Trump’s Takeover of the Kennedy Center Part of His Imperial March

Imagine this: See in your mind’s eye the famous Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts along the mighty Potomac River in Washington D.C. Upon the stage of the main concert hall, Donald J. Trump, President of the United State, 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 sounds of Trump’s arrangement of the Village People’s “YMCA.”

The look of sheer amazement and surprise come from the stunned faces among members of the audience. One person can be heard screeching, “But the program says we are supposed to see Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’.”

Another person laments: “I subscribed for the Kennedy Center’s Shakespeare series. Last week I was here watching ‘As You Like It.’ And I did like it,” said the audience member. “So now, where’s ‘Twelfth Night’.”

Though this is not an actual scenario, it comes very close to the realm of possibilities.

With his fire hose of executive orders and policy initiatives flooding the headlines after Trump has 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 as “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.

President Donald 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 connect with Trump’s expansionist project of incorporating Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal as U.S. states, and privately owning the Gaza Strip, this takeover amounts to another example of his mean spirited retribution aimed at political enemies. Rubenstein, the current board chair, is a supporter and ally of former President Joe Biden.

For Trump, in addition to his imposing his political agenda on The Pentagon, for example, or dismantling federal agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, and others, he will use the Kennedy Center in his fierce battle in his war against “woke” and Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

Trump continued 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 Czar 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’s “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night” are not outside of the possibility of Trump’s censorship since the former includes the character Rosalind who disguises herself as a boy named Ganymede, while the latter profiles 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’s plays such as “Othello” whose lead character is a Black Moor, or “The Merchant of Venice” with a Jewish character. Trump may get behind “The Tempest” with its theme of revenge and retribution but he will 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-he 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 in most years for the annual “Kennedy Center Honors” since 1978, which highlights great personalities in the performing arts for their lifetime of contributions to American culture, Donald and Melania Trump failed to attend the tribute throughout all four years as occupants of the White House.

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 Trump forbidding government agencies from commemorating History and Heritage Months 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 the many who do not or will not conform and submit.

The German Nazis

Adolph 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.

Nazi storm troopers, in 1933, 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.

Storm troopers 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” 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. Preeminent German and Austrian Jewish composers and conductors, for example, immigrated to California: Otto Klemperer, Prince Hubertus von Löwenstein, Arnold Schönberg, and Ernst Toch.

The German Nazis produced several propaganda films to upgrade 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 Nazi’s accepted and advanced the “scientific” view that European-heritage Jews, in fact, all Jews of every so-called “race,” constitute a separate and lower “race” as justification for extermination as if we were vermin.

Cultural Control Follows Pattern of Authoritarians

As wisely and eloquently stated by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1839 play, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy, “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 throughout the ages?

Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts must not be placed in the category of “minor” or “lesser” in his fire hose of actions. Rather, it must be seen as confirmation in his autocratic takeover of the government in his incessant march toward totalitarianism.