WASHINGTON
Last week, audience members loudly booed Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The crowd was telling the Second Couple: You don’t belong on our turf.
Ah, but there’s a new sheriff at the opera. President Donald Trump is now chairman of the Kennedy Center board. Monday he took a walk-through at America’s culture center and shared his thoughts on the institution’s faults and future with reporters.
Let’s just say that Trump was not love-struck with the iconic cultural center, which first opened in 1971.
It looks “tired,” Trump told reporters, and it has too many rooms “that nobody’s going to use.” The building, Trump noted, is in “tremendous disrepair, as is a lot of our country.”
Ever the Realtor, Trump also offered, “It has tremendous potential.”
Like so many Washington institutions, the Kennedy Center also is saddled with debt — $72 million — so you know it’s part of the permanent D.C. establishment.
Trump has been at war with the left-wing entertainment complex since 2017, when big-name celebrities made a point of shunning the Republican president. After high-profile artists and entertainers announced they would boycott the Kennedy Center Honors to protest the 45th president during his first term, Trump boycotted it back.
This go-round is different. In the ultimate if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em move, Trump 2.0 put a number of his loyalists on the Kennedy Center board — “setting the arts community on edge,” according to the Washington Post.
The recently-booed Usha Vance now is a trustee.
Ditto Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino also are on the board. Richard Grenell — also his designated envoy for special missions — is board president.
Expect more mainstream entertainment. Nashville “God Bless the USA” singer/songwriter Lee Greenwood is a new addition to the board.
On Truth Social, Trump promised an end to “Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth” — an apparent reference to Tara Hoot who, according to NBC4, has performed a drag story reading for children at one of the Kennedy Center’s smaller venues.
Trump hardly is the first president to use the Kennedy Center to reward team members and supporters. Former President Joe Biden appointed his Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and White House senior advisor Mike Donilon to the board.
But Biden didn’t purge 18 board members, as Trump did.
Yet even before Trump cut board members, stars in the Kennedy Center orbit self-deported.
Broadway hit “Hamilton” canceled performances at center — so much for wanting to be in the room where it happens. Last month, soprano Renée Fleming, TV producer Shonda Rhimes and actor Issa Rae cut ties with the center as well. They are engaging in a high-stakes temper tantrum with performance arts as the nose they are ready to cut.
Their team lost the 2024 election — so they’ll use the Kennedy Center as a consolation prize.
If they can’t bar the presence of a U.S. president elected by American voters from a cultural event, they’ll stay home.
Forget all that talk about reaching across the partisan divide. They think they own the Kennedy Center and they shouldn’t have to share.
Contact Review-Journal Washington Columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.
