President Trump’s recent announcement that he was seizing control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by installing himself as head of the Center’s board of directors and long-time confidant Ric Grenell as interim executive director was met with predictable howls of outrage from the cultural left.
Kerry Kennedy, niece of JFK and president of the ultra-woke Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, wasted little time in weighing in about the fascist threat to democracy that Trump’s move portended, telling the leftist British tabloid The Guardian that the board takeover “is very dangerous for democracy and has grave implications for what will happen not just at the Kennedy Center but for government funding of the arts across the country.” An anonymous long-standing board member of the Center elaborated that “this coup is antithetical to the founding of the institution. Thrusting the Center into a political space like this is unconscionable. This is not what we signed up for.”
Indeed, what they “signed up for” was using the prominent platform of the Kennedy Center to advocate for the latest fashionable leftist cultural trends and as a bully pulpit to denigrate all the traditional American values that President Trump and his populist movement represent. A sampling of the Kennedy Center performances from the past few years includes “Dragtastic Dress-up,” a flamboyantly obscene drag show marketed to LGBTQ youth, and “Finn,” a musical described on the Kennedy Center’s website as the story of the coming of age of a “young shark who just wants to be his true self” who “loves sparkles and bright colors despite being a shark.” High culture indeed.
Trump had evidently had enough of the embarrassing woke circus.“I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” he tweeted out on Truth Social. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA, ONLY THE BEST …Ric shares my Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture, and will be overseeing the daily operations of the Center.”
Scores of advisors and “stars” have subsequently disassociated themselves from the Center or canceled their shows in protest, in what precisely no one considers to be an irrevocable loss to American culture. Ironically, in the same story characterizing Trump as a threat to democracy and artistic integrity for calling a halt to instrumentalizing the Kennedy Center to promote an aggressive cultural leftism that offends the vast majority of taxpayers, the Guardian includes an attempted swipe at the president’s antiquated cultural tastes. With a “cultural palate frozen in the 20th Century,” they jeer, “Trump is known to admire singers such as Elvis Presley and films such as Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Amazingly, citing Trump’s admiration for some of the greatest achievements of popular culture in the 20th Century in preference to the widely despised woke agitprop favored by our ruling elite is supposed to be some kind of insult. Evidently, Trump shares the assessment of the great Bob Dylan about the state of American cinema, who recently wrote, “People keep talking about making America great again. Maybe they should start with the movies.”
When asked about his boss’s thinking regarding the takeover, interim executive director Grenell said it was simple: “If you’re an arts institution and you’re asking for public dollars, then you’ve got to give the public what they want,” not something that deliberately offends the sensibilities of the vast majority of voters and citizens.
The late Andrew Breitbart once observed, in an oft-quoted phrase, that “politics is downstream from culture.” This is true, of course, in the important sense that the institutions influencing cultural attitudes and beliefs (including our universities and our entertainment industry) are vitally important in shaping narratives, and hence political outcomes.
In another sense, however, politics can, and does, shape culture. The popular culture of the Camelot era of the JFK presidency was heavily influenced by Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s White House and its somewhat self-conscious emphasis on sophistication, high culture, and the arts. Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” politics of patriotic optimism and American renewal characterized much of 1980s popular culture in America, from movies such as Indiana Jones, Rambo, Rocky, Star Wars, Back to the Future, and Ferris Bueller to musicals like Big River and television shows such as The Dukes of Hazard and The Cosby Show. Undoubtedly, the popular culture in many ways reflected the political tenor of the time.
Despite the sneers and jeers of our cultural elite, the prospects that President Trump’s takeover of our premier cultural platform will lead to an American cultural renaissance are actually relatively high. If not a full-fledged return to the “golden age” of American dominance of the popular arts, it at least augurs the end of an aggressive wokeism, whose very measure of success is the degree to which it offends popular taste and the commonly held values of Western civilization.
Rob Wasinger is co-founder of The Ragnar Group. He was director of Senate relations for the Trump transition team in 2016 and the first White House liaison at the State Department during the Trump administration.