Alarmed by Trump, a Renowned German Violinist Boycotts the U.S.
When the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff returned home to Berlin after a recent performance in Chicago, he was distraught. The concert had gone well, but he was increasingly disturbed by political developments in the United States: President Trump's embrace of Russia, the dizzying cuts to the federal work force and changes in policies affecting transgender Americans.
'I felt like a child watching a horror film,' he said in an interview.
On Friday, Mr. Tetzlaff, 58, a renowned violinist who frequently performs in the United States, said that he was canceling an eight-city tour of the country with his quartet this spring — including a stop at Carnegie Hall — and that he was unlikely to perform again in America unless the government reversed course.
'There seems to be a quietness or denial about what's going on,' he said. 'I feel utter anger. I cannot go on with this feeling inside. I cannot just go and play a tour of beautiful concerts.'
Harrison W. Fields, a White House spokesman, offered a two-word response to Mr. Tetzlaff's cancellation: 'America first.'
Mr. Tetzlaff is one of the first major foreign artists to try to use a cultural boycott to influence Mr. Trump's policies during his second term.
For decades, American artists have canceled tours as a means of protesting war, autocracy, injustice and discrimination abroad. There were cultural boycotts of South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s in protest of its policy of apartheid, and more recently, artists have refused to perform in Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Now, with the Trump administration dramatically remaking both domestic and foreign policy in its first 100 days, some performers are employing the tactic and turning the tables: canceling performances in the United States.
It is unclear if the strategy will have much impact on the highly polarized political environment in America. The vast majority of foreign artists have kept their engagements.
Mr. Tetzlaff said he hoped to start a conversation.
'I pay 32 percent taxes on every concert I play in the United States,' he said. 'That goes, at the moment, to a state that does partially horrible things with the money. And so to complain and then to say, 'I take my money and go home' — that's also not good.'
Many artists, especially those from Europe, have been alarmed by Mr. Trump's embrace of Russia and his criticism of Ukraine in his second term. Just last week, Mr. Trump falsely asserted that Ukraine 'started' the war with Russia and called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine a 'dictator without elections.' On Friday, Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Mr. Zelensky in an unusually fractious White House meeting, accusing him of not being grateful enough for U.S. support.
Mr. Tetzlaff said the American government was betraying Ukraine — and that its new approach to the conflict was a major factor in his decision to cancel his appearances.
'Have the American people forgotten the pictures and tales of the scores of slain civilians in every town the Russians invaded?' he said.
Mr. Tetzlaff, who was to appear next month with his ensemble, the Tetzlaff Quartet, in New York, Connecticut, Georgia and California, said he was also likely to cancel his engagements planned this summer and fall in the United States. He added that he would be open to performing benefit concerts in the United States for Ukraine or for groups that support women's rights.
'Anything that could help mend wounds in society or to help people who are being slighted now,' he said.
Mr. Tetzlaff first performed in the United States in 1988 and has about 20 engagements here each year. Calling America a 'big part of my musical life,' he said he would be saddened to add it to the list of countries where he does not perform. That list includes China and Russia, which he has avoided because of government policies.
Mr. Tetzlaff said that he had consulted friends and colleagues and that many disagreed with his decision, saying that music could help bring people together. But he said he was inspired partly by the example of composers like Beethoven, Brahms and Bartok, whose music touched on themes of freedom and individuality.
'I cannot see myself as an entertainer; it's not our aim to please an audience so they go home and say, 'This was a lovely evening,' with a good glass of red wine,' he said. 'Music sends messages about the human condition, about empathy and the heart. We have to uphold these ideals.'
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Atlantic
33 minutes ago
- Atlantic
The Shame of Trump's Parade
Today—250 years since the Continental Army officially formed to fight for the independence of the American colonies against the British monarchy—marks a milestone in President Donald Trump's effort to politicize the U.S. military. Though they are rare, military parades have happened before in Washington, D.C. For the most part, these have been celebrations of military achievements, such as the end of a war. But today is also Trump's birthday, and what he and his supporters have planned is a celebration of Trump himself. A mark of a free society is that its public institutions, especially its military, represent the body politic and the freedom-enabling equal rights that structure civic life. If service members and the public begin to believe that the military is not neutral but is in fact the servant of MAGA, this will threaten the military's legitimacy and increase the likelihood of violent conflict between the military and the public. Today's events bring us one step closer to this disaster. I have seen the politicization of the military firsthand. Last month, I resigned my tenured position as a philosophy professor at West Point in protest of the dramatic changes the Trump administration is making to academic programs at military-service academies. Following an executive order from January, the Department of Defense banned most discussions of race and gender in the classroom. West Point applied this standard to faculty scholarship as well. As a result, my research agenda—I study the relationship between masculinity and war, among other things—was effectively off limits. I consider what the Trump administration is doing to the military-service academies as a profound violation of the military's political neutrality. That destructive ethos is the same one apparent in the parade scheduled for today. Before Trump was reelected, the Army had planned significant celebrations across the country to mark this day, including the release of a commemorative postage stamp and a visit to the International Space Station by an Army astronaut. But according to The New York Times, arrangements for today's D.C. event, unlike the other plans, began only this year. The day is scheduled to begin with a variety of family-friendly concerts, a meet and greet with NFL players, and military-fitness competitions, all on the National Mall. If all goes to plan, the celebrations will culminate with what organizers are calling a 'grand military parade' that starts near the Pentagon, crosses the Potomac River, and ends near the White House. The parade is anticipated to involve 6,700 active-duty soldiers and a massive display of Army equipment: dozens of M1A1 Abrams tanks and Stryker armored personnel carriers, along with more than 100 other land vehicles, 50 helicopters, and a B-25 bomber. Trump is scheduled to give remarks after the parade and receive a flag delivered from the air by the U.S. Army Parachute Team known as the Golden Knights. A fireworks show is set to follow later tonight. The organizers have made it abundantly clear that today's purpose is to directly laud Trump and his politics. In promotional materials, they tell us, 'Under President Trump's leadership, the Army has been restored to strength and readiness.' They credit his 'America First agenda' for military pay increases, enlarged weapons stockpiles, new technologies, and improvements in recruitment, declaring that he has 'ensured our soldiers have the tools and support they need to win on any battlefield.' Monica Crowley, the State Department's chief of protocol and a former Fox News host, went on Steve Bannon's podcast WarRoom to say that the concurrence of the U.S. Army's anniversary and Trump's birthday is 'providential.' She called it 'meant to be. Hand of God, for sure.' She added, 'It is really a gift, and we want to be sure that we celebrate in a manner that is fitting, not just of this extraordinary president but of our extraordinary country.' She also expressed hope that the crowd would serenade the president with 'Happy Birthday.' Clearly, Trump isn't merely the guest of honor; he is the reason for the party. During his first administration, members of Trump's own Cabinet often thwarted his efforts to corrupt the Pentagon. This time, Trump has appointed a secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who is willing to tear down the boundaries separating politics and the management of national defense. Trump and Hegseth claim to be purging the military of politicization instilled by previous administrations and resetting the DOD around the nonpartisan matter of readiness for war. But in reality, they have used this rationale as a cover to insert an unprecedented level of political partisanship into the military. 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Trump and Hegseth have denied the validity of ideas that are taken seriously in a variety of disciplines and banned them from the classroom, including, as I noted above, matters pertaining to race and gender. Books and other works, most of which are by women and people of color, have been removed from the curriculum. The academic programs of the service academies are now structured around the Trump administration's ideological worldview. Faculty and cadets wonder if they are allowed to entertain perspectives inconsistent with the administration's politics. In May, Hegseth led an evangelical prayer service in the Pentagon's auditorium. Standing at a lectern with the Department of Defense seal, Hegseth led the audience in prayer to 'our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.' The main speaker at this service was Hegseth's pastor, Brooks Potteiger, of the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. This church restricts all leadership positions to men, declares homosexuality immoral, and asserts that women should not serve in combat. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a secretary of defense acknowledging his religious faith. What's objectionable is the use of his authority to push his personal religious views on subordinates, especially as the director of a major institution of the secular state. The president now routinely speaks to uniformed service members in his red MAGA hat, using his trademark rhetoric centering himself and belittling, even demonizing, his critics. He openly suggests a special alliance between him and the military. At Fort Bragg on Tuesday, for instance, Trump encouraged uniformed soldiers to cheer his political agenda and boo his enemies. This is all extremely dangerous. Keeping the military a politically neutral servant of the constitutional order, not of the president or his political ideology, is vital to ensuring the security of civil society. 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San Francisco Chronicle
36 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
He took over a trans health nonprofit in California. Trump and Newsom made his job harder
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Not many things are just one thing to Coté, the 43-year-old therapist who somewhat reluctantly accepted the top job at the gender-affirming health provider in March 2024, eight months before Donald Trump reclaimed the White House with a campaign that vilified transgender people and immigrants. Less than five months into his second term as president, Trump has issued directives to strip transgender Americans of their health care, revoke housing and employment protections, ban them from military service and women's sports, and erase them from federal documents while penalizing the states that don't go along. Coté and his organization, which is emerging from a period of internal turmoil, are also contending with the prospect of debilitating state funding cuts as they swim against a national political backlash marshaled by a president who maintains that trans people simply do not exist. And yet. On a warm weekday afternoon at the beginning of Pride Month, the vibe inside the Gender Health Center was relaxed and happy, Coté's mood inviting and confident. He greeted a mother and adolescent child in the small lobby colorfully cluttered with wall art, queer media, encouraging sticky notes and a binder full of letters from past clients to new ones, letters that Coté still chokes up reading aloud. He showed off the cozy therapy wing, a lounge-y electrology studio, rooms and nooks where clients get blood panels done, pick up hormone kits and meet with a bubbly personal stylist, all for little to no money. He described an almost secret power — Coté called it 'magic' — within marginalized groups to create community in harsh conditions. Borrowing his mental health director's analogy, he compared it with composting, taking something discarded and — through the right amount of heat and movement — turning it into something that can grow new life. 'There's something that queer and trans people have figured out because we've had to. Because no one else was there,' he said. Thinking of the psychologically bruising politics and worsening national attitude, he added, 'There's also a responsibility to share that.' Journeys Coté came to the Gender Health Center around 2012, as a client. He was finishing up his master's degree in family therapy through the University of Oregon and eager to begin his medical transition. He paid out of pocket for several one-and-done consultations with primary care physicians but, not wanting to be someone's first trans patient, kept looking. One of the doctors referred him to the center, where a graduate student helped him get his paperwork to start hormone therapy. Facing a monthslong wait in Sacramento, Coté was able to fast-track the process by working with a nurse practitioner at the established Lyon Martin Community Health Services in San Francisco. But Sacramento was his home. And the scrappy, low-budget Gender Health Center had promise. Psychology student Danelle Saldana started the center in 2008 with $650 that she spent on incorporation fees, a telephone line and a post office box — alongside four volunteers who included her mother — tax records show. Saldana was moved and inspired by the people she met through her internship at the Sacramento LGBT Community Center, said her mother, retired social worker Essie Saldana. 'She just worked tirelessly to put the foundation together,' Essie Saldana said. Danelle Saldana died in her sleep in January 2009. She was 30. The Gender Health Center opened the next year. It has never been a flush operation. Its 2023 revenue intake of $703,000 marked the lowest since 2015, a period that overlapped with the center churning through six executive directors in three years, none of whom earned more than $69,500 annually and most of whom made considerably less. 'It had its ups and downs,' said Essie Saldana, who sits on the board. 'We all come with our own brokenness and our own issues, and sometimes it doesn't always work out that you can keep those things outside of your workplace. So we did. We had some significant turnovers.' In 2022, two co-directors resigned amid accusations of financial mismanagement, which prompted a strike and crowdfunding campaign for five fired staffers. They were followed by an interim director and several months where the board ran the organization. Coté, who was in private practice and consulting the center on its mental health programming, heard rumblings that funders were getting nervous about the nonprofit's direction. He had turned down a leadership position before. But he also kept hearing from people in his everyday life how important the Gender Health Center had been to their journeys. It was important to his. And he saw it moving in a positive direction. 'So then I got asked again,' he recalled. 'I said, 'OK.'' Ebony Harper, who started her advocacy career at the Gender Health Center in 2016 and now co-chairs Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis' Transgender Advisory Council, praised Coté as 'one of the most grounded and visionary leaders I've worked alongside.' 'He's stepping into this role during a time of intense political pressure, statewide budget cuts, and escalating attacks on trans communities,' Harper said in a text message. 'And he's doing it with clarity, tenderness, and this powerful sense of responsibility to both healing and justice.' Coté said the Trump effect has manifested most noticeably in a dour pall. Parents are worried about their children's access to treatment and rushing the waitlist. Employees and clients are concerned the president's dehumanizing rhetoric will encourage anti-trans violence in the same way hate crimes soared against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities after Trump scapegoated China for COVID-19. The national LGBTQ advocacy nonprofit GLAAD said it tracked more than 930 anti-LGBTQ incidents in the country over a 12-month period ending on May 1, a 14% increase from the previous year and with more than half of the incidents perpetrated against trans people. 'Act of erasure' A different threat manifested from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who divided his own party when he criticized trans athletes on his podcast with conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. Contending with a $12 billion state budget shortfall partly owing to Trump's tariff decisions, Newsom eliminated $31 million in LGBTQ funding in a budget proposal known as the May revision. The money accounts for three-tenths of a percent of the state's projected deficit, and a lot more to the 68 community organizations that were expecting it. 'These aren't just cuts — they're an act of erasure,' Bamby Salcedo, president and CEO of the TransLatin@ Coalition in Los Angeles, said in a statement responding to Newsom's budget. 'The state is pulling funding from programs that were already promised, already contracted, and already making an impact in our communities.' Coté said the Gender Health Center stands to lose $500,000 — almost half of its funding — imperiling a core mental health program serving nearly 200 clients with 80 more wait-listed. Coté joined a coalition of LGBTQ, immigrant and reproductive health advocates lobbying against the cuts. The Legislature approved a $325 billion budget Friday that restored the threatened programs and rejected other Newsom cuts, but continued a freeze on new Medi-Cal enrollments for undocumented adults. State lawmakers and Newsom have until July 1 to ink a final budget deal. If the Bay Area and Southern California have more established support infrastructures for trans, nonbinary and gender-expansive residents, Sacramento's Gender Health Center occupies more rarefied air. According to the member-based coalition CenterLink, there are 60 LGBTQ community centers in California and 375 in the U.S., an unofficial tally that doesn't include the Gender Health Center. Mind the Gap, a consortium of gender care providers associated with the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center, shows nine gender-affirmative organizations in the Bay Area. By all appearances, the Gender Health Center seems to be one of the few trans-led nonprofits offering its blend of free health and cultural services north of the Bay Area. In January, it opened an electrology studio to instant and overflowing demand. Arely Aguayo, owner of eleQTrospot, said they stumbled onto the untapped market potential while studying at the Monterey Bay Institute of Electrology, where their instructor and classmates dismissed their idea for a gender-affirming studio that bills insurance providers. Aguayo, a former health care advocate, understood the hesitancy. Their spouse and business partner spends hours each day calling and emailing insurance providers and, when that doesn't work, bringing in legal aid workers. 'She's freaking awesome,' Aguayo said. 'To this day, we still have people (asking), when are you gonna be open? … I just hope it opens doors for other electrologists to start accepting health insurance.' Coté is working on that piece now, through budding partnerships to train electrolysis providers in Butte County and mental health providers in Yuba County. He said he was also in the process of diversifying the center's funding to be less dependent on the state, but Newsom's cuts moved up the timeline by more than a year. Coté said the Gender Health Center was one of roughly four organizations like it to receive money through the California Reducing Disparities Project, which Newsom proposed cutting. Essie Saldana says she'll give what she can. 'I don't have any grandkids. She was my only daughter. So everything I had would've been hers,' she said, her voice breaking. 'So it goes to the Gender Health Center.' The retired social worker spent nearly 50 years working with physically and developmentally disabled children. She sometimes took her daughter to work when Danelle was a toddler, and said she had to be told not to help the other kids so much, that they needed to learn to fall and get up on their own. 'But that was my baby girl,' she said. Coté sees himself as an inheritor in more ways than one. He took the job out of a sense of duty and will remain in it as long as he feels he's continuing the work of his predecessors and benefiting those around him. His hope is that he's cultivating his own replacement. He thinks of the dead and gone, what they endured, yes, but also what they enjoyed and imparted. His great-great-grandfather was enslaved. His grandfather was a taxi driver who used his hack and wage to bring food to his church, that generation's version of a social safety net. Coté has a doctorate and a platform. 'This is how I think about gender anyway,' he said. 'It's more about seeing possibilities. Oh, this is a possibility that's within me, and now I'm embodying it. And with any possibility, there's hope.'
San Francisco Chronicle
36 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Donald Trump is losing. Here's how California can keep the pressure on
Californians are angry. They should be. President Donald Trump's militarized mass deportation policies aren't just thoughtless and cruel — they have, in many instances, been executed illegally. This includes targeting international college students with legal residence for their political expression. Four undocumented children in San Francisco were also among those rounded up, among them a 3-year-old, whose family was lawfully complying with a scheduled check-in with immigration authorities. Abundant evidence suggests racial profiling is part and parcel of the administration's strategy. Federal agents aren't simply doing the hard work of tracking down the immigrants with criminal records whom Trump has emphasized for deportation. Instead, they've fished for people en masse at places like Home Depot — sometimes masked and without visible identification — sweeping up citizens of color in the process. In some cases, Trump isn't deporting people back to their native lands. He has sent hundreds of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom had violated no other law than coming to the country without authorization, to prisons in places that are not their country of origin — including what could best be described as a gulag in El Salvador. In the fear and confusion that has ensued from these actions, criminals pretending to be Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are exploiting the chaos to attack vulnerable communities. And so Californians — and increasingly people across the nation — have taken to the streets in protest. The Constitution and the moral imperative are on their side. In response, Trump has sent thousands of federalized National Guard troops and 700 Marines to the streets of Los Angeles in a clear act of intimidation — claiming an insurrection, but notably not invoking the Insurrection Act statue that would give him the legal authority (and the checks and balances that come with it) to mobilize troops. When U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla of California attempted to publicly question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about these excesses and injustices, he was shoved and handcuffed by federal agents. It's a perilous time for American democracy. The threat of a descent into unchecked authoritarianism is real. Protestors are correct in their assessment that silence in the face of such tyranny is unacceptable. But as citizens of conscience take to the streets — particularly in California, where the undocumented migrant population is bearing the brunt of our nation's political war — there is something important they should keep in mind: Donald Trump is losing. In recent months, courts have shot down any number of his executive orders, along with his targeting of international students with legal residence. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled on Thursday that Trump's federalization and deployment of California National Guard troops was 'illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.' The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will consider an appeal of Breyer's ruling on Tuesday. Beyond the legal realm, Trump's economic policies are floundering. His 'big, beautiful' budget is in disarray after an embarrassing public fallout with the world's richest man. His tariff negotiations have gone nowhere. His foreign policy bluster has resulted in heightened global instability. The American people are beginning to widely see Trump for what he is: a failure Only 38% of registered voters approve of his performance, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday. And on immigration, 57% disapprove of his policies. Perhaps recognizing the turning tide, Trump has wobbled on many of his more aggressive stances. After calling for an all-out ban on Chinese students, he suggested this week that he would actually like 500,000 to come to the United States. He further said he had changed his views on migrant farm workers. 'You go into a farm and you look at people — they've been there for 20, 25 years, and they've worked great, and the owner of the farm loves them, and everything else and then you're supposed to throw them out,' Trump said Thursday at the White House. He ultimately backed down from these positions. But the flip-flopping shows his weakness — and the reality that better federal immigration policy, not crackdowns, are needed if we want to better meet the country's workforce needs. The question now for Californians is how to keep the pressure on Trump and defend the rights of immigrants without turning against one another or giving the Trump administration the kind of public spectacle it craves. While Trump is weak, he remains a master manipulator. He has already tried to leverage scenes of carnage stemming from a handful of bad actors at the protests in Los Angeles. California cannot afford to give him more fodder. That danger runs particularly high in Los Angeles, where Trump's federalized troops add an element of unpredictability. 'It's like bringing in a new player to a game and not giving them the playbook,' former Houston police chief and crowd control expert Art Acevedo told the editorial board. 'It's counterproductive. It's theater. And it's not operationally sound.' Acevedo, who drew nationwide praise for his handling of the 2020 protests in George Floyd's native Houston in the wake of his murder by police, said that the best way to protect the public's First Amendment rights is through local organization and communication. Here in San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie has been criticized for his reluctance to even say Trump's name in public. But San Francisco doesn't need him to make fiery speeches. What it needs, Acevedo said, is for officials and the police department to keep lines of communication open with activists and protest leaders and to signal their compassion. San Franciscans are more than capable of speaking for their city. They need to trust that they will be safely empowered to do so. That does not preclude the necessity of weeding out bad actors. Trump is weak. With the discipline to maintain the moral high ground, he can be defeated. As Michael Ansara, who as a student helped organize the March on Washington in 1965, concluded in a recent op-ed: Protesting against Trump is good. Organizing against him is better.
