Trump’s weird obsession with the arts is part of the authoritarian playbook

In Washington, Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center – the US’s imposing national centre for the performing arts – presents a bizarre, unnerving and, at times, bleakly comical spectacle. Last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president, foreign policy adviser Richard Grenell. On Monday this week, the president’s motorcade disgorged him at the building – which contains an opera house, theatre, concert hall and a plethora of smaller venues off its towering, chandelier-hung foyers. By this point, his and Melania Trump’s portraits, alongside those of vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha, had been screwed to the wall beside the concert hall stage door.

Trump and his new trustees – who include Usha Vance and Fox presenter Laura Ingraham – then discussed changes to the Kennedy Center Honors, founded in the 1970s to recognise the greatest figures in American cultural life. Trump called previous honorees, who have ranged from Fred Astaire to Francis Ford Coppola, “radical left lunatics”. Men such as singer Andrea Bocelli, who has performed at Mar-a-Lago, and Sylvester Stallone, who recently called Trump a “second George Washington”, were floated for future honours. With the truculence of a slighted schoolboy, Trump opined that he had never much cared for Hamilton – this, after the news that the musical has withdrawn from a 2026 run at the centre. He also complained about an infestation of mice. All this, the day before he was due to speak to Russian president Vladimir Putin to haggle over Ukraine’s future. It is enough to give you a political-cultural attack of the bends.

Those who work there – it is the home of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, sustains a large educational programme and hosts touring productions – are faced with a moral dilemma. One senior figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that what is keeping them from resigning after the ripping away of the centre’s bipartisan heart is the fact that their own section’s programming has yet to be targeted; a feeling of responsibility towards employees’ livelihoods; and a hope that things will one day “swing back”. Nevertheless, the figure told me: “I’m asking myself every day when I get up, am I being like a French collaborator?”