Goodbye Camelot, Hello MAGAlot

Yahoo

25-02-2025

By anointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Napoleon-style, Donald Trump revealed a longing to seize one of America's most romantic and abiding myths: Camelot. Nothing would be better than to appropriate the elegant and sparkling aura of cultural influence that came to characterize John F. Kennedy's administration—hopeful, attractive, even sexy. And if the liberal elites refuse to see Trump this way, his actions seem to be saying, then he'll just have to create his own version, MAGAlot.
Trump's interests seem to flicker depending on the day—yesterday owning Gaza, today invading Canada—but when it comes to culture, he is all in. This is not a job to outsource to Elon Musk. He is most engaged when issuing executive orders calling for 'beautiful' and 'classical' architecture in federal buildings or reviving his idea for a National Garden of American Heroes (where the stony likenesses of Humphrey Bogart, Kobe Bryant, Antonin Scalia, and Shirley Temple will congregate for all eternity), and especially when promising to turn his showman's instincts toward transforming the Kennedy Center—to 'make art great again,' as the newly appointed interim president of the center put it.
To the extent that Trump's cultural designs offer a coherent vision, it shares his larger ambition to restore the country to a 'golden age' (and a gilded one). In usurping control of Washington's premier cultural institution, the annual bestower of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors (the closest America has to knighthood), he appears set on rebuilding Camelot in his own image.
But if Trump is trying to follow, or supplant, JFK, he is missing an important aspect of how the earlier president understood culture: not as a blunt instrument to be wielded for ideological or personal gain, but as a natural resource to tap for the long-term benefit of America's image. Just as Trump is discovering that imperialism is a bigger lift in the 21st century than it was in the 19th, he is bound to learn that the unruly organism of American culture exists to be propagated, not tamed.
Even Camelot was only Camelot in the rearview mirror: King Arthur's legendary medieval court was first invoked by Jackie Kennedy in the days after her husband's assassination, as a way to begin shaping his legacy. In an interview with Life magazine, she paraphrased from the then-popular Alan Jay Lerner musical: 'Don't let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot.'
[Read: The Trump world order]
There was some substance behind the grieving widow's spin. The Kennedys had brought the executive branch not only glamour but also a renewed emphasis on the arts. Robert Frost became the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration when he recited 'The Gift Outright' on the day JFK took the oath of office. Musicians, writers, and artists were frequently, and very publicly, invited to the White House, and the historic legacy of the house itself, its art and architecture, was the subject of Jackie Kennedy's meticulous attention. The president sent out Duke Ellington as a 'jazz ambassador' on international tours. In 1963, Kennedy proposed creating a federal advisory council on the arts, an idea that would find its expression in the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. He was emphatic about the value of cultural patronage, saying in a speech after the death of Frost that he envisioned an America 'which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.'
Camelot had its borders, of course, and the aesthetic vision of the Kennedys, for all their youth, was still a patrician one that excluded the more jagged and challenging forms of expression emerging in the 1960s (as for his personal taste, Jackie once joked that her husband's favorite piece of music was 'Hail to the Chief'). When James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and a group of other Black artists met with Attorney General (and brother of the president) Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 to express their exasperation with the slow pace of desegregation, the conversation was famously tense, leaving RFK annoyed and Baldwin confirmed in his feeling that the quasi-royal family was out of touch.
But Kennedy's Camelot at least tried to elevate idealism, intellectualism, and the modern elegance of a pillbox hat. What might MAGAlot bring us? The jokes about Hulk Hogan becoming a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honors were tired even before they were made. When, a week into the new regime, the comedian W. Kamau Bell wondered from the stage of the Kennedy Center, 'How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?' he elicited audible groans. Trump hasn't provided too many clues about his vision for programming beyond that it should stop being 'wokey,' as he put it in a call to the new board. 'I think we're going to make it hot,' he told the group, now packed with loyalists. 'And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.' The new chairman had not only declined to attend the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term; he recently admitted that he hadn't been to a single performance there.
What he doesn't want is much clearer to discern: drag shows. 'Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP,' he posted on February 7. He seemed to be referring to a couple of drag-based events at the center that represent a minuscule fraction of programming (the institution puts on roughly 2,000 events a year). As for what he would add to the schedule, the suggestions coming from Trump world sound like one-offs that would serve the sole purpose of giving Washington's liberal establishment the finger. Steven Bannon wants to see the J6 Prison Choir, made up of men who had been jailed for attacking the Capitol on January 6, perform on opening night.
Trump does have his own neo-Baroque aesthetic: The Village People, Luciano Pavarotti, the grand chandelier he envisions hanging from the ceiling of the Oval Office. But these personal flourishes—like his desire to pave the Rose Garden to more closely resemble his patio at Mar-a-Lago—seem to have little chance of trickling down into the culture at large. Trump's effect on the culture cannot be easily sussed out from a programming guide or a glance at the gold figurine recently screwed into a molding at the White House. He has been more effective at glorifying and encouraging a style of meanness, which appears in unlikely places but is easy to hear if you're listening for it. Even Kendrick Lamar flaunted this style by making a diss track the focus and theme of his Super Bowl halftime show.
Read: Trump takes over the Kennedy Center
The most recent president to attempt the Camelot thing was Barack Obama, who elevated American art forms like jazz and hip-hop in ways meant to show that inclusiveness and excellence were not mutually exclusive. Stevie Wonder and Lin-Manuel Miranda would drop by the White House. Philip Roth was given a National Humanities Medal. And Barack and Michelle would happily bop to Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors. But how much did this presidential boosterism influence the culture and the artists who make it? Obama's regular book picks and Spotify playlists have come to seem, in his post-presidency, slightly self-indulgent and cringey. The overall effect is of professional curation designed to be respectfully broad (a little country, a little indie rock), while not veering toward blandness. The Obamas have always understood the potency of culture, which helps explain their move, in recent years, toward making it themselves; but despite the occasional Netflix documentary production credit, it's harder to say that they have set an enduring agenda.
MAGAlot seems even less likely to shift the culture of the arts in any concrete way. This might be, in part, because Trump's ambition misses what made Camelot matter: The Kennedy administration's true legacy was the advancement of American soft power in service of real global policy goals. Just as Kennedy created USAID and the Peace Corps in part to showcase American abundance and goodwill, he deployed cultural influence to demonstrate, during the most intense period of the Cold War, that the U.S.-led vision of the world was just cooler than the rest. At one point, in 1962, he even sent Robert Frost to the Soviet Union, where he met with other poets, gave readings, and had a tête-à-tête with Nikita Khrushchev. Cultivating attractive, dynamic American arts, whether spaghetti Westerns or Broadway musicals, accrued long-term strategic benefits to the United States—and it still does. But reaping those benefits requires supporting people who make culture without dictating what that culture should look like.
Trump would find this hard. His zero-sum view of the world affords little patience for the churn and friction and provocation that actually makes for good art. He wants to be the minister of culture mostly because it's the quickest way to upset his detractors, to pave over the rose gardens of generations past—and because, I imagine, the thought of a North Korean–style glorification of his rule pleases him. But after the drag shows are banned and the J6 chorus has had a chance to sing its 'Justice for All' at the Kennedy Center, he may well discover what other aspiring authoritarian leaders have in the past—that culture is not easily bent. And when it is, it usually snaps back with force.
Article originally published at The Atlantic