President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that he is planning to shut down the Kennedy Center for two years for construction in order to ensure the institution achieves “the highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur.”
We should be skeptical of the purpose of the announcement. In all likelihood, this is Trump’s attempt to save face after his decision to add his name to the performing arts center has elicited unrelenting, humiliating backlash.
Trump has conveniently put an end to the growing tally of boycotting artists.
The Kennedy Center was named a “living memorial” to President John. F. Kennedy by Congress after his assassination, and for decades, it has enjoyed a reputation as an august performing arts institution above the fray of partisan politics. But it has been in a tailspin ever since Trump stacked its board with loyalists, attempted to alter its programming based on political preferences and narcissistically added his name into the title of the center, deeming it “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Top officials have quit. Attendance at the National Symphony Orchestra, which performs up to 150 times a year at the center, is reportedly down 50% compared to last year. And perhaps most significantly, one artist after another has canceled their agreed-upon performances there in protest to Trump’s attempt to commandeer the institution.
Last week, the prominent composer Philip Glass canceled the Kennedy Center debut of a long-awaited symphony he wrote honoring Abraham Lincoln. “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony,” he wrote in a letter asking the National Symphony Orchestra to not play his new work.
Earlier in January, the Washington National Opera announced it would move its performances out of the center — where it has played since 1971, when the center opened. The opera’s announcement came shortly after banjoist Béla Fleck withdrew from concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra, and Stephen Schwartz, the composer of “Wicked,” said he wouldn’t host a May gala there. The Washington Post is keeping a running list of cancellations, and it is not short. Trump has conveniently put an end to the growing tally of boycotting artists by suddenly announcing that he’s shuttering the center so he can really spruce it up. He has offered no details other than to say the center would see “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.” The New York Times reports that even though Trump has discussed altering the Kennedy Center since his first weeks in office, “there had been no public discussion of anything as drastic as a full two-year shutdown.” Some Democratic lawmakers are also questioning Trump’s authority to shutter the center without Congress’ approval. Unsurprisingly, this has all the hallmarks of a desperate Trumpian pivot. Trump perhaps thinks he can “win” this culture war by radically altering the architecture of the Kennedy Center, which underwent a $250 million renovation just seven years ago. Perhaps it’ll echo Trump’s tacky White House renovation, which, as my colleague Hayes Brown points out, has diverged sharply from historical norms in its scale, speed and lack of transparency. That would allow Trump to leave his mark on Washington while circumventing at least two years of cancellations-as-protests and, theoretically, begin afresh with a new slate of committed performers who are amenable to rubber stamping his propaganda efforts. Trump’s retreats have never proven to be a sign of his being humbled, but instead an opportunity to regroup and find some new way to degrade whatever he controls.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. 
