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President Donald Trump announced the last of his appointees to the Kennedy Center board on Friday, naming Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo to the panel.
“We look forward to restoring the Center to Greatness, and ushering in America’s Golden Age,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social about their appointments.
Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center has prompted a number of artists to cut ties with the institution, many of whom have cited his changes as the reason for their departure. Most recently, the creators of the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” announced that the show will pull out of a scheduled run next year, a decision that provoked the ire of the center’s interim president, Richard Grenell.
The appointments of Ingraham and Bartiromo complete Trump’s overhaul of the institution’s traditionally bipartisan board to one that is staunchly conservative. The Kennedy Center’s board members now include second lady Usha Vance; White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and her mother, Cheri Summerall; White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino; country singer Lee Greenwood; first lady Melania Trump’s former White House adviser Pamela Gross; and the spouses of his megadonors and business allies.
Like other members of the board, Ingraham and Bartiromo are Trump loyalists. Ingraham, who hosts “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News, has peddled the “great replacement” theory and spread unfounded claims about the Covid-19 vaccine and the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Bartiromo, whose promotion of election fraud conspiracy theories has been cited as evidence in defamation lawsuits against Fox News, is known for her softball interviews with Trump. After he lost re-election in 2020, she landed Trump’s first post-election media interview, during which she allowed him to air a stream of false and unfounded claims without pushback.