Placing government authority over cultural institutions yields outcomes that are visible in practice. When President Donald Trump announced an effort to seize control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last year, he insisted he was striking at a particular kind of cultural rot affecting the Washington, D.C., venue. “We can do without the ‘woke’ agenda at the Kennedy Center,” he proclaimed in early 2025. “I will remain there until it operates properly.”
The pledge did not endure; by May 2026, a federal judge ruled that renaming the center after Trump had been unlawful. In his attempt to cure the so-called woke Kennedy Center, he replaced one alleged form of political capture with another.
The institution occupies a gray zone where public funding and private influence intersect. Taxpayers cover the costs of building maintenance, day-to-day operations, security, and repairs, while private donors and ticket sales constitute the primary sources supporting programming. Initially known as the National Cultural Center, the venue was renamed by Congress in 1964 to honor President John F. Kennedy after his assassination. Memorials to former presidents are not unusual, yet naming an arts institution after a politician—and using taxpayer money to establish it—was itself a political act.
Trump is an unusual figure. Yet he has, in a caricatured way, shown what can occur when the public sector gains control over something that is fundamentally a private enterprise. The vast majority of Americans will never set foot inside the “national cultural center.” Why are they paying for it, and why should someone like Trump have any say over its fate?
The takeover proved predictably disastrous. Ticket sales plummeted, artists canceled performances en masse, and donations reportedly declined. “It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center,” Washington National Opera artistic director Francesca Zambello, who said donor confidence had “shattered,” told The Guardian last year. “But if we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets there, we have to consider other options.” The company departed from the Kennedy Center soon after.
In August 2025, at the height of the takeover, Parade arrived at the Kennedy Center. The musical recounts the story of Leo Frank, a man who historians widely agree was wrongly convicted of murder. After his death sentence was commuted to life in prison, he was lynched by vigilantes.
Parade was relocated from the opera house—twice the size of the theater it moved to—into the center’s Eisenhower Theater amid weak ticket sales. The production offers a powerful examination of antisemitism, media malpractice, racial dynamics in the South, and tribalism—the kind of intricate tale that is designed to transcend partisan divides. At Trump’s Kennedy Center, it drew a sparsely attended crowd.
