The nation’s arts community is suddenly aflutter with apprehension, doubt, and some mild public protests over President Donald Trump’s recent decision to overhaul the leadership of Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In a flash decision announced on Feb. 7, Trump availed himself of heretofore unused presidential powers to fire the arts complex’s chairman, the philanthropist David Rubenstein, who had served in that role since 2010, and dismiss board members appointed by former President Joe Biden.

“We are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Trump announced on his Truth Social platform, noting that those he removed “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” Trump promised.

Trump immediately appointed 14 new board members, including such close political associates as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Second Lady Usha Vance, as well as several ladies well known in Palm Beach philanthropic circles. Once installed, they unanimously elected Trump himself to be the Kennedy Center’s new chairman and fired its longtime president Deborah Rutter, who planned to depart later in the year.

The board’s Barack Obama-appointed treasurer Shonda Rhimes quit, as did two artistic advisors. Two guest artists canceled one-performance engagements scheduled for later this season. The Center itself announced the cancelation of a musical production tour with alleged gay themes and a performance by Washington’s Gay Men’s Chorus. Trump’s announcement singled out drag shows “specifically targeting our youth” as something that “will stop,” but these two cancelations appear to have originated before Trump’s takeover.

Politics aside, Trump’s interest in the Kennedy Center represents an enormous opportunity. At no time in our history has a president of the United States assumed a personal leadership role in a major arts organization. The presidency’s patronage and prestige alone will almost certainly guarantee a massive flood of federal arts funding in support of projects that esteem the nation as it approaches the 250^th anniversary celebrations planned for 2026. Washington can, and should be, a focal point for those observances, and the Kennedy Center, a public-private partnership founded in 1958 and operational from 1971, suggests itself as the headquarters for those efforts.

Investing generously in the arts complex complements Trump’s campaign promise to clean up the city of Washington, which under Biden once again became a cesspool of crime, drugs, and blight—some of it within short walking distance of the Center’s august halls—and to present a more positive image of the United States at home and abroad. It is also consistent with Trump’s directives to the National Endowment for the Arts to remove funds from divisive and racist DEI programming and to prioritize beauty and classical form in federal architecture.

How the Kennedy Center’s previous leadership would have observed the country’s 250^th anniversary, or, given its relative passivity, allowed them to be observed by overwhelmingly woke and substantially anti-American artists, is anyone’s guess, but a cursory review of some of its recent programming did not augur well for festivities that most Americans would enjoy.

Pages now removed from the Kennedy Center’s website listed multiple drag events of the type Trump described, including “Broadway Drag Brunch,” “Dancing Queens Drag Brunch,” “A Drag Salute to Divas,” and “Dragtastic Dress-Up.” A production of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, a Christmastime ballet favorite that is a staple of almost every major American dance company, presented a “diversity” theme completely alien to the work. The musical &Juliet reimagined Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet as a feminist critique of society in which Juliet runs away from Romeo for a lesbian relationship.

A pre-pandemic production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni staged by Washington National Opera, which performs at the Kennedy Center, presented the title character’s romantic conquests as his “survivors” and was introduced by a panel discussion consisting entirely of leftist women, some of whom have publicly supported the cancelation of men accused without evidence of sexual harassment, including the opera’s former director Placido Domingo. Nothing could be less American than that, but would it surprise you to learn that Washington National Opera has gone from presenting eight main stage productions when Domingo was director to only four in recent seasons?

Little information indicates how this type of programming has served the Kennedy Center’s larger mission statement, which claims that it “presents world-class art by the artists that define our culture today, delivers powerful arts education opportunities nationwide, and embodies the ideals of President Kennedy in all the Center’s activities.” Kennedy may have been a Democrat, but none of the extensive scholarship on his abbreviated presidency has revealed any predilection for balletic diversity rewrites, lesbian fantasy, or the drag subculture. Nor could even the grumpiest protester marching outside his memorial theater complex pretend that our most recently martyred president would have survived the #MeToo principles apparently espoused by artistic leaders within his namesake cultural center.

Indeed, before Trump’s takeover, the Kennedy Center’s self-curated public image inspired little confidence. Its facilities, which received $23 million in federal funding for upkeep in fiscal year 2025, are frowzy and badly in need of renovation and overhaul.

Last June, I personally saw mice running around in the Center’s Opera House, its biggest theater, during a performance of Puccini’s Turandot, the ending of which was absurdly rewritten to make the opera’s title character a victim of rape culture. The new “REACH” event space, which was intended to be cutting edge but also relaxing, is an ugly, brutalist monstrosity of poured concrete that recalls a bomb shelter in the former Yugoslavia. After one visit, I was cured of any desire ever to return to it.

On Feb. 12, Ric Grenell, whom Trump appointed interim director, posted that the Center has “ZERO cash on hand. And ZERO in reserves” and noted that its “deferred maintenance is a crisis.” At the same time, however, the Center has had the resources to pay Rutter $1.4 million per year and observe a woke “land acknowledgment” still posted on its website to “honor with gratitude” Native American tribes who were “the stewards of this land throughout the generations.” And just where was their arts complex?

Fortunately, Trump and his new board have much to work with. The Kennedy Center features some 2,200 performances a year. Many are of high quality and could be bolstered with even more ambitious and appealing offerings while pandering and uninspired DEI productions are phased out. The National Symphony, under its splendid music director Gianandrea Noseda, stands as one of the world’s leading orchestras and presents excellent concert programs to appreciative audiences who see more in the classics than they might perceive in BIPOC comedy shows and questionable street art packaged partially at taxpayer expense as “social impact” content. Elevating the best will make the Kennedy Center great again, and Trump has a historic opportunity to gift such excellence to the nation.