Two days before she was scheduled to play, she announced she would be donating her fee to a trans equality group in an Instagram post that dared the new guys to cancel her performance. When they didn’t, she began to consider an even bolder act of protest.
The response online was less enthusiastic. As video of her performance spread on social media, Canal’s Instagram and other platforms were bombarded by Trump supporters and hundreds of comments a minute, attacking everything from her disability and her weight to her gender expression and her sexuality, she said. (Canal is queer, Latina, and was born without a right forearm.) “It became clearer and clearer,” she told me with a sigh, “that that audience”—the one at the Kennedy Center that stood and applauded her—“doesn’t represent America.”
Transforming—and MAGA-ifying—the arts have emerged among the president’s more surprising second-term priorities during his first 100 days: Even as the Trump administration has moved quickly to decimate federal agencies and defund top universities and museums, it has not targeted the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Arts with the same gusto, though the Kennedy Center has seen a handful of layoffs. What has emerged instead are at times bewildering gestures toward a more insidious goal: not just chilling art deemed “liberal” and fostering right-wing arts institutions, but establishing a Trump-aligned power base through which to rival the diversity of American culture.
The National Endowment for the Arts, which awards tens of millions in grant money each year, could be an even more consequential front in the administration’s larger fight for cultural supremacy, if the administration doesn’t try to kill it, which had been proposed during Trump’s first term. (“Art can survive and thrive without public funding,” urged a recent briefing paper from the libertarian Cato Institute, citing such examples as Gone With the Wind, Harry Potter, and Shakespeare.)
There’s little ambiguity over the kind of art the administration doesn’t like. But what kind of art does it support? In early February, the NEA indicated that projects celebrating the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence would get funding priority, a promise that disappeared from the agency’s website shortly after it prompted confusion and mockery. (The theme had previously been “encouraged” under President Joe Biden, which is the language now.)
The NEA and the Kennedy Center both sprang from a well of midcentury optimism. The NEA was created in 1965 to meet the demands of Americans who had more education and time to take an interest in the arts as the nation’s quality of life dramatically improved. The Kennedy Center’s impetus came from Dwight Eisenhower, who viewed the arts as a form of soft power during the Cold War, which could combat the perception “that too many foreign peoples saw us as materialistic and militaristic,” in the words of diplomat Ralph Becker.
Many of those artists are alarmed over the latest attempt to police the agency. Luke Stettner, an artist in Columbus, Ohio, spent some 50 hours working on an NEA application to fund a yearlong exhibition centered around queer collaborative art practices, featuring a local artist who identifies as a lesbian. “Queer was maybe mentioned six times” in their application, he said. Convinced that it was doomed under the new administration, he made the “difficult decision” to pull it even before the new guidelines were put in place.
The same day that Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center was announced, Chris Nee, co-creator of the children’s musical Finn, learned the center was canceling its sponsorship of a planned two-year national tour for financial reasons. Nee and her colleagues had good reasons to doubt that explanation—among them, they had been in talks about the planned tour as recently as late January. She suspected the termination was ideological: The play is about a shark who likes bright colors and sparkly things. “It’s for those kids out there that I think are so unbelievably under attack right now,” she said.
The Trumpified Kennedy Center also risks alienating much of its audience in progressive Washington, D.C. When Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, attended the symphony in March, they were resoundingly booed, prompting Richard Grenell, the center’s interim president, to send a staff email, as reported by The Washington Post, insisting that they make the Kennedy Center a “place where everyone is welcome” and that he takes “diversity and inclusion very seriously.”
For now, audiences are booing, artists are canceling, and the Kennedy Center hasn’t gotten any Trumpier.
Cultural DEI is not a bad way of understanding Trump’s weaponization of federal arts funding and his takeover of the Kennedy Center. There have been clumsy signals—like Trump wanting to use some NEA money to build his own sculpture garden—that the administration hopes to use its newfound power to cultivate Trump-approved art. For now, audiences are booing, artists are canceling, and the Kennedy Center hasn’t gotten any Trumpier.
When discussing his plans for the Kennedy Center, Trump frequently stumbles into a version of his political message by invoking a bygone era of mass entertainment that wasn’t tainted by politics. American Culture can be made Great Again—as long as it is forbidden from engaging with the world around it. On the one hand, this is a very old vision: Demagogues have attempted to use bread and circuses to satiate the masses for millennia. But it’s also apparent that, beyond the Kennedy Center and the NEA, there is a clear desire to showcase art with a distinctly Trumpian spin—even if no one seems entirely sure of what that would look like in practice.
Canal, the singer-songwriter who protested at the Kennedy Center, hypothesized that only AI art can give the president what he wants. Because “no artist in their right mind,” she said, “is going to be making art about Trump.”
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