Trump confirmed as chairman of Kennedy Center as part of plan to end ‘woke’ performances
The board of Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Wednesday to confirm President Trump as its chairman.
“It is a Great Honor to be Chairman of The Kennedy Center, especially with this amazing Board of Trustees,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We will make The Kennedy Center a very special and exciting place!”
Shortly after Trump was confirmed at the center, musician Ben Folds announced he was resigning his position as artist advisor to its National Symphony Orchestra.
“Given developments at the Kennedy Center, effective today I am resigning as artistic advisor to the NSO,” Folds wrote in a statement. “Not for me.”
Trump announced last week he would buck decades of bipartisanship at the Kennedy Center, which is both publicly and privately funded, and push out presidentially appointed trustees from the Biden era.
These holdovers “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” Trump said.
The president has accused the landmark national arts complex of being too “woke” and has taken issue with recent events featuring performers in drag.
“We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center,” Trump told reporters this week.
“Some of the shows were terrible, a disgrace that they were even put on,” he added, though he noted he didn’t actually attend any of the events he took issue with.
Last week, Kennedy Center leaders appeared blindsided by Trump’s moves to take over leadership of the arts institution.
“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,” the center said in a statement. “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.”
Programming at the center is expected to shift under Trump to be more appealing to conservatives, sources told CBS News, and an acknowledgement that the center is "standing on the traditional land" of the Nacotchtank and Piscataway tribes is expected to be removed from the institution’s website.
The Kennedy Center board is now made up entirely of Trump appointees, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, longtime aide Dan Scavino, and Second Lady of the U.S. Usha Vance.
During his first term, Trump refused to attend the Kennedy Center Honors, an annual ceremony celebrating lifetime achievements in American culture, after some attendees signaled they would boycott the festivities over Trump’s lukewarm denunciation of white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville.
The center has long been a site of U.S. cultural diplomacy, and played host to historic Cold War visits from Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet and Cuba’s Ballet Nacional.
Trump’s changes to the Kennedy Center are part of the new administration’s larger campaign against “wokeness,” a catchall it uses to describe everything from protections for transgender people, to curriculum describing the history of racism in the U.S., to corporate and government programs centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
The administration has ordered all federal agencies to terminate DEI programs, calling them “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”