President Trump speaks to journalists at the White House on February 03, 2025 in Washington, DC
Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images / Getty Images North America
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Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images / Getty Images North America
President Trump plans to dismiss several members of the board of directors of the John F. Kennedy Center of Washington DC for the performing arts. And to the surprise of many in the arts world on Friday, he said that he would be called the president. This is why all this counts.
1. He wants to chair a board of directors. Is it important?
Admittedly, it looks like small potatoes compared to the annex proposed by the president of Greenland, the Panama, Canada and Gaza canal, but in the years following the Kennedy Center proposal at the end of 1950s, this had a disproportionate impact on the way the American culture of public views. In addition to being welcomed by the National Symphony and the Washington Opera, not to mention Broadway touring companies, dance troops, jazz, blues and pop concerts, the center is also a national monument – a temple in White marble located on the banks of the Potomac in the national capital. This gives him an unrivaled cachet and an international importance. At the height of the Cold War, when the center brought the Bolchoi ballet and the Cuba Nacional Ballet in the United States in 1962.
“Today, as always,” he told a sparkling crowd that included opera singer Marian Anderson and an eight-year-old cello prodigy named Yo-Yo Ma “, art does not know national borders.
For this reason, he has always endeavored to represent everyone – his Bipartisan board of directors, uniformly separated between democratic and republican members – and its wide programming, from Bluegrass to hip -hop, from the Comedy of Room to Driving at an avant-garde event.
2. Why does President Trump take control?
Trump has a story tangled with the center. During his first mandate, he jumped the honors of Kennedy Center when some winners refused to meet him for a reception in the White House. He ended up jumping for four years, the first president to do. But his article on his social media platform, Truth social, does not mention this background. He says that he draws the chairman of the board of directors (the co-founder of Carlyle Investment Group, David Rubenstein) and other members who “do not share our vision of a golden age in the arts and the culture”. He did not specify who else he dismissed, but the membership includes singer Jon Batiste and Grey’s Anatomy Creator Shonda Rhimes. What the president did The mention as justification was an assertion that “last year, the Kennedy Center presented dredging shows targeting our young people – that will stop”.
I looked at the reservations of last year and there were a few dragster brunches in the restaurant on the roof of the center, Drag salvation towards the divas to her free millennium scene and a single production separately Dixie’s Tupperware Party. All these shows are aimed at adult crowds. But Party Tupperware of Dixie Played in the family theater with 324 places in the center, so appointed to make it ring more inviting than the opera and the much larger concert hall, each of which has more than 2,000 seats. The nickname of the theater is, for the record, just a name – I caught conferences and films at the “Family” theater, just as I saw concerts and plays at the “Opera” house.
3. Where are things about here?
This is all that President Trump has mentioned so far, but the best brass from Kennedy Center has received a letter on January 24, just four days from the new administration, from two members of the Republican Congress – the representative Christopher Smith of New Jersey and representative John Moolenaar of Michigan of Michigan – accuse the center of “subsidizing the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party”, by presenting a series of five -day performance by the National Ballet of China. It could therefore be a suspicion of things to come. It is who gives to think if you remember that at the height of the Cold War, the center brought the ballet of the Bolchoi of Russia, so it is sort of cooked in its DNA.
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