New signage, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center For The Performing Arts, is unveiled on the Kennedy Center in Washington on Friday.Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press
To a list that includes Trump Tower in New York, Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, Trump International Golf Links in Scotland, Trump Towers Istanbul and countless others, there now is one important addition: The Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The name change was approved by the Kennedy Center’s Trump-appointed board, to applause from Trump supporters, who view the performance centre as a symbol of the new Washington order and the deserved fate of progressive-leaning arts programmers. But it was met with outrage from cultural leaders and the Kennedy family, who see it as an insult to a martyred president who was devoted to the arts.
The entire episode is, in short, the American culture war being played out in the capital’s premier cultural centre.
Moreover, it affirmed the place of Donald Trump at the centre of contemporary American culture – an unlikely profile for a man who, though at age 23 was the associate producer of a doomed Broadway show called Paris Is Out! and a prominent figure at Broadway openings, has never been regarded as a major figure in the arts. Indeed, despite his prominence as a New York billionaire and thus a logical candidate for arts-board membership, he wasn’t selected to join the high counsels of the New York Philharmonic Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Instead, he was regarded by New York cultural barons as something of a philistine and was reviled for his role in destroying artwork he had promised to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was never forgiven for constructing Trump Tower at the site of the old Bonwit Teller haute couture emporium, a revered centre of art history because of its design by the architects who created Grand Central Terminal and because it had been a setting for window displays by such figures as Salvador Dalí, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
Mr. Trump’s cultural power grab came after targeting the Kennedy Center from the very start of his second term.
He vilified its leadership for “woke” productions, criticized the occasional drag performances, fired the leadership of the centre, prompted mass resignations, appointed himself chairman of the board, and explained his unusual presidential absence from the theatres in the building along the Potomac River by saying, “I didn’t want to go. There was nothing I wanted to see.”
U.S. National Guard soldiers walk toward the Kennedy Center as work is done on the signage on the exterior on Friday.Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press
His view is easily summarized: “We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center, and … some of the shows were terrible,” he said. “They were a disgrace that they were even put on.”
Mr. Trump’s involvement with the prominent arts centre seemed incongruous for a president who disbanded the Presidents’ Committee on the Arts and the Humanities that was created by Ronald Reagan, himself a former actor. Mr. Trump ordered that National Endowment for the Arts grants be denied to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and said that his “Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture” included such productions as The Phantom of the Opera and Cats, strains of which sometimes appear at his rallies.
Earlier American presidents were closely tied to the arts. Thomas Jefferson (“I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts”), Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon played the violin. Harry Truman and Mr. Nixon played the piano. Bill Clinton was an All-State saxophone player. Abraham Lincoln was drawn to the theatre, and died after being shot during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater. Franklin Delano Roosevelt empowered artists such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Conrad Aiken, and Zora Neale Hurston with his New Deal Federal Writers Project.
Though not regarded as a cultivated man, Warren G. Harding was said to be proficient in every instrument but the trombone. George W. Bush made painting his avocation in his presidential retirement.
Mr. Trump once claimed he had “brilliant” musical talent and could have been a noted flautist but for the fact that he hated the instrument.
Although Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation creating the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Kennedy is regarded as perhaps the greatest presidential promoter of the arts – the reason Congress created the Kennedy Center as a living memorial to the 35th president.
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Mr. Kennedy set out his views on the arts in an October, 1963, speech during which he was awarded an honorary degree at Amherst College – remarks that are a poignant counterpoint to some of the Trump initiatives. “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda,” he said. “It is a form of truth.”
But his Amherst speech also includes a passage that might appeal to Mr. Trump: He looked forward to “an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”
Mr. Trump shares one important attribute with George H.W. Bush – an aversion to what Mr. Bush called “being on the couch,” which is to say, being analyzed. But the President’s recent preoccupation with the arts may provide unusual but useful insights into the seldom-examined inner life of a man not often celebrated for introspection.
The key may be a quotation chiselled on the wall of the Kennedy Center, drawn from Mr. Kennedy’s response to an inquiry by Theodate Johnson, the publisher of Musical America, who asked Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kennedy, the two 1960 presidential nominees, to share their views on the arts.
Mr. Kennedy’s answer on Sept. 13, 1960, illuminates what might be Mr. Trump’s ambition to seal his name on the contemporary era:
“There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth also the age of Shakespeare.”
Could the President’s ambition be that the age of Trump is also the age of his favoured composers, playwrights and performers?