The woman and her sister had been out jogging by the river when they saw the bird fall from the sky. At first, they mistook it for a falling leaf, but the angle and speed of descent suggested a weightier object. They squatted down like children to inspect the body. A pale-green bird with a cream-colored breast, too delicate for a city bird. They saw nothing above them. No trees or obstructions, just a red fog of diffuse and muddled light.

Poor bird. Why would a bird fall out of the sky like that? It was small enough to have balanced on a single blade of straw. They knew almost nothing about the daily lives of birds, save the pigeons who scampered about, pecking at urban detritus. During mating season, the males chased the females up and down the sidewalks, hopping on, hopping off.

If they had seen the dead bird in a state of decay, they would have simply sidestepped it. But because they’d witnessed the moment it struck the ground, they felt somehow responsible, as though it were a piece of trash that had blown out of their hands.

Shouldn’t we at least put it off to the side, the woman wondered aloud.

Don’t do it, her sister warned. You don’t know what it has.

They left the body, casting a few backward glances. The brief stop made it more difficult to continue running, so they walked for a stretch. The path along the Hudson River was almost empty at that hour. A flock of seagulls bobbed on the water, penned in by a rhomboid of lamplight. A crow perched mutely on a wire.

Before the interruption, she had been telling her sister about the artist. You know, the artist. I profiled him in the magazine several years ago, she reminded her sister, when he was working on the windmill installation? Remember, I shadowed him for a week, and then we took that trip to Montauk? Now he’s back in town to install a new show in Chelsea. Some kind of sculpture—a machine.

The woman’s sister was staring at her phone. She frowned at the lit screen, typing rapidly. What is it? the woman asked, waiting. The concentration on her sister’s face made her wonder if everything was all right. What happened? Her sister finally looked up.

Oh, we ordered a mattress online and now it’s arrived.

The screech of wet bicycle brakes. Water slapping against rock. Her sister was saying, Honestly, it took us forever to decide. Weighing the environmental impact of a new foam mattress versus a used one, cost versus expediency and guilt.

A plane roared overhead, lower than normal, heading to LaGuardia, perhaps. The sky was so woolly, she imagined the runway materializing at the last minute, filling up the entire windshield. A plunge of faith before the tires hit tarmac. The pilot must have a way of knowing where the ground is, she thought. Or the plane’s apparatus must know.

What were you saying just now? her sister asked. Oh, yeah, the artist. The artist who’s coming to town. What about him? I can’t believe you’re still talking to that creep.

In a rare confluence of irregular schedules, the woman and her husband were having dinner together at home, discussing the details of his upcoming birthday party. It was an unremarkable middle-age birthday, and he didn’t want to make a fuss. A small gathering at the German beer hall, he finally decided, and friends could drop in as they wished.

So, I’ll tell everyone Wednesday, he said, because Thursday I have class and Friday I’ll be gone.

What’s on Friday? The woman looked up.

I already told you. I’m going to Connecticut with Miriam.

The woman’s phone buzzed on the table. Her sister: I Googled the dead bird.

But I can’t Wednesday, the woman said. I told that artist I’d see his installation.

Apparently migratory birds get confused by high-rises that emanate light. The storm exacerbated things.

Her husband, scraping off the dishes: Come when you’re finished, then. Can’t take that long to—

A muffled notification pinged on his phone, and he reflexively put a wet hand to his back pocket.

The one we saw could’ve been some kind of warbler. Or vireo?

Okay, don’t steal my idea, but listen to this, he said, picking up the spatula again. Office hours, but for dating.

Birds navigate by feeling the pull of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Why keep up this fake pretense that each date is somehow brand-new, virginal? Line them up. Drop-in model. Thank you, next. He was gesticulating wildly for effect.

Are you experiencing such a volume of matches on your app that you’re wishing for a more expedient model of vetting and exploiting people?

The 9/11 memorial endangers thousands of birds every year.

Very funny.

What’s the arrangement you have with Miriam now, after your little incident? I’m not judging; I’m just curious if she requires you to get tested regularly.

The birds fly around the light, unable to extricate themselves.

We said we wouldn’t talk about details.

They waste precious energy and can die of exhaustion.

And I wonder how you’ll explain to everyone why you’re spending your birthday weekend with her, not with me.

I’ll tell them my wife is very principled; she doesn’t believe in the birthday industrial complex. She believes only in radical transparency, and in emotional blackmail when it suits her.

Put homing pigeons in a dark cage, take them out to sea, and spin them around and around until they’re sick. They’ll still find their way home.

Why do you insist on going through with this?

You were the one who wanted this, not me.

I guess if you want something badly enough, you generally find a way. Throat gonorrhea be damned.

Her husband threw the dish towel on the counter and went into the other room. The woman watched him leave, and wondered whether memory had once served as a kind of homing mechanism. Pillars of light. Remembering how things used to be.

Her mother had told her, over and over, Don’t look at your phone in a dark room. It’s terrible for your eyes. If you have to read, turn on the lights. She looked over now at her husband’s sleeping form, his back turned against her. She dimmed the phone’s brightness to the lowest possible setting. She swiped through various screens but could not retain much of what she saw. Tropical storm, six-foot surge, 150 awaiting rescue. Friend struggling into skinny leather pants in a dressing room. Death toll rising. Waterlogged areas. Urgent closing date upcoming. Dear members of the media—please find attacked the early-preview invitation and other press materials. She stared at the typo. Attacked. She chuckled audibly and took a screenshot. This confrontational language slipped out of people unexpectedly, breaching the surface for oxygen. The other day, a friend wrote to say that she would defiantly be at the café—

The restaurant fan on the roof of their building revved to life. The walls shuddered; a coin on their nightstand began vibrating at an irritating frequency.

Are you kidding me? her husband said, smothering his own head with a pillow. At this fucking hour.

So he hadn’t been asleep.

I’m going to throw myself out the window. I swear to fucking God.

Ass me! they typed on accident, and the occasional Go tit! never got old. Sometimes, meaning to type Done! with her hands in the wrong home position, she typed Die! instead. She eagerly opened the email with the press materials, but before it could fully load, she suddenly remembered what she had wanted to read.

Birds and the Urban Environment: Did you know that the Miracle on the Hudson accident, in which Captain Sully had to perform an emergency landing in the Hudson River, was caused by a bird strike? A bird strike happens when one or many birds collide with a plane. Sometimes birds will be ingested into the jet engine and cause catastrophic engine failure.

Another common problem for birds is called fatal light attraction. You might not know this, but the majority of migrating birds travel at night and utilize the moon and stars for navigation. However, these days, migrating at night has become deadly. Light pollution from urban centers can work alongside fog and storms to disorient birds. Imagine being distracted while you’re trying to complete a marathon or an Ironman event! Even worse, birds often crash into reflective windows, perceiving them as a continuation of the sky. This is one reason it will sometimes “rain birds” after a storm.

Help us! Have you seen these birds?

She’d opened up another article, which mentioned the case of a strange tropical bird, with a flat, “lizard shaped” head, that could not leave Times Square. It was most likely an escaped species from a collector’s menagerie. Otherwise it had blown in from somewhere. Tourists pointed and gawked as it slammed helplessly into glass doors and flapped against the panels of glowing screens.

Still up?

Hey! Here finally?

I’m really looking forward to seeing you.

As though on cue, a pink aura—a kind of sparkling rainbow mash—appeared on the borders of her vision. She clicked her screen closed.

You don’t find instant connections easily, an elderly man on the bus had once told her, unsolicited.

Five or six times in a lifetime, that’s all.

The phone glowed again.

Will I see you at the gallery tomorrow?

Yes, of course.

Then nothing. Perhaps he was going through customs, or the reception was weak. She stared at the window expectantly. When the text came through, it was a picture of him with an inflatable travel pillow around his neck.

Was a selfie always an invitation for another selfie? Impossible in the dark, here, in bed. She could send a joke in response. Or the screenshot of the gallery’s typo. She opened her sister’s chat window to work out the text draft there, so he wouldn’t see her typing.

Who are you talking to? Please. I’m begging you. I have to get to campus early, her husband said.

My sister. I’m almost done.

We forgot to do the laundry. Tomorrow, okay?

She sent her screenshot, clicked off the phone, and shoved it under her pillow. She imagined vibrations against her ear but forced herself not to look.

This is a momentary infatuation and it will dissipate soon, she thought. I have nothing to confess.

Sweetie, you’re obsessed with being good, her friend had said once, to tease her. Secret feelings aren’t the same as actions.

In her daily life, nothing that was felt could be acted upon; what could be acted upon followed routines of inertia or necessity. To be an adult was to feel a thing and walk away from it. To feel anxiety and know its baselessness, to feel jealousy and chalk it up to insecurity. To feel the need to run out of the train, screaming, yet remain completely still, unruffled.

Her husband began snoring.

She closed her eyes and put her hand into her underwear.

Before she fell asleep, she thought about the Mandarin duck that had appeared one day in a pond in Central Park. The duck was dazzling, with high-contrast plumage reminiscent of a Peking-opera mask. Its arrival had felt like a very special occasion, like a visit from a prime minister. Now, according to the articles, the duck paddled around with the common mallards, circling idly for crumbs of bread. Visitors flocked to take its photo. Beautiful things want to be replicated, so philosophers say. Was this visitation beautiful? The unfathomable longing of this wayward bird that wakes one day in a man-made pond, alone among strangers.

The woman spent most of the next morning in bed. In the middle of the night, the artist had sent an audio file—no subject, no body, just a recording of himself playing scales on the guitar. Higher, faster, changing keys, breaking off into riffs and climaxes. The file had gone on for 10 minutes. She hadn’t understood his intention, but her gut had kicked so violently that she’d had to take several shits.

After she’d listened to the file, she’d dug around online for his past interviews, trying to summon his actual voice. She’d found a short documentary on public television, but the green of his shirt had put her off. Next, she’d scrolled through Google Image search, looking for new pictures, then the tagged photos on his social-media profile, and had found one of him looking at the camera with a dreamy, postcoital expression. She had masturbated to this and now she was late, speed-walking to the gallery.

She was sweaty in the unseasonable humidity, and her hair was wilting. She could feel the sting of salt in the fresh wound in the corner of her mouth. Getting ready, she’d picked at a patch of dead skin until it bled.

Miriam just picked up the cake! Can’t wait to see you all!

She approached the gallery and saw a block of text pasted on the white wall at the entrance. Underneath was his name in big black lettering.

APORIA
PETER FANG-CAPRA

Inside, workers on ladders with buckets of black paint were brushing an enormous contraption of pneumatic valves and tubes and elbows. She saw him up there, craning his neck and pointing a finger along a ribbed piece that linked to a mechanical lung. The artist looked the way she’d remembered … perhaps more diminutive.

Her voice was lost in the din. Hey, do you guys need some help?

He climbed down from the ladder.

Look who’s here, at the very end of the day.

She stiffened in his embrace.

I thought you would show up earlier. Come. We tried to save some of the work so you could see.

Gripping her forearm, he led her underneath some scaffolding, and they stood before a maze of freshly oiled pieces, on a blue tarp, that had yet to be lifted into the sculpture. He gestured toward a metal chamber. An organ? The apparatus seemed to follow the logic of utility, but if one looked closely, the structure had no observable function. Where things ended or began was impossible to say. Head, tail, mouth, or anus. She took out her phone to take photos.

We’re here by the bathrooms. Got two tables. Taking all bier and wurst orders!

By the way, I’m sorry about that file I sent, he said. Please don’t listen to it. I play scales when I’m nervous, and it helps calm me down.

Too late. I listened to the whole thing on repeat when I went for a run this morning.

I’m so embarrassed.

You’re really good at the guitar.

Abruptly, he grabbed her by the shoulders and leaned in, his lips brushing her ear.

Don’t turn now. My gallerist is walking rapidly toward us with a very determined expression. Pretend we’re invisible. Oh God, she’s looking for me. She’s quite mad. I’ll have to be right back.

She watched as he danced off to intercept a tall, finely dressed woman. They retreated into a back office and closed the door behind them.

The woman looked again at her phone.

dang you dense girl
homeboy turning up the charm so you’ll write a good review
that simple
heard a thing or two about him
be careful kk love

Alone, the woman tried to look preoccupied and circled the machine, as though studying its craftmanship. She had long reached the end of her observations. She took out her phone again, scrolled through her email, and opened up the press materials.

“Is my death possible?” asks Jacques Derrida in Aporias. How can one experience that which is impossible to experience? In this new sculptural work, Fang-Capra asks whether the future itself is aporetic, a pipe dream or a mirage. Materials of modernity comprise this convoluted structure; discourses of biopolitical and emotional disaster are limned by discarded pipes and sheet metal. What would a machine of the impossible look like? The enfolding tensions of late capitalism are shaped into a coherent yet discomfiting whole.

She went outside and walked toward the corner bodega. Once there, she bought a can of seltzer and considered the bodega’s neon display of CBD gummies. An LED sign flashed:

HELLO VAPE WORLD
MILE HIGH CLUB
ITS YOUR YEAR
YEAR TO QUIT

She bought a pack of regular cigarettes and looked for a socially sanctioned place to smoke.

I’m an analog kind of girl too, said a blue-haired woman who was also smoking in the piss-scented alleyway. They exhaled their respective clouds of combustion and pulled their arms more tightly around themselves.

She nodded. We evolved around the communal fire; think about that.

She didn’t like to inhale too deeply anymore.

Hey babe. Ordered u a yummy fleischsalat.

She finished her cigarette and went back inside the gallery. Two other writers she recognized had also come to preview the installation. She waved hello and approached them, catching the last fragments of their conversation.

Dude must have paid a shit ton to ship all this metal. Wonder how he harvested these car parts.

Probably dispatched a crew of interns to a Third World junkyard, then mobilized another crew to receive them in Berlin, where they breathed toxic fumes and shaved off years of their life for vague proximity to art-world fame.

That envy talking? I’m feeling a takedown coming.

A slammed door.

The artist walked out, shouting, Yes, yes, I know. See you at breakfast. Good luck.

The two critics congratulated him, patting him amiably. Thank you, thank you, the artist said, shaking his head. All of you are much too kind.

Everything okay? She asked.

They really need me to get dinner with this Saudi prince. A collector they’re courting.

Don’t you have to go? Big payday, no?

There are so many princes. Can’t keep track of them all.

Hey, you. Aren’t you taking me somewhere? He suddenly prodded her, as though they had been interrupted mid-conversation. Aren’t you taking me out for a drink to talk nuts and bolts and hammered grommets?

Her phone lit up in her palm.

Cake is about to have a meltdown, lol. When u coming????

Only if now’s a good time for you …

No no, she protested, typing fast.

Honey don’t wait for me

She looked up.

Seriously. Do you have somewhere to be?

The cab driver turned north onto the West Side Highway. I can’t stand these screens, the artist said, jabbing at the mounted tablet in front of them. What trash. The touch screen was desensitized with a filmy layer of grease, the cumulative tapping of many dirty hands. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. he said, pressing hard. The sound muted, he settled back into his seat and turned toward her. His hands floated up and down his legs.

Everyone wants your attention, she said. Royalty, technology. How do you manage?

Yes. I do need to get away from it all. He sighed in a melodramatic way. Well, that’s the life of a world-famous artist.

Another one of his jokes. She cracked a smile.

Don’t I manage to give you my undivided attention?

Not really, she said. But I don’t expect it from you.

He mimed a punctured heart and smiled that winning smile.

It might not appear as such, he said, but I’m an insanely jealous person. I am very aware of this flaw in myself. I don’t like to have any distractions.

He pulled her closer.

What have you been thinking about? Ever since you arrived, your mind seems elsewhere.

He was smiling even more broadly now, and she was smiling, and they were both smiling at each other like two dumb dogs. A wide, shit-eating grin is how someone would have described it. Had her mouth ever stretched this wide. Had she ever felt this turned on. Had anything ever been this real.

He licked his lips. She could see a coating of white at the corners of his mouth, the kind of thick saliva that accrues after too many drugs, or too much talking and not enough water. She pulled slightly away but he grabbed her chin and held it fast as he worked his mouth up and down her neck. Eventually he settled on a spot above her collarbone, attaching and sucking, round and full, like a lamprey on aquarium glass.

It hurt a bit; her eyes fluttered open. Behind his head, next to the rear window, was a message for her.

Where are you?

More and more, whenever she sees a flash of blue—a blue sheet of paper, a framed square of sky—she mistakes it for her phone. Electricity jolts through her entire body.

This time, the dangling seat-belt buckle had reflected the blue from the Chelsea Piers sign.

Yesterday, I was reading about birds, she wanted to say. That’s what I was doing. Have you ever thought about how a bird is like a kind of machine?

One clammy hand was already under her shirt, flicking her nipple through her bra. The other hand crawled up her thigh, a thumb pushing against the nub of her clit.

Birds are automatons with a repertoire of preprogrammed behavior. They do everything by instinct. Fly, feed, migrate, mate. An osprey will return to nest in the same place even if it happens to be in the middle of a traffic intersection. A guinea fowl accustomed to flat terrain won’t know to fly over a low mesh fence to get to the other side. It may simply keep running into the barrier, over and over again.

You’re ready for this, he moaned. You’re so ready.

A bird hardly knows what it’s in love with. A baby cuckoo will push the other baby birds out of the nest, and the parents will keep feeding the parasitic chick. Goslings will bond with whatever moving thing they see in their first minutes of life. I once saw a pigeon guard its nest while its dead mate lay nearby.

I’ll be there soon.

I’ll be late.

I’ll be so late I won’t arrive.

Let’s have a drink on the roof at your place, she could say. See the tops of the trees in Central Park. Birds congregate there because there’s little other refuge for miles around, to land, to rest …

Don’t wait up for me.

Imagine the sheer density in that sliver of green.

The driver coughed a few times. She opened her eyes and saw, as they idled at a light, a spectacle of starlings feasting on a fried chicken wing from the garbage. She wanted to look away. Their adaptivity made them repulsive. They could use their intelligence for problem-solving. They could eat anything and live anywhere. They could learn new habits of being.

Midtown was fading in the rearview mirror, a cloud of light rising above Times Square. Dots of pink and white, flashing, scintillating.

Dizzy with desire, she gazed up at the camera flashes, at the neon tickers. She struggled against the car door, her forehead knocking against glass. He was shoving her out of the cab and through the revolving doors of the hotel.

Upstairs, the hotel room was rimmed with glass. She felt the whoosh and boom of being orbited on all sides by a monsoon of light. She approached the window.

Isn’t it curious how people always want to be high up and have a bird’s-eye view of things? As if we can’t see what we’re doing down there every single day.

Looking down, she thought of a woodcock, with its large, depthless eyes that see better behind than ahead. In her mind’s eye, she saw the patch of field by the schoolyard, where pink-and-white clover grew. Decades ago, she had lost herself in them, pinching stems to string into a necklace. She remembered the green grass, the blue sky, the brown mud, her teacher’s face looming suddenly so close to hers, asking, What do you see? She’d pointed. The iridescent blue of a butterfly’s wing. The woodcock lies quietly on the sidewalk, paralyzed, its neck snapped in two. The heels of commuters click busily around it.

But I will learn to adapt, the woman thought. I will be a city bird.

By anointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Napoleon-style, Donald Trump revealed a longing to seize one of America’s most romantic and abiding myths: Camelot. Nothing would be better than to appropriate the elegant and sparkling aura of cultural influence that came to characterize John F. Kennedy’s administration—hopeful, attractive, even sexy. And if the liberal elites refuse to see Trump this way, his actions seem to be saying, then he’ll just have to create his own version, MAGAlot.

Trump’s interests seem to flicker depending on the day—yesterday owning Gaza, today invading Canada—but when it comes to culture, he is all in. This is not a job to outsource to Elon Musk. He is most engaged when issuing executive orders calling for “beautiful” and “classical” architecture in federal buildings or reviving his idea for a National Garden of American Heroes (where the stony likenesses of Humphrey Bogart, Kobe Bryant, Antonin Scalia, and Shirley Temple will congregate for all eternity), and especially when promising to turn his showman’s instincts toward transforming the Kennedy Center—to “make art great again,” as the newly appointed interim president of the center put it.

To the extent that Trump’s cultural designs offer a coherent vision, it shares his larger ambition to restore the country to a “golden age” (and a gilded one). In usurping control of Washington’s premier cultural institution, the annual bestower of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors (the closest America has to knighthood), he appears set on rebuilding Camelot in his own image.

But if Trump is trying to follow, or supplant, JFK, he is missing an important aspect of how the earlier president understood culture: not as a blunt instrument to be wielded for ideological or personal gain, but as a natural resource to tap for the long-term benefit of America’s image. Just as Trump is discovering that imperialism is a bigger lift in the 21st century than it was in the 19th, he is bound to learn that the unruly organism of American culture exists to be propagated, not tamed.

Even Camelot was only Camelot in the rearview mirror: King Arthur’s legendary medieval court was first invoked by Jackie Kennedy in the days after her husband’s assassination, as a way to begin shaping his legacy. In an interview with Life magazine, she paraphrased from the then-popular Alan Jay Lerner musical: “Don’t let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot.”

[Read: The Trump world order]

There was some substance behind the grieving widow’s spin. The Kennedys had brought the executive branch not only glamour but also a renewed emphasis on the arts. Robert Frost became the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration when he recited “The Gift Outright” on the day JFK took the oath of office. Musicians, writers, and artists were frequently, and very publicly, invited to the White House, and the historic legacy of the house itself, its art and architecture, was the subject of Jackie Kennedy’s meticulous attention. The president sent out Duke Ellington as a “jazz ambassador” on international tours. In 1963, Kennedy proposed creating a federal advisory council on the arts, an idea that would find its expression in the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. He was emphatic about the value of cultural patronage, saying in a speech after the death of Frost that he envisioned an America “which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”

Camelot had its borders, of course, and the aesthetic vision of the Kennedys, for all their youth, was still a patrician one that excluded the more jagged and challenging forms of expression emerging in the 1960s (as for his personal taste, Jackie once joked that her husband’s favorite piece of music was “Hail to the Chief”). When James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and a group of other Black artists met with Attorney General (and brother of the president) Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 to express their exasperation with the slow pace of desegregation, the conversation was famously tense, leaving RFK annoyed and Baldwin confirmed in his feeling that the quasi-royal family was out of touch.

But Kennedy’s Camelot at least tried to elevate idealism, intellectualism, and the modern elegance of a pillbox hat. What might MAGAlot bring us? The jokes about Hulk Hogan becoming a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honors were tired even before they were made. When, a week into the new regime, the comedian W. Kamau Bell wondered from the stage of the Kennedy Center, “How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?” he elicited audible groans. Trump hasn’t provided too many clues about his vision for programming beyond that it should stop being “wokey,” as he put it in a call to the new board. “I think we’re going to make it hot,” he told the group, now packed with loyalists. “And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.” The new chairman had not only declined to attend the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term; he recently admitted that he hadn’t been to a single performance there.  

What he doesn’t want is much clearer to discern: drag shows. “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP,” he posted on February 7. He seemed to be referring to a couple of drag-based events at the center that represent a minuscule fraction of programming (the institution puts on roughly 2,000 events a year). As for what he would add to the schedule, the suggestions coming from Trump world sound like one-offs that would serve the sole purpose of giving Washington’s liberal establishment the finger. Steven Bannon wants to see the J6 Prison Choir, made up of men who had been jailed for attacking the Capitol on January 6, perform on opening night.

Trump does have his own neo-Baroque aesthetic: The Village People, Luciano Pavarotti, the grand chandelier he envisions hanging from the ceiling of the Oval Office. But these personal flourishes—like his desire to pave the Rose Garden to more closely resemble his patio at Mar-a-Lago—seem to have little chance of trickling down into the culture at large. Trump’s effect on the culture cannot be easily sussed out from a programming guide or a glance at the gold figurine recently screwed into a molding at the White House. He has been more effective at glorifying and encouraging a style of meanness, which appears in unlikely places but is easy to hear if you’re listening for it. Even Kendrick Lamar flaunted this style by making a diss track the focus and theme of his Super Bowl halftime show.

Read: Trump takes over the Kennedy Center

The most recent president to attempt the Camelot thing was Barack Obama, who elevated American art forms like jazz and hip-hop in ways meant to show that inclusiveness and excellence were not mutually exclusive. Stevie Wonder and Lin-Manuel Miranda would drop by the White House. Philip Roth was given a National Humanities Medal. And Barack and Michelle would happily bop to Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors. But how much did this presidential boosterism influence the culture and the artists who make it? Obama’s regular book picks and Spotify playlists have come to seem, in his post-presidency, slightly self-indulgent and cringey. The overall effect is of professional curation designed to be respectfully broad (a little country, a little indie rock), while not veering toward blandness. The Obamas have always understood the potency of culture, which helps explain their move, in recent years, toward making it themselves; but despite the occasional Netflix documentary production credit, it’s harder to say that they have set an enduring agenda.

MAGAlot seems even less likely to shift the culture of the arts in any concrete way. This might be, in part, because Trump’s ambition misses what made Camelot matter: The Kennedy administration’s true legacy was the advancement of American soft power in service of real global policy goals. Just as Kennedy created USAID and the Peace Corps in part to showcase American abundance and goodwill, he deployed cultural influence to demonstrate, during the most intense period of the Cold War, that the U.S.-led vision of the world was just cooler than the rest. At one point, in 1962, he even sent Robert Frost to the Soviet Union, where he met with other poets, gave readings, and had a tête-à-tête with Nikita Khrushchev. Cultivating attractive, dynamic American arts, whether spaghetti Westerns or Broadway musicals, accrued long-term strategic benefits to the United States—and it still does. But reaping those benefits requires supporting people who make culture without dictating what that culture should look like.

Trump would find this hard. His zero-sum view of the world affords little patience for the churn and friction and provocation that actually makes for good art. He wants to be the minister of culture mostly because it’s the quickest way to upset his detractors, to pave over the rose gardens of generations past—and because, I imagine, the thought of a North Korean–style glorification of his rule pleases him. But after the drag shows are banned and the J6 chorus has had a chance to sing its “Justice for All” at the Kennedy Center, he may well discover what other aspiring authoritarian leaders have in the past—that culture is not easily bent. And when it is, it usually snaps back with force.