommon ranges of cultural energy. Over the course of that first 12 months of the Trump administration, the theaters of America had been host to at least one showy disruption after one other, everywhere in the drawback of Trump.
Earlier than Trump even took workplace, shortly after the 2016 election, then Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a exhibiting of Hamilton. On the finish of the present, the forged addressed Pence straight from the stage, calling on him to guard and defend “all of us,” together with these “of various colours, creeds, and orientations,” and to “uphold our inalienable rights.” An outraged Trump known as for a Hamilton boycott in response.
In June of 2017, the Public Theater’s Shakespeare within the Park staged Julius Caesar with Caesar as a Trump determine who will get assassinated. Trump’s favourite conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer attended one efficiency and rushed the stage mid-show to yell, “Cease the normalization of political violence towards the best! That is unacceptable!”
Then there was a 1984 manufacturing that warned that Trump would usher in fascism, and featured a torture scene so gross viewers members fainted and vomited.
Trump is a creature of Nineteen Eighties Manhattan, when the newest Andrew Lloyd Webber present was perennially the most popular ticket on the town. He seems to be a real fan of Lloyd Webber, whose glitzy, maximalist aesthetic should converse to Trump’s personal gilded coronary heart, however he’s additionally a product of a second when the elite energy brokers of Manhattan one-upped one another by flexing their Broadway entry. Trump has at all times appeared to lengthy for inclusion within the rich, unique circles of cultural establishments, however at his second of triumph, when he was lastly president, all of them denounced him.
Now, Trump has taken management of arguably a very powerful theater within the nation — he will get to form its legacy and taunt the trade that shunned him. Now, he has the facility to precise his revenge.
