Trump’s Revenge Now Includes His Takeover of the Kennedy Center

The trouble started in August 2017 when the television producer Norman Lear said he was skipping a White House reception for his Kennedy Center Honors award. Another honoree, the dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, pulled out after President Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Va.

Mr. Trump, who ended up canceling the reception and shunning the annual awards ceremony all four years of his first term, got his revenge last week when he purged the bipartisan Kennedy Center board of Biden appointees, fired the center’s president and made himself the new chairman.

The question now is what a thin-skinned showman will do with an institution of music, theater and dance that has been central to Washington’s cultural life for more than 50 years.

Stephen K. Bannon, the longtime Trump adviser, thinks there should be an opening night performance of the J6 Prison Choir, made up of men once imprisoned for their role in the assault on the Capitol but now pardoned by Mr. Trump. The president could also emulate one of his favorite authoritarians, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into state-sanctioned art to glorify the nation and his leadership.

The prevailing view in a stunned Washington is that a center that offers a smorgasbord of more than 2,000 events a year — everything from a towering production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle to “Sesame Street: The Musical” — will now feature more country music ahead of 2026, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Notably, the country singer Lee Greenwood, a Trump supporter whose signature song “God Bless the USA” has become a Republican anthem, is on the board.

Whatever the center’s future, conservatives exulted that Mr. Trump’s domination of Washington has extended to artistic expression and a pillar of the city’s establishment.

“This Kennedy Center thing is big, folks — big,” Mr. Bannon said on his podcast last week. “They’re crushed over there.” He called the center “the high church of the secular, atheistic administrative state that runs the imperial capital,” enthused that “Visigoths” would now be filling the seats and recommended that the Jan. 6 choir replace an evening of opera.

“Just watch the meltdown of the Washington elite,” he said.

Making the Center ‘Hot’

Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s interim president of the center and a former U.S. ambassador to Germany known for savaging his critics on social media, did not respond to requests for comment about his plans. It remains unclear how long he will be in the job, since two days after his installation he told reporters he was considering running for governor of California in 2026 if former Vice President Kamala Harris enters the race.

Mr. Trump has yet to reveal specific programming, though he said in a phone call to a meeting of the new Kennedy Center board — the audio was leaked to CNN — that “we’re going to make it hot. And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.”

The president’s stated reason for the takeover was to rid the center of drag shows last year that he said targeted young people, which seemed to be a reference to a drag-themed show the center hosted last year, “Dragtastic Dress-up,” aimed at “LGBTQ+ youth under 18,” according to marketing materials.

In later comments to reporters on Air Force One, Mr. Trump said that some of the shows at the Kennedy Center “were terrible,” but when asked if he had seen anything there, he said no.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Tuesday that “the Kennedy Center learned the hard way that if you go woke, you will go broke.” (The center ran a $1 million deficit on a $268 million budget last year.) Mr. Trump and the new board, she said, will rebuild a center “where all Americans, and visitors from around the world, can enjoy the arts with respect to America’s great history and traditions.”

Michael M. Kaiser, a former Kennedy Center president who is now the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management, remains apprehensive. “It’s a scary time right now because we don’t know what the ambition is,” he said. He was worried about the donor base, he added, and whether patrons from an overwhelmingly Democratic city would continue to come to events.

As for Mr. Trump, he said, “who knows how long this will be a priority when he realizes the chairman is expected to make a major gift every year and raise other money.”

David Rubenstein, the purged chairman, billionaire philanthropist and co-founder of the private equity Carlyle Group, contributed $120 million to the Kennedy Center over 20 years on its board — the single largest donated sum of any individual or corporation in the center’s history. Mr. Rubenstein also oversaw an effort to raise $100 million in donations each year.

Some $43 million of the center’s budget last year was paid for by federal aid to cover operations, maintenance and repair for the center itself, which was created as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. The rest of the budget — $225 million — depends on ticket sales and donations.

Mr. Rubenstein, who owns the Nantucket compound that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has used for his family vacations, appeared to be on good terms with Mr. Trump ahead of his ouster. Mr. Rubenstein and his friend Caryn Zucker had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Trump and Melania Trump, the first lady, last year. Mr. Rubenstein also interviewed Mr. Trump for a book on the presidency that was published in September.

Mr. Rubenstein has so far said nothing publicly about his dismissal, though in a post on social media last week, he thanked the entire Kennedy Center team and its fired president, Deborah F. Rutter, for “helping to make the center the beacon for the performing arts its founders intended.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation in 1958 to create what was then called the National Cultural Center, but the effort changed its plans and name after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. The grand opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was in September 1971, featuring the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” commissioned for the occasion.

Critics often called the center, built on the banks of the Potomac River, a marble mausoleum of highbrow and not always superb art set apart from the life of the city. Its symphony, opera and ballet were never on par with the best that New York, Los Angeles or Chicago had to offer. It was as traditional as official Washington, but over time its repertoire expanded, improved and relaxed. Restaurants sprang up around it, and public transportation made getting there easier. On warm summer nights, people gathered on the outdoor plaza during intermission to see the twinkling lights of the city and planes headed for Reagan National Airport across the river.

The goal was to have something for everyone. Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the opera together, and Vice President Mike Pence saw “The King and I.” Little girls in pink dresses flocked to see the ballet “Swan Lake.” Young people filled the Opera House for the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” There were free concerts, a country music festival and the smattering of drag shows that Mr. Trump said so offended him.

“Looking back, I now think it’s wonderful,” said Tim Page, a professor emeritus of musicology at the University of Southern California, a former music critic for The Washington Post and a former reporter for The New York Times.

The Kennedy Center Honors began in 1978 under George Stevens Jr., to recognize people and institutions for lifetime artistic achievement. Honorees at the December gala have varied from George Balanchine to Tennessee Williams to Dolly Parton to the Grateful Dead. Mr. Trump was the first president in 40 years to skip the event.

A number of artists connected with the center resigned in protest last week, among them the renowned soprano Renée Fleming, who was an artistic adviser, and Shonda Rhimes, a famed television producer and writer, who was treasurer of the board.

The board consists of 36 members who serve for six years each, meaning that even though presidents get to pick who serves, the board is not often evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. In Ms. Rutter’s case, a majority of board members in recent years were Trump appointees from his first term, among them Pam Bondi, now the attorney general, and Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor who is Mr. Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel.

“I had a fantastic working relationship with Pam and Mike Huckabee,” Ms. Rutter said.

New Trump appointees on the board include Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; Cheri Summerall, Ms. Wiles’ stepmother; and Dan Scavino, a longtime Trump aide.

A Trump appointee from 2020 is Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who discovered Melania Trump in Milan and introduced her to the future president at a 1998 party he hosted at the Kit Kat Club. He is now the United Nations ambassador of Dominica.