No, Donald Trump is Not ‘Taking Control of the Arts’

Since President Trump announced that he was making changes at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, including the unusual step of making himself, like Frank Sinatra, the chairman of the board, anyone who cares at all about the arts has wondered what the new Kennedy Center is going to look like. Last weekend, CBS News, on its Sunday Morning show, aired the highest-profile look yet at the new Trump-ified Kennedy Center. It didn’t exactly fill me with alarm.

At the core of Norah O’Donnell’s piece was an interview with Paolo Zampolli, a New York real-estate magnate friend of the President’s, and also a former modeling-agency head. In a piece in Politico last month, Zampolli’s major criticism was not that the Kennedy Center is too “woke,” it’s that the food in the cafeteria is disgusting, and the decor outdated. He wants it to be classy and glamorous, with red-carpet fashion shows, and to establish an arts academy on the grounds.

Here’s what he told CBS: “We’re on the Potomac River. We could have a little marina where in the weekend boats can come, and nice cafes, nice location where they can spend the weekend there and make it like a destination.”

In other words, he wants to make the Kennedy Center upmarket.

On the losing end of the stick are former Kennedy Center employees and officials like Deborah Rutter, recently fired after being president of the Kennedy Center for more than a decade. To CBS, she spoke out against Trump cancelling events like “Broadway Drag Brunch,” saying that people performed Shakespearian plays in drag in Shakespeare’s time. While that’s certainly true, it’s also because Elizabethan England didn’t allow women to work as actors.

Harsher still was musician Ben Folds, who recently retired his position as advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. Folds served throughout Trump’s first term, but claims this time is different, that artists will no longer feel safe “being themselves” under Trump II. “There is an instinct, an authoritarian instinct, that is true in all authoritarian times in history,” he said. “Take control of the culture, take control of the arts early on.”

But is Donald Trump actually taking control of the arts? How would that even be possible? Ninety-five percent of all people who produce art of any kind in this country are anti-Trump. Most movies and TV shows lean liberal, at least in their social politics. That may pivot quickly as Trump’s second term takes hold and commercially-minded arts producers try to pander to the new American majority. But the kinds of arts that the Kennedy Center features are much slower to change.

There’s an old adage that politics are downstream of culture. But in this case, the surprise re-election of Trump, and the absolute hurricane of changes that the administration is imposing on the country, took the culture largely by surprise. For once, culture is downstream of politics, and everyone is desperately trying to adjust to the new reality.

But crying “authoritarianism” is far too simple. When a member of the center’s board of trustees is saying, “let’s do fashion shows” and Trump is calling for the production of “non-woke musicals” like ‘Cats,’ that doesn’t exactly sound like a pogrom against, shall we say, non-traditional lifestyles. The D.C. Gay Men’s chorus may be off the menu for now, but I highly doubt that gay men, in the aggregate, are.

Paolo Zampolli wants the Kennedy Center to be like La Scala in Milan, not a boycotted dump on the Potomac. He wants UNESCO to designate it as a World Heritage Site. That sounds pretty fancy. It almost sounds…globalist.

Cover image courtesy of Grok.