Imagine this: the famous Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts stands along the mighty Potomac River in Washington D.C. Upon the stage of the main concert hall is Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, feet firmly placed on the conductor’s podium, his arms held high holding a white baton in his right hand to alert the full orchestra. He gives the downbeat, and out comes the sound of Trump’s arrangement of the Village People’s “YMCA.”
Looks of sheer amazement and surprise come from the stunned members of the audience. One person can be heard screeching, “But the program says we are supposed to see Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”
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This, of course, is not an actual scenario, but it comes very close to the realm of possibilities.
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With his firehose of executive orders and policy initiatives flooding the headlines after Trump captured the Oval Office for the second time, the media can only report on what they consider the most important for the public to know. Those they consider “lesser” often go unchronicled.
But while one of these may seem rather trivial on its surface, when taken in context, it conforms to Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the federal government in his imperial project.
Trump announced on his so-called Truth Social platform on February 7, 2025, that he will be taking over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, gutting its current board of trustees, firing its chair – billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein – and installing himself as chair
“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Trump said in a post to Truth Social. “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. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!”
Not only does this takeover connect with Trump’s expansionist project of incorporating Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal as U.S. states and privately owning the Gaza Strip, but it also amounts to another example of his meanspirited retribution aimed at political enemies. Rubenstein, the current board chair, is a supporter and ally of former President Joe Biden.
In addition to imposing his political agenda on major federal agencies, Trump will no doubt use the Kennedy Center in his fierce war against “woke” DEI programs.
Trump also wrote on Truth Social, “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”
Though he offered no detailed proof for his charges, if drag shows found an audience and were presented, who is Trump to act as Cultural Tzar of the United States?
Have you seen his tacky and tasteless, over-the-top gold-plated sense of style at Mar-a-Logo and throughout his apartment in his New York City Trump Tower with a gold toilet? Give us a break.
The scenario above with Shakespeare is not outside the possibility of Trump’s censorship since the show includes the character Viola, who dons boy’s clothing and calls herself Cesario in order to work for Duke Orsino.
In fact, during Shakespeare’s time, men and boys played all the women’s parts since women were forbidden to perform on stage as actors.
And what about other Shakespeare plays like “Othello,” whose lead character is a Black Moor, or “The Merchant of Venice,” which has a Jewish character? Trump may get behind “The Tempest” with its theme of revenge and retribution, but he may not permit its performance at the Kennedy Center since it concludes with characters displaying the human ability of forgiveness, which is anathema to the would-be orange king of the United States.
I wonder whether Trump has ever attended a cultural event at the Kennedy Center. While sitting presidents have traditionally been present for the annual Kennedy Center Honors, which highlights people in the performing arts for their lifetime of contributions to American culture, Donald and Melania Trump failed to attend the tribute throughout the president’s entire first term.
Trump’s attempt to control the production of cultural expression links directly with the regime’s emphasis on banning books and curricular materials in schools and libraries nationwide and with government agencies halting the commemorations of history and heritage months to comply with Trump’s orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on the rationalization that they are anti-Christian or anti-white and are, therefore, un-American.
What connects Trump and MAGA with all the people who wish to deny others the right of self-definition and self-expression is the overarching patriarchal, heteronationalist, Christian, white supremacist project, one based on an oligarchical, dictatorial, fascist foundation privileging the very few while controlling and disempowering those who do not conform and submit.
Trump’s predecessors
The Nazis
Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist and cultural arbiter, Joseph Goebbels, considered that “art is no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon of war.”
According to the French scholar Eric Michaud, author of The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, the Nazis used culture “to make the genius of the [Aryan] race visible to that race.” Michaud added that: “Hitler presented himself not only as a ‘man of the people’ and a soldier with frontline experience (Fronterlebnis), but also and above all as a man whose artistic experience constituted the best guarantee of his ability to mediate the Volksgeist and turn it into the ‘perfect Third Reich.’”
The main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter – the equivalent of right-wing social media of its time – interwove the politics of culture with the politics of war.
Soon after taking power, the Nazis passed laws “cleansing” Germany’s cultural life of “un-German” elements, including homosexual and Jewish authors, musicians, and composers.
In 1933, Nazi stormtroopers invaded, ransacked, and padlocked The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality and gender research, the precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.
The Nazis carried away and torched thousands of volumes of books and research documents, calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”
Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations and public and school libraries and confiscated books they deemed “un-German” (the equivalent of “woke” when used as an epithet). The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.”
On May 10, 1933, the students, along with Nazi leaders, set ablaze over 25,000 volumes in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Joseph Goebbels fired up the crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring, “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”
Many German homosexual and Jewish artists were forced to flee their country to places like the United States where they might earn a living.
Prominent German Jewish composer Kurt Weill wrote: “I consider what is going on here so sickening that I cannot imagine it lasting more than a couple of months… But one could be very wrong.”
Preeminent German and Austrian Jewish composers and conductors, for example, immigrated to California, including Otto Klemperer, Prince Hubertus von Löwenstein, Arnold Schönberg, and Ernst Toch.
The Jewish brain drain became Germany and Austria’s loss but the world’s gain. Schönberg, probably the best-known of the musical immigrants, produced several momentous works in his adoptive country of the U.S., including Kol Nidre (1938) and the poignant A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), which was inspired by stories of brave Jews singing on their way to the gas chambers.
The Nazis produced several propaganda films on German culture while depicting non-Aryan cultural forms and people, especially Jews and people from Eastern Europe, as “Untermensch” (“Subhuman”).
The Nazi propaganda film “Der Ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”) represented Jews as plague-ridden hordes of rats. The Nazis accepted and advanced the “scientific” view that Jews constitute a separate and lower “race” as justification for extermination.
Stalin
Joseph Stalin also used cultural elements as propaganda to control the minds of the Soviet people. He did this through censorship campaigns of opposing ideas and by inflicting Russian culture on minority ethnicities.
His “cultural revolution” included a strict program for the transformation of a Soviet national culture along with a national economy through industrialization and collectivization.
Stalin’s government, like Hitler’s, purged or exiled musicians, especially composers, who would not conform to state-mandated cultural principles. The Stalinist regime condemned Russian composers such as Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich for “formalism” (also the equivalent of “woke” used as an epithet), a literary and musical catch all term that the Soviet Union outlawed and condemned as elitist and anti-socialist.
The Central Committee of the Russian Communist (Stalinist) Party openly denounced these composers for writing music that was “inexpressive, poor, unharmonious, muddled” and that “smells strongly of the spirit of the modern bourgeois music of Europe and America, which reflect the marasmus (emaciation) of bourgeois culture.”
The Committee demanded music that combined “a high content of artistic perfection and musical form,” that moved in a “realistic direction” and which recognized the “truthfulness and reality of music, of its deep organic connection with the people and their music and songs.”
The government’s purpose was to cleanse Western influence from Russian music and art and to impose “socialist realism.”
Mao Zedong
Leader Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China launched his so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, a sociopolitical movement with the goal of preserving Chinese socialism by purging remaining hints of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. He argued that bourgeois elements (another equivalent of “woke” used as an epithet) had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism.
The Cultural Revolution was acted out through violence and turmoil. Death toll estimates vary anywhere from 1 to 2 million. Tens of millions were persecuted, and intellectuals and scientists were labelled as the Stinking Old Ninth. The government also closed schools and universities (Trump wants to shutter the Department of Education).
Approximately 10 million youth from urban areas were relocated under the Down to the Countryside Movement and forced to work in the fields.
The march toward totalitarianism
As wisely and eloquently stated by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” This adage holds that the written word acts as a powerful tool in the transmission of ideas. Why else would oppressive regimes and other avid enforcers of the status quo engage in censorship, book bans, burning, and other forms of cultural annexation through the ages?
Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts must not be considered minor among his firehose of actions. Rather, it must be seen as confirmation of his autocratic takeover of the government in his incessant march toward totalitarianism.
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