Trump’s surprising plan to close the Kennedy Center

Andrew Feinberg, The Independent

To understand why President Donald Trump is shutting down one of America's premier cultural institutions — and why he's urging what would be an illegal takeover of the basic machinery of democracy in places where his party doesn't win — one has to turn back the clock four years.

At this time in 2021, Joe Biden was president, Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago home and was very much an outcast in much of polite society after he fomented a riot at the US Capitol in a last-ditch attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Staring down what would become four years of political exile in Florida, Trump spent much of that time stewing over not just his defeat at the hands of Biden but a laundry list of slights accumulated over the course of his first four years in the White House — and plotting revenge.

Besides his refusal to accept that he'd lost convincingly, Trump was nursing another grievance over the failure of America's cultural establishment — music, theatre, film and the like — to embrace him as a cultural icon in the way they had his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Trump has spent years venting about Hollywood and its stars, especially those who speak out against him. So it's no surprise that when he returned to the White House, he quickly put the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in his crosshairs. He quickly took over the center's operation and made himself the chair. He gutted the staff. He changed the performance schedule. He alienated artists. The Center is now just a shell of its former self, and will soon be just a physical shell as Trump has now announced plans to gut the center for renovations.

If you thought his plans to remake the Kennedy Center were extreme, Trump is floating a similar makeover for the entire American election system. His Kennedy Center plans have upset the arts world; his election plans, however, could change the course of history. When Trump took over the Kennedy Center, he fired the well-regarded president of the Kennedy Center, philanthropist David Rubenstein, and installed himself atop the organisation.

He also removed most of the board and replaced the departed members with sycophants and allies from across Washington, while his handpicked executive director for the centre, ex-acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, set about purging the organisation of anything deemed too "woke."

At the very core, the takeover was designed to let Trump get even for how he felt he'd been unfairly denigrated during his first term at every turn by cultural elites — think Robert de Niro's 'Trump' speech at the 2018 Tony Awards — while Obama, the first Black president, had been undeservedly venerated. But the revenge tour at the Kennedy Center has not gone well, to say the least.

Ticket sales began to dip in the immediate aftermath of Trump's takeover. Performers also began to cancel performances and seek alternative venues in Washington, with the producers of the hit musical Hamilton scrapping plans for a 2026 visit to the center due to what producer Jeffrey Seller called the "recent purge by the Trump Administration of both professional staff and performing arts events at or originally produced by the Kennedy Center."

Seller also said the decision was a business move meant to hedge against the new-look Kennedy Center management trying to renegotiate the terms of the musical's contract. The sorts of luminaries who normally grace the centre's stages still haven't embraced Trump — and they're staying away for good now that he's grafted his own name onto the building above Kennedy's as a show of dominance. So he's now shutting the centre down, ostensibly for renovations — even though the building underwent significant renovations and an expansion within the last ten years — in what preservationists fear will be a re-run of his demolition of the East Wing just four months ago.

It was a hastily announced move that even caught board members off guard. It's the equivalent of a disgruntled chess player upending the entire board when he starts to lose rather than make any adjustments to his strategy. And it's exactly what he's threatening to do with America's elections.

Five years after his blatant lies about the conduct of the 2020 race in key swing states led to a deadly riot among his supporters at the US Capitol, Trump is once again threatening to illegally put the federal government in charge of elections that the Constitution specifically puts in the wheelhouse of each of America's 50 states. In the US, elections are run at the county or city level, and because of differences in how different states allow postal ballots and early vote results to be counted, Trump and his allies have been arguing for years that elections that end with Democrats winning on the strength of those votes are per se illegitimate. During one recent interview with podcaster (and former FBI Deputy Director) Dan Bongino, Trump claimed investigations into the 2020 results would show there were "states that I won that show I didn't win" and claimed to have thrice won electoral votes from Minnesota, a state where no Republican has won since Richard Nixon carried the Gopher State in his 49-state romp over George McGovern in 1972.

Yet he still told Bongino he "won the state three times" but "got no credit" because it's a "rigged state" that is "really rigged badly with the Somalians" even though the number of Somali-Americans living there is fewer than the margin by which he lost the state in 2024, 2020 and 2016. The president also argued that the GOP "should take over the voting in at least 15 places" and "nationalise" voting in defiance of the Constitution because those places "are so crooked." That is why, he thinks, the federal government should take over elections. It would be against the Constitution and a major shift from the nation's 250 years of elections.

It's unclear what authority Trump would have to carry out such a move, which would be in blatant violation of the nation's founding document. And there's no evidence that any of those elections in the places he lost five years ago are "crooked" – because those results were confirmed by multiple recounts demanded by Trump's own team. But that's not the point. The point is that the president, with the unyielding backing of a supine GOP-controlled Congress and acquiescence from many of the wealthiest and most powerful people and institutions in the country, is now unwilling to countenance not getting his way, whether it's from pesky theatre kids or from voters.

If he can bend the elections to his will by browbeating Congress into passing legislation to make it harder for Democrats to vote, or by bullying GOP-led state governments into taking over elections in Democratic-led cities, that's what he'll do. But if that doesn't work and his party loses the midterms, he is equally likely to try what he's trying at the Kennedy Center by pushing to throw everything out and remake it as he sees fit.