What’s Going On At The Kennedy Center?

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center, has become a flashpoint in one of the many offensives that President Donald Trump launched upon taking office last month. After dismissing board members and anointing himself chair of the popular D.C. venue for concerts and shows, Trump has appointed diplomat Ric Grennell, fresh from intrigues in Venezuela, as interim director.

With characteristic bombast, the president stated in a Truth Social post that Grennell “shares my Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of the American Arts and Culture, and will be overseeing the daily operations of the Center.”

He went on to proclaim, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA—ONLY THE BEST. RIC, WELCOME TO SHOW BUSINESS!”

Trump also promised a new board of trustees, prompting the center to release a statement saying that the function of choosing the chairperson properly belonged to members of the board, and that never before in its history had an administration replaced board members.

Why has the Kennedy Center become such a culture war battleground? Never mind the fact that its very name implies a lack of political neutrality, deriving from one of the most iconic liberal presidents in U.S. history. Looking back over the center’s programming for recent years, maybe one could forgive Trump for thinking that someone in a top position there did not like him very much and wanted to amplify as many progressive and anti-Trump voices as possible.

In August 2023, the center proudly hosted performances of Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird—yes, the same Aaron Sorkin who, after Trump won in 2016, sent a letter to his daughters, telling them that “the world changed last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from,” then going on to call Trump “a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas” and his supporters a gaggle of Klansmen, white nationalists, “sexists, racists and buffoons.”

Except, of course, when they want to pay for a ticket to see his movies. Other programming in recent months has included Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, an allegory about the Red Scare of the 1950s and the ravages of McCarthyism, a Women’s Equality Day concert, rap and hip-hop performances, and a fulsome tribute to the great Leonard Cohen, that champion of libertinism, pacifism, and the homeless who sang about how the rich are all going to get what’s coming to them.

In September 2022, the center hosted a production of Mass, a theatrical piece by Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), the composer whom Tom Wolfe made famous for his ostentatious promotion of far-left causes—coining the phrase radical chic—and his personal fondness for Black revolutionaries.

Then there is the matter of those drag brunches.

Of course, none of this is to say that such productions have no place at the Kennedy Center, and that people who go in for this sort of thing should not do so. They absolutely should. Those who say they favor free speech within certain limits, or up to a point, are either dishonest or do not understand one of the most basic of civic concepts. But Trump-haters and drag queens don’t represent a majority of Americans, and it does seem fair to ask why a  devotion to a limited range of values and viewpoints has been so evident in the venue’s programming for so long.

An organization that professed a devotion to diversity, and meant it, might have put on a Deplorable Choir concert once in a while, or some David Mamet productions, giving one of the most gifted writers and playwrights in America, who has made no secret of his disaffection with progressivism and his pivot to the right, a prominent platform. It might also have hosted a Q&A with Jon Voight, Clint Eastwood, Dennis Quaid, and other actors and directors whose views are sometimes at odds with the Hollywood establishment.

In the view of Clay Calvert, a professor of law at the University of Florida and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Trump is making some effort to balance the scales after all these years of people getting such a narrow range of cultural perspectives.

“The Kennedy Center and the Kennedy Center Honors are high-profile venues for showcasing and presenting American artistic culture to the U.S. and the rest of the world. President Trump’s move simply represents an effort to highlight other aspects of—and individuals from—the American performative arts and entertainment sectors that he likely feels have been ignored or slighted in the past,” Calvert told Book and Film Globe.

“This is Trump as a culture warrior,” he added.

Those who despise Trump are already crying censorship, but it seems unlikely that the Kennedy Center would have come to his attention in the first place if there had been even a semblance of balance in its programming in recent years—if it had not practiced the de facto censorship that these days sometimes goes by the name of “denying a platform” to one or another viewpoint that those who control the platform find distasteful.

One can make a case that Trump should stay out of arts controversies altogether and use his four short years in office to focus on carrying out those powers that the Constitution specifically vests in the executive branch. Maybe, with the seasoned Grennell in place at the Kennedy Center, he will do just that—and maybe we’ll get a springtime Ted Nugent concert as a bonus.