By Jonathan Blumhofer

There’s nothing benign about what just happened on the banks of the Potomac. 

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth…In a free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.”

— President John F. Kennedy at Amherst College, 26 October 1963

“How crazy is it to think that we’re going to celebrate Christ at Christmas with a big traditional production, to celebrate what we are all celebrating in the world during Christmastime, which is the birth of Christ?”

— Kennedy Center interim president Richard Grenell at CPAC, 22 February 2025

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — unsettling business is afoot.

Given everything else happening these days, one could be forgiven for overlooking the recent goings-on at Washington, D. C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In case you missed it, earlier this month, Donald Trump fired eighteen of the institution’s board members; dismissed its widely admired president, Deborah Rutter; installed fourteen of his cronies; named himself the chairman of its board; and elevated his lackey Richard Grenell to run the place in the interim.

Considering how much unsettling business is afoot, Trump’s seizure of the Kennedy Center necessarily ranks lower on the scale of national horrors. The destructive antics of an unelected, chainsaw-wielding South African billionaire; control of the nation’s health care system being handed to an anti-vaccination, conspiracy theory-embracing crackpot; and the dismissal of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on account of his skin color ought to worry and offend us more.

Yet there’s nothing benign about what just happened on the banks of the Potomac. Indeed, the president’s move makes history of the most nefarious kind: for the first time, the federal government has hijacked what is supposed to be the nation’s premiere arts institution in an effort to explicitly censor voices and viewpoints it deems undesirable.

If that sounds like a page out of Stalin’s playbook, that’s because it is. And easy though it might be to look away or laugh off Trump’s action, that would be a mistake: nothing about it is reassuring.

Again, we have a demonstration of an individual with immense powers who’s simply out of control. Forget disregarding norms and pushing boundaries. Trump is doing what he can because he can, not because it’s the right thing to do, not because he’s qualified, not because it makes any logical sense, not because it’s in anyone’s best interest. By another name, this behavior is an abuse of power, one that’s consistent with an ideology of “might makes right” that, as it follows its natural course, is overtaking national institutions like a cancer.

Trump lackey Richard Grenell will to run the Kennedy Center for the time being. Photo: WIki Common

Coupled with this is the administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Thus far, this assault on “wokeness” is their most pernicious and wickedly ingenious. The definition is slippery, but that’s the point: like “communist,” “socialist,” or “Red” of an earlier era, it’s a catchy epithet that counts.

Naturally, the arts are Ground Zero for the next offensive in this battle. The field’s openness to all comers and, often enough, its embrace of MAGA world’s outcasts—people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and political liberals—makes it an easy target. So, too, is its relative economic fragility: threaten its public funding, the thinking goes, and everyone will fall into line.

The administration has already started doing the last, rolling out new guidelines for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) that require compliance with their anti-DEI and anti-trans initiatives. Such noxious doings are, of course, their prerogative—like it or not, that’s the platform Trump ran and was elected on. Nevertheless, historical examples of governments forcefully injecting themselves into the arts rarely ends well, either for compliant artists or nations.

That the Kennedy Center finds itself in the eye of the storm is both fitting and tragic. When Congress passed the National Cultural Center Act of 1958 it was at the height of the Cold War; the the idea that the United States should challenge Soviet artistic excellence followed as a matter of course. Though, geopolitically, those years were often harrowing, American arts and sciences thrived.

Though the national temper was jaded and more skeptical by the time the building was completed in 1971, the Kennedy Center has, by and large, admirably fulfilled its mission to serve as a beacon for the national arts, weathering the whims of whatever party was in control of the White House or Congress. In fact, the decentralized nature of American culture helped ensure that its work flourished thanks, mainly, to private support. Especially given this fact, the breadth of the Center’s offerings—music of all kinds, theater, film, sculpture, photography, and educational programs among them—has been remarkably catholic and remains unique on these shores.

Now, though, all of that is under threat.

Grenell, whose glaring unfitness for his position makes him an ideal cog in the machine of sophomoric incompetence that is the Trump Administration, has thoughts on what should be in — Jesus, the J6 Prison Choir (yes, a collective of singing, pardoned felons) — and out: the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington. One can only imagine what next year’s sestercentennial will look like. No doubt triumphalist and partial, as these things usually are, though perhaps tinged with more than the usual edge of White Christian Nationalist malice?

What a far cry from Opening Night in ’71, when Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, a self-titled “theater piece” for singers, players, dancers, symphony orchestra, blues combo, rock band, and then some, wove all (or nearly all) of the day’s irreconcilable contradictions—of race, gender, faith, unbelief, protest, conformity, and more—into a messy whole. Perfect? Hardly. But Mass stands as a considerably fairer representation of the polyglot nation we inhabit and a far more honest effort to address its real problems than the current regime is either capable of admitting or willing to attempt.

What, then, can be done?

A few things, even if, in the near term, Trump remains president and Congress keeps behaving like his supine lapdog. As Norman Ornstein has pointed out, there are legal means at the Kennedy Center’s disposal to potentially overturn what’s just occurred.

A scene from the Boston Conservatory production of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Photo: Eric Antoniou.

Whether or not that happens, the future of the symbolic home of the nation’s arts remains murky. Will the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera remain in residence? If they leave, where do they go? Will touring artists avoid the venue? Several, including Issa Rae, Rhiannon Giddens, and Renée Fleming, have already cut their ties with the Center. What about its diverse offerings of hip-hop, country, folk, theater, comedy? How will they be curtailed?

That all remains to be seen though, to be sure, there’s no shortage of right-leaning performers—not to mention choirs of pardoned criminals—who might fill open dates. Either way, the situation hardly says anything encouraging about the larger state of our nation, either artistically or morally.

The good news, however, is that we needn’t settle for it. At the very least, the Trump Administration’s assault on the arts and free expression should be a call to action, for audiences just as much as artists.

How to proceed? Well, first, remember Benjamin Franklin: “A great empire, like a cake,” the Boston native once quipped, “is most easily diminished at the edges.”

Accordingly, stay alert. We should know by now that the time to resist unacceptable impulses and actions is early on. Desiring to wait out events or for things to calm down is natural, but to dally six, twelve, or eighteen months—let alone years—makes the eventual effort to rise up that much more difficult.

In the coming months, audiences will need to speak anew with their feet and their wallets. Engage with the arts. Support artists and institutions that share your values and advocate for the causes you believe in. Buy tickets and attend performances. If certain groups aren’t doing as much as you think they should, make your voice heard. Don’t forget that there is a direct relationship between the arts and the general public that should never be discounted—by either side. Also, donate: small groups and big ones need support.

The latter will no doubt have some difficult decisions to make. They’ll either need to develop new sources of funding or tailor their offerings to fit the strictures of the NEA’s Trump-friendly grant guidelines—if that is department isn’t axed entirely. The easy choice may well be to go small and keep quiet. But this is a moment that calls for so much more. History is littered with examples of artistic and moral cowardice. Don’t let this be one of them: if today isn’t the day for institutions to stand up for something right and good, then that day is never coming.

Individual artists and smaller groups are, often, more versatile and creatively nimble. Now is the time to redouble support for them.

Official White House photo of President John F. Kennedy . Photo: Wiki Common

Make no mistake, come what may, the arts will endure. They are, at their truest, a reflection of our shared humanity and don’t care a whit for the caprices of petty tyrants or anti-diversity initiatives. Just as Beaumarchais and Verdi worked their way around 18^th– and 19^th-century censors and Pasternak and Shostakovich navigated the far more treacherous waters of Soviet cultural practice, 21^st-century American artists now have their moment. It may not be the one we wanted, but it’s the one we’ve got. Let’s make the most of it.

Along the way, recall JFK. His 62-year-old speech at Amherst isn’t the sort of oratory one will be hearing from the White House anytime soon, but its content, which gives surprising and humane voice to Nietzsche’s injunction that “art is the proper task of life,” rings as potently now as ever.

“The artist,” Kennedy observed on that long-ago October evening, “however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role…

“If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

“In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope’.”

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.