What Donald Trump really means for the arts in America

Yahoo

01-03-2025

There is no way to sugarcoat a coup. When President Donald Trump made the abrupt decision to overtake the board of the Kennedy Centre – among the foremost cultural institutions in the US – firing its top leadership and announcing plans for a reboot, it amounted to no less than a full-blown attack on the arts in America.
The arts in America, however, have been marginalised for so long that throwing salt on the wound has greater symbolic connotations than the destructive ones implied in this instance.
Trump and his newly-anointed Kennedy Centre interim president, Richard Grenell, have expressed a desire to obliterate the current programming in favor of… well, so far, 'a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas' – as Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany under the previous Trump administration, told Conservative Political Action Committee. For his part, Trump himself proclaimed that the Kennedy Centre would no longer host drag shows (there was a small 'drag brunch' event last fall, but little else).
Whatever new programs develop with time, the Kennedy Centre – a world-class theatre that also hosts the annual Mark Twain and Kennedy Centre Honors awards celebrations, among other major cultural events – has essentially lost its prestige factor. Like so much else with this administration, it's become a billboard for autocracy run wild.
These manoeuvres have occurred in tandem with a flurry of efforts to overshadow institutional support of the arts. They followed a new mandate from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, denying funding to grant applicants with diversity, equity, and inclusion factors (DEI) or those that promote so-called 'gender ideology,' a coded term with transphobic implications. Trump even attempted to get his talons into Hollywood with the announcement that Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, and Jon Voight would serve as his ambassadors to bring back business to Hollywood. (Gibson said he wasn't even aware of the appointment until it was announced.)
Anyone looking for a curatorial vision from the new leadership doesn't have to think hard about the implications here: Trump and his team seem intent on weaponising creative expression as an instrument of propaganda. 'We want to make the arts great again,' Grenell said. The pushback against his administration's efforts has come from every direction. The comedian Issa Rae and soprano Karen Slack cancelled gigs at the Kennedy Centre. Singer Rhiannon Giddens followed soon after. The theatre then cancelled an upcoming concert from the International Pride Orchestra scheduled for June.
Over the decades, the Kennedy Centre has hosted big-ticket performers ranging from Led Zeppelin to David Letterman. In recent weeks, it has reportedly seen a 50 per cent drop in ticket sales. A letter signed by 463 artists, many of whom have been supported by the NEA, sent a letter protesting the organization's moves.
Yet most of the ways that the Trump Administration can run amuck with the arts won't truly impact their presence stateside. That's because, for all the pearl-clutching around what artists do and whether the government should support it, America has fallen short of institutional support of the arts for decades.
As in England, most major American artists thrive on alternate sources of income, private philanthropic support and the ever-combustible fine art market. Within that dynamic, the NEA has proven to be a valuable force for individual artists. In the third quarter of 2024 alone, the NEA distributed nearly $37 million to nearly 1,4000 entities. Yet these funds have never been enough to create a path for long-term sustainability.
Meanwhile, big technology companies like Amazon and Apple control the fate of the entertainment business with success metrics that have nothing to do with cultural legacies. Filmmaking outside the Hollywood studio system has largely migrated abroad in the form of international co-productions. Ironically, the autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (a Trump ally) has proven more hospitable to American movies than America with robust tax incentives unlike anything available in the US. Current Oscar contender The Brutalist was shot mainly in Budapest – and yes, that includes the bulk of the movie that takes place in Pennsylvania.
And yet The Brutalist director Brady Corbet recently made headlines when he said, during an interview with Marc Maron on his WTF Podcast, that he was broke. 'The art life,' as David Lynch called it, has been a tough haul in America across many presidential administrations. America doesn't truly provide long-term support for freelancers of any stripe, thanks to an unstable healthcare system and the overall high cost of living. Trump can wreak havoc all he wants on arts organizations that operate at the government's behest, and it won't change much about the situation that has been operating on life support anyway.
Still, the NEA has done extraordinary work for the arts on the local level. It was a non-partisan effort out of the gate, having been proposed during the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower. When the agency finally started 60 years ago under Lyndon B Johnson's administration, the organisation was launched to bring the same degree of investment to the arts that the government was already providing for the sciences.
The concept was attached to Johnson's concept of creating a 'Great Society' across America, an idealistic goal that helped him win the election two years earlier. It was also an invaluable instrument of soft powder during the Cold War, with poets such as Robert Frost sent to the USSR on artistic-diplomatic missions.
In recent times, the NEA has proven itself valuable for smaller organisations and individuals capable of working on tight budgets and within the constraints of their communities. Last year, the NEA granted nearly $37 million to communities in all 50 US states.
The apparent shift in priorities for these funds will likely harm the most vulnerable and marginalised corners of creativity in America. We are likely to see efforts to create privatised support systems to make up the difference. Local resources will become more vital than ever.
But could the new Trump administration go further? In autocratic regimes like China, all creativity in circulation faces a committee that determines whether the work is acceptable to the regime. Artist Ai Weiwei dealt with multiple prison stints as a result of rejecting censorship laws before finally choosing to live in exile. The same fate befell Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, another Oscar nominee this year for The Seed of the Sacred Fig, who went into exile after his prison release in 2023. Both men were jailed because their work portrayed governmental policies in a negative light.
Might such harrowing restrictions find their way to American shores? In the 1950s, the era of the Hollywood blacklist, they certainly did. It's hard to fathom a similar state of affairs now. The power of the First Amendment looms large here, stretching across the political spectrum, and the idea of complete censorship remains a somewhat intangible conceit. The more likely scenario is a constant back-and-forth between establishment forces and artists resisting the pressure to hold back, with both ends of the equation lobbying for audiences to get on their side.
The far-Right has made headway in the US through precise creative channels, including stand-up comedy and podcasting, where a war on progressivism has found a receptive audience. Traditional entertainment channels have a harder time worming their way into the consciousness of young audiences. The so-called 'war on wokeness' has sent executives scrambling to depoliticise any upcoming projects on their balance sheet – for instance, the recent Disney+ animated series Win or Lose eliminated the storyline of a trans character. If such a mentality continues to infiltrate the most powerful arts institutions in America, they will be facing a form of censorship by default.
For now, though, an air of resistance persists. Comedian W Kamau Bell didn't cancel his scheduled appearance at the Kennedy Centre this month; instead, he took the gig and devoted his routine to the circumstances at the theatre. At the recent SAG Awards, The Power of the Dog director Jane Campion spoke out against the current political climate while accepting a lifetime achievement award. 'By the way, woke just means you give a damn,' she said.
For 54 years, the Kennedy Centre has been a beacon for performing arts in America. It has survived many administrations and changes in the climate for the arts during that time. Yet if the Kennedy Centre becomes little more than an extension of the Trump Disinformation Machine, with programs featuring acolytes like Joe Rogan and Kid Rock, it's hard to imagine that it can maintain the aura of prestige surrounding its existence. Instead, like so many Trump decrees, it will become something of a sick joke.
America has entered an era of contradictory moods. It's a celebratory moment for big business and conservative causes, but one of great fear and uncertainty for anyone invested in the pillars of democracy and liberal values. Popular culture and subsidised art may get steam rolled by pressures from the party in power, but that's only one factor in a vast, messy equation that amounts to the arts in America.
In 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda catapulted to fame with Hamilton, which became more politically charged than expected once the first Trump Administration swept into power a year later. With its Latin-flavored retelling of America's founding spirit, the musical met its moment and then some.
When then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended the show shortly after Trump was first elected, actor Brandon Victor Dixon read a statement during the curtain call saying the cast was 'alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights'. In a response the next day, Trump demanded through his old mouthpiece, Twitter, that the show issue an apology for what he deemed a 'rude' manoeuvre.
The opposite happened. Nobody apologised or faced repercussions for speaking out. Hamilton found its political voice. Tickets soared. It remains one of the top Broadway shows to this day. The outcome proved that there is power in dissent, especially when audiences choose to open their wallets to support it.
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