Updated at 7:48 p.m. on February 7, 2025

Artists embarrassed Donald Trump when he first came to Washington. Now that Trump is back in power, he is determined not to let that happen again.

Trump plans to announce the dismissal of multiple members of the Kennedy Center board as soon as today, a group likely to include recent appointees of former President Joe Biden; among those on the current board are the Democratic political strategist Mike Donilon, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Democratic National Committee finance chair Chris Korge. The White House has also had discussions about having Trump himself installed as chair of the board, according to two people familiar with the purge, who requested anonymity to describe plans that are not yet public.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

(Several hours after this article published, Trump confirmed the news, writing on Truth Social that he planned to make the Kennedy Center “GREAT AGAIN” by terminating “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 that he planned to announce a “new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” adding, “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!”)

“The Kennedy Center has received no formal notifications from the White House about what you’ve reported,” Eileen Andrews, the center’s vice president of public relations, told us before Trump put out his Truth Social post.

Trump never attended the Kennedy Center’s annual gala event during his first term, as artists protested his administration and threatened to boycott Kennedy Center events at the White House. Now Trump is making clear that he will not be sidelined again from the most celebrated cultural institution in Washington.

“The attitude is different this time. The attitude is Go fuck yourself,” said one of the people familiar with the planning. “It’s ridiculous for four years for Trump and Melania to say, ‘We’re not going to the Kennedy Center because Robert De Niro doesn’t like us.’” (De Niro was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2009 and spoke at the 2024 event.)

Trump’s relationship with the arts world has long been strained. During his first year in office, all 17 members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a nonpartisan advisory body whose members at the time had been appointed by President Barack Obama, resigned over what they called Trump’s “hateful rhetoric” following the white-nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump later disbanded the group, rather than replace the committee, which was established by Ronald Reagan.  

Later that year, three of the five artists recognized at the annual Kennedy Center Honors said they would not attend or were considering a boycott of the traditional White House reception before the gala, citing various objections to Trump’s leadership. Trump, in response, canceled the reception and became the first sitting president not to attend the gala at any point in his term since its inception in 1978.

Trump showed a similar lack of interest in the National Medal of Arts, the government’s highest award for artists and arts patrons, which the president oversees. In his first term, Trump distributed just nine medals, including an award to the musicians of the U.S. military. Obama had awarded 76 medals over eight years, and Biden gave out 33 during his four-year term.

Trump was more circumspect about the Kennedy Center, alternately praising and criticizing federal funding for the institution. “They do need some funding. And I said, ‘Look, that was a Democrat request. That was not my request. But you got to give them something,” Trump said in 2020, when asked about a proposed $25 million in additional funding as part of a COVID-relief bill. “The Kennedy Center, they do a beautiful job—an incredible job.”

Weeks later, he changed his position. “I hated putting it in the bill because it’s just not appropriate,” he said of the funding.

If Trump became chair of the Kennedy Center board, he would replace the philanthropist David Rubenstein, who has held the post for 14 years but signaled that he will move on after September 2026. A week after Trump’s second inauguration, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter announced her own plans to step down at the end of the year.

For his second term, Trump is taking a more assertive approach to a range of cultural institutions. Within hours of his inauguration, he abolished the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which Biden had revived in 2022, preempting any possibility of another mass resignation. He then moved to impose his own views on government-funded cultural projects.

Nine days into his second term, he signed an executive order restarting planning for an idea from his first term: a national “Garden of American Heroes,” location to be determined. Trump had previously named 244 honorees—52 of them women—who would get statues, including figures from science, sports, entertainment, politics, and business, as well as some of the nation’s founders. (The family of at least one would-be honoree, the anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, later asked that he not be included.)

Trump also moved quickly to impose his vision on plans for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—July 4, 2026, also known as the Semiquincentennial. He created a new advisory panel, called Task Force 250, that he will chair to support a congressionally funded organization that has already begun planning events.

During the presidential campaign, Trump said he wanted the Semiquincentennial celebrations to last more than a year, from Memorial Day 2025—just 15 weeks away—until July 4, 2026. He proposed a “Great American State Fair” in Iowa as one component, an homage to the state’s own summer fair tradition but featuring pavilions from each state. He also promised the creation of a new national high-school sporting contest, called the Patriot Games, to take place alongside the fair. “Together we will build it, and they will come,” he said in 2023.

Trump’s newfound interest in the arts represents a departure of sorts. In his first term, Trump repeatedly tried to pull funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, two major sources of support for arts and cultural programs around the country. But appropriators in Congress overruled him, and by the end of his term, annual funding was up slightly from the beginning of his term, sitting at more than $167 million for each agency. (The number rose to $207 million during Biden’s presidency.)

This time around, Trump has asked the chairs of both the arts and humanities endowments to join Task Force 250. Nina Ozlu Tunceli, the top lobbyist at the nonprofit Arts Action Fund, who has worked for decades with Congress to secure arts funding, told us she is hopeful that Trump’s interest in the 250th celebration will provide “a very good lifeline” for the endowments’ funding.

Still, Trump’s executive order calling for the “termination” of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government will become a source of tension—and another way for him to assert his will on the arts. In recent budgets under Biden, House appropriators praised the endowments for “addressing equity through the arts” and “diversity at the national endowment.” “The [Appropriations] Committee directs the NEA to continue prioritizing diversity in its work,” read a section of the budget for fiscal year 2023.

Given the changes that have already begun under Trump, Ozlu Tunceli said, “those programs will definitely be removed.”

Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is moving quickly.

On Friday night, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter informed board members that some of their colleagues had already received termination notices from the administration. And she said that Trump appears to have the legal authority to take the unprecedented step of firing them before their six-year terms expire.

“Per the Center’s governance established by Congress in 1958, the chair of the board of trustees is appointed by the Center’s board members,” she wrote in the email, which was later posted on the Kennedy Center’s website. “There is nothing in the Center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.”

The Kennedy Center is the premier performing-arts institution in the nation’s capital. It is home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, and it hosts more than 2,000 performances and exhibits a year, including major foreign cultural exports.

Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Friday afternoon that he would terminate multiple board members and install himself as chair, hours after The Atlantic reported on his plans.

“The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from across our Nation,” he wrote. As chair, he promised to impose “our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” (Since the chair is chosen by the board members, Trump presumably intends to appoint enough to secure a majority in favor of his chairmanship.)

What would that artistic vision look like? Trump’s rallies provide some glimpses into his cultural tastes, with a heavy diet of songs by Village People and Guns N’ Roses along with Broadway standards from Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. (He is, evidently, an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan.) He walks onstage to a recording of “God Bless the USA” sung by the current Kennedy Center trustee Lee Greenwood, who was appointed during Trump’s first term.

[Spencer Kornhaber: How the Village People explain Trump]

Ultimately, a Trumpian Kennedy Center might be distinguished more by what types of performances are not featured. In his original announcement, Trump criticized the organization for having hosted drag-show performances in the past, and said he will stop future performances.

Blaq Dinamyte, the president of Qommittee, a national network of drag artists and allies, condemned the president’s move in a statement Friday. “Banning an entire art form is censorship, plain and simple,” Dinamyte wrote.

A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment. The White House press office sent a link to Trump’s social-media post in response to a request for comment.

People familiar with Trump’s planning have said that his aggressive moves are an effort to avoid the clashes with artists that he endured during his first term. In 2017, he became the only president to ever skip the Kennedy Center Honors since the event began, in 1978, following threats by some of the 2017 honorees to boycott an accompanying White House reception.

The Kennedy Center board was created by Congress as part of the Smithsonian Institution. By law, it includes a number of Cabinet officials, federal officers, and members of congressional leadership. An additional 36 “general trustees” are appointed by the president. Joe Biden appointed 13 new members shortly before leaving office, including his close adviser Mike Donilon, the Democratic National Committee Finance Chair Chris Korge, and the former Biden White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Trump likewise appointed some political allies and donors during his first term.

Even so, the institution has, until now, believed it could float above partisan politics.

“Throughout our history, the Kennedy Center has enjoyed strong support from members of congress and their staffs—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents,” Rutter wrote in her email. “Since our doors opened in 1971, we have had a collaborative relationship with every presidential administration. Since that time, the Kennedy Center has had a bi-partisan board of trustees that has supported the arts in a non-partisan fashion.”

Trump, of course, doesn’t believe that the Kennedy Center has been upholding that nonpartisan tradition. Putting himself personally in charge seems unlikely to restore it.