In early February, President Donald Trump announced that he was going to fire the board of directors of John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to DC, he would be president, and as he wrote on Truth Social, he would return the center again. “
But in recent months – while Trump has appointed new members to the board of directors and many programmed artists have boycotted the center – it becomes clear that the administration seems to have a fairly loose idea of what it wants art like.
During a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to the editor of New Yorker Katy Waldman in which the administration uses Kennedy Center as a laboratory for her ideas on arts and culture. This transcription has been modified and condensed for more clarity.
Mary Harris: Can we go back a little time and talk about the Kennedy Center and her role in the culture of Washington? How did it happen to exist in the first place? Where does he come from? Why was it important for DC to have an institution like this?
Katy Waldman: The original momentum for this was the end of the Second World War. President Eisenhower wanted to cheer up the country and bring them into a peaceful mentality and promulgate the country’s soft power through the arts and culture. And then after the assassination of President Kennedy, this plan which was on the back of the night light to have a cultural institution merged with the desire to honor President Kennedy and his own personal commitment to the arts. And so the Kennedy Center was born, and it was a trifecta. It was the cultural center that Eisenhower planned, it was an art scene of the show, and it was a living memorial for President Kennedy.
How did Donald Trump thought of Kennedy Center during his first mandate?
The buzzing thing that happened in Trump’s account against Kennedy Center in the first mandate was that some of the artists who had received this very prestigious prize, the honors of Kennedy Center, threatened to boycott the ceremony if Trump is driving it. And it was right after Charlottesville. It is therefore not only as if they were political without reason, something horrible had just happened. And they said: “Well, given this sympathy with the neonazis, we are not going to come to the honors of the Kennedy Center if Trump is there.” It was an artistic decision fairly based on principles. And Trump said, “Ok, very well. I let you have your ceremony in peace. And also, I will not have reception in the White House for one of the artists who received this award.”
And at that time, he never did anything for the honors of Kennedy Center. Which was somehow a new splashing but did not affect the operations of the Kennedy Center much. And in fact, some of the people I spoke to say that they had a perfectly beautiful relationship. The presidential box of the concert hall was filled almost every evening. He offered this as an advantage to visiting people.
It was not the approach that Trump adopted in his second term. He sort of taking a Doge style control, where he enters with a chainsaw and pirate a fairly delicate ecosystem, then throw a patch of astroturf on top and says: “You see, it’s great.”
He has ousted Deborah Rutter, who had been president of Kennedy Center since 2014. He replaced her by Richard Grenell, who has mainly been a Trump’s foreign policy advisor so far. Does Grenell have a link with the performing arts?
This is Trump’s central / reducer of Trump on the functioning of identity. Grenell spent a little time in Hollywood, but he is also the most gay prominent member of the Trump Circle. And so I wonder if Trump thought, Oh, you could do theater.
Grenell is ambassador. He came by the UN, he made the National Security Council. He is also a property developer. According to essentially, according to all those to whom I spoke who interacted with him, is a fairly terrible human being. Quotes are something like “it’s the worst person I have ever encountered.” He seems to be a really cruel and combative guy.
What has he done since he was resumed? Was this cruelty manifest?
So I want to walk carefully here. I think the ways he dismissed people or dismissed people was somewhat heartless. And also, there have been many slippery explanations. For example, several shows with LGBTQ themes have been canceled at Kennedy Center. And there was an exchange of emails which disclosed between Grenell and an artist who wrote to him to ask him what was going on with that. He was really antagonistic and somehow angry, speaking to this artist. And I think it reflects a broader ethics of, like, Sow any soil, come warm, attack, attack, attack.
Trump and some of the officials he has mainly said that the Kennedy Center was in financial disarray. What is the reality of his financial situation?
From what I could say was flourishing. There was money, and he did what he was supposed to do with the pre-trump. This does not necessarily mean that it was always earning more money than it spent on its programming. But because his sources of income were not only the box office, but also gifts and gifts, he was still overall in black.
It seems that what the new management of Kennedy Center tries to transmit to the public is: “In the past, the Kennedy Center organized programs that were not making money. And we are going to stop this because it was a bad deal.”
I think what the previous leadership said is that it is actually a good deal, because even if we do not earn money on these more experimental or more niche emissions, we carry out the mission of the center, which is to represent the diversity of American culture. And that will draw many donations from people who agree with this vision.
Ticket sales are now down, right?
It is a completely different part of the image, which is no matter how much the center was before Trump, the Trump Anti-Midas Touch is in service here, and now everything is worse. Not only are ticket sales down, but donations have been interrupted, but artists withdraw. All money taps have slowed down or have been disabled.
You spoken with Mary Helen Bowers, a ballet dancer who is completely conservative and who is part of the Kennedy Center Board since the end of Trump’s first term. Did she have a vision of what the programming of the Kennedy Center would look like?
She seemed very optimistic. She said that the world’s largest businessman intervenes to straighten the Kennedy Center ship, so we will all have the chance to have great art in the future. But one thing that has been quite striking about the new leadership is that they don’t really have a coherent vision for what the art of Kennedy Center will be. We therefore have a quote from Grenell saying that there will be a great celebration of Christ at Christmas. And we have Trump saying more Broadway shows. But beyond that, I couldn’t really have a good idea what they to want.
