They’re Turning the Friggin’ Kennedy Center Straight

Theatre is gay.

Don’t get me wrong—I love theatre. I’ve acted in college and community productions, worked backstage, directed high school plays, and attended a few dozen shows at various D.C. venues. 

But it’s very gay. 

It’s also—like much of the arts—resolutely Left. Playbills invariably frame the shows’ plots in progressive political terms, directors gleefully queer and gender-bend characters, and every theatre in town continued enforcing mask mandates long after they became a joke everywhere else.

So imagine my shock when D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, previously wreathed year-round in rainbow light, began instead to throw pure white illumination onto the dark waters of the Potomac. Theatre will remain at least somewhat gay, but get more based (a week ago, Trump announced Ric Grenell as the Kennedy Center’s interim executive director).

That wasn’t the end, though. Just hours later, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that the Kennedy Center’s days of hosting drag shows were over. “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 wrote. 

The current chair, billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, is the perfect example of the progressive patronage machine DOGE is fighting to dismantle. In addition to chairing the Kennedy Center, Rubenstein also owns the Baltimore Orioles, chairs the National Gallery of Art and National Constitution Center, formerly served as co-chair of the Brookings Institute, and sits on the boards of both Harvard University and the World Economic Forum. His name is plastered all over Montpelier—James Madison’s Virginia estate—where the gift shop bookstore stocks almost exclusively DEI titles and slave narratives. 

Past Republican presidents (and even Trump during his first term) were largely content to pursue narrow political goals while letting the operators of this patronage machine operate in lockstep with impunity. It never occurred to them to turn the power of the state against the hostile network undermining their every move. 

DOGE’s cuts at USAID and elsewhere are a good start—but it won’t be enough for the MAGA movement to defund its enemies. For a lasting legacy, Trump & Co. will need to build something of their own. The way to loosen the Left’s longstanding cultural stranglehold is by centralizing power in a charismatic leader who can appeal directly to the populace while forming a new counter-elite to staff new institutions or take over existing ones. The king and the people versus the barons.

So it should have been no surprise when Trump continued his Truth Social post by revealing that he would “soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!”

Installing himself as the head of the nation’s most visible public arts entity seems like an act of Neronian megalomania on Trump’s part. Perhaps he’ll take the stage himself to recite his original epic on the Fall of Troy and accompany his recitation with original lyre music he composed for the occasion. Hopefully he won’t set fire to Washington to relieve his writer’s block.

Ego might be part of it, but the best explanation is that Trump understands the importance of arts and entertainment. Our inner libertarian tells us the state should focus on building roads and leave culture to the free market. If government must step in to subsidize artistic endeavors, elected officials should delegate the task to apolitical “experts.” 

Trump sees through this illusion. The experts are far from apolitical. The arts are part of the diffuse progressive patronage system, and it doesn’t do us any good to pretend otherwise. In this case, simply appointing some conservative theatre patron (assuming such a thing exists) would be insufficient. It wasn’t Clinton, Obama, or Biden but George W. Bush who gave us Rubenstein. 

If Trump wants to move the needle, he’ll need to throw all his personal star power behind his administration’s arts agenda. He’s Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus—governing a great-power empire, but devoting significant attention to his (admittedly fallible) patronage of the imperial opera. It’s too important to leave on autopilot.

The Kennedy Center’s new overlords have fired most of the institution’s highest-paid employees and canceled a children’s musical about a transgender shark. The real question is what will replace it. Will a patriotic, right-wing Kennedy Center feature marathon readings of Homer and Virgil? Commissioned stage adaptations of Dostoevsky’s Demons or Of Plimoth Plantation? New works by Walter Kirn or David Mamet? Productions of Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square plays or T.S. Eliot’s verse dramas (with Narnia plays for the children)? Stand-up sets by Andrew Schulz, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan? Kid Rock concerts?

It’s hard to say. But regardless of the specifics, Trump’s acknowledgement that the cultural is political is real progress.

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