More than any president in memory, Donald Trump is attuned to aesthetics.
This should scarcely come as a surprise, given that Trump is our first builder-turned-president. In his previous vocation as a real estate developer, Trump became familiar with the things that make a building more than merely functional but surpassingly beautiful. One senses that he is accustomed to evaluating marble, conversant in matters of flooring, and comfortable in issuing judgment on fabric swatches.
Consequently, Trump’s seemingly left-field involvement in the management of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts should not be regarded as a random act of agitation but a substantial addition to his core agenda. Having spent his life overseeing the development and construction of buildings that are, by his lights, pleasing to visit or inhabit, Trump has a sure sense of what he likes. Curb appeal, beautification, and the importance of décor — these are not alien concepts to the 47th president. It is no accident that among Trump’s first executive actions was the issuance of a memorandum to “advance the policy that Federal public buildings … respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” Somewhere, Tom Wolfe, who excoriated modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House, is smiling.
Trump even couches some of his most famous policies in aesthetic terms. For the decade or so he has been in the political arena, he has long promised not merely to build a wall on the southern border but “a big, beautiful wall.” He has spoken of the “waterfront property” potential of certain stretches of North Korea. By the same token, Trump’s opposition to windmills and LED lightbulbs is seemingly grounded in their objectionable aesthetics: He considers the former a blight on the landscape and the latter to emit insufficiently inviting light.
Far more than most utilitarian-minded politicians, Trump knows whether he considers something beautiful or ugly. This is especially true in the realm of arts and entertainment. The consistency of his musical tastes is astonishing: Trump has a marked preference for lush, extravagantly orchestrated popular music on the order of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera or the Andrea Bocelli–Sarah Brightman ballad “Time to Say Goodbye,” the latter of which was first on Trump’s golf-cart playlist as disclosed during his wonderfully entertaining interview with golfer Bryson DeChambeau last summer. Even many of Trump’s signature hits during his rallies have an opulent quality distinct from many trends in popular music: Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” the Rolling Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and Queen’s “We Are the Champions” are not mere songs but epically overproduced sonic extravaganzas that reflect the bigger-than-life tastes of their favorite listener. That Trump also expresses enthusiasm for Kid Rock is likely a concession to the singer-rapper’s political support. It is far easier to picture Trump soaking in Puccini’s aria “Nessun dorma,” as he did during the Republican National Convention last summer.
It is in this spirit that we should consider Trump’s palace revolution at the Kennedy Center, whose leadership he deposed in favor of a Trump-sympathetic board, with the commander in chief as its chair and Ric Grenell as its president. One can easily imagine Trump surveying the performing arts complex on the Potomac and judging its offerings to be severely wanting. Of course, the president is right to wonder why drag shows are being held at the venue, but if he looked at much of its programming from 2024, he would have found plenty of other ways in which it disappoints.
Last March, the Kennedy Center hosted the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s cynical discourse on married life, Company — with its central character performed not by a man, as the composer-lyricist first conceived, but by a woman. Hasn’t Broadway heard that gender fluidity is on its way out? Then, last April, “Here It Is: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen” was presented — perfect for baby boomers and those who lamented Trump’s election (and reelection) by grimly singing “Hallelujah.” The next month was vocalist Patti LuPone, famous for her soaring voice but also for excoriating maskless theatergoers during COVID-19. The last program was presented as part of the concert series “Renee Fleming Voices,” but since the soprano for which the series was named has departed her perch in the Trump-era Kennedy Center, perhaps we will be spared return engagements by pandemic-era scolds. As for the “Women’s Equality Day Power Up Concert” (last August), the performance by the National Symphony Orchestra at the National Institutes of Health (September, but billed, cringingly, as an annual event), and an in-person conversation with celebrity chef Ina Garten of the Food Network (October), is this really the best the Kennedy Center can do?
Not being a resident of the Beltway, I readily concede that I did not see any of these programs. In fact, I have never been to the Kennedy Center. But from my years as a working critic in the Midwest, I have ample firsthand experience with the intrusion of left-wing politics, woke revisionism, and pure and simple bad ideas in art. From where I sit, we can do better than a feminism-inflected version of an operatic masterpiece by Puccini, contemporary ballet that trades elegant choreography for movement I once described as akin to a “traffic jam,” and a production of Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 satirical operetta Candide in which Trump was, unaccountably but all too predictably, depicted as a character onstage — all of which I have personally seen, mostly to my chagrin. Such preachy, doctrinaire, often repellant art may be made to draw attention to this or that social issue, but it is surely not produced to entertain. That leaves in the cold those of us for whom entertainment is the primary function of art — you know, ordinary people like Trump and me.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Grenell promised to supplant present Kennedy Center programming with “big productions that the masses and the public want to see.” He spoke of a production this coming December that would celebrate the birth of Christ. “How crazy is it to think that we’re going to celebrate Christ at Christmas with a big traditional production to celebrate what we are all celebrating in the world during Christmastime, which is the birth of Christ,” Grenell said. It is easy to see why such a program would appeal to the New Yorker Trump, who surely has taken in more than one Christmas Spectacular at the Radio City Music Hall. It is even easier to imagine that such a program would be more broadly popular than the sort of fare that has evidently been the stock-in-trade of the Kennedy Center.
In the final analysis, the Kennedy Center is small potatoes — a venue of symbolic importance that is largely irrelevant to the vast swath of the nation that resides somewhere other than Washington, D.C. All the same, conservatives with any connection to the arts should take advantage of the lane created by Trump’s unlikely intercession in the Kennedy Center, and they should take heart by the quickness with which various liberals associated with, or engaged to perform at, the center abandoned their posts, including soprano Fleming, Ben Folds, and Issa Rae. For owners and operators of performing arts venues with a smidgen of courage and even the slightest sense of the public mood, there is room not only for Christmas productions that reflect Christian doctrine but also for operas that honor the intentions of their composers, symphony concerts that present majestic music without references to social issues, and broadly appealing but apolitical musical artists of the sort preferred by Trump.
Conservatives sometimes act as though the great art forms — opera, classical music, movies, painting, and sculpture — are destined to be the domain of liberals. Unquestionably, left-wing, woke, and pretentiously out-of-touch artists dominate these forms, but there is nothing inherent in the forms themselves that says this must be so. For proof, we need look no further than the relatively recent past. A mere 70 or 80 years ago, modern composers were not minimalist bores like Philip Glass and Arvo Part but great artists who trafficked in unashamed Americana, such as Aaron Copland and Morton Gould. Similarly, there was a time when the biggest hit on Broadway was not a girl-power remix of The Wizard of Oz but the pro-God, pro-family, pro-country corpus of Rodgers and Hammerstein (Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music). Once, the controversy in Hollywood was not whether or not a lousy movie in support of the trans movement (Emilia Perez) would survive the controversial tweets of its star but which of the following patriotic, literate, or reverent movies would win best picture: The Best Years of Our Lives, Henry V, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Razor’s Edge, or The Yearling? (As it happens, The Best Years of Our Lives rightly walked away with the prize in 1947.) From the 1930s through the mid-’60s, Hollywood honored the values of the nation by voluntarily mandating the Production Code, the revival of which would require no legislative action but simply enough offended parents willing to write in. If Trump’s so-called “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, and Jon Voight, want to do good for their industry and the public it influences, they should commit to making exclusively G- or PG-rated movies — as did, implicitly, the great movie stars of the past who worked under the code.
Opera companies today might seem hopelessly woke, but in 1951, NBC premiered and broadcast an original opera on a Christian theme, Amahl and the Night Visitors. The contemporary art world seems equally beholden to the postmodern, offensive, or otherwise incomprehensible, as evinced by the unaccountable attention received by the likes of Jenny Holzer and Marina Abramovic, but infinitely more popular in their heyday were traditionalists like John Singer Sargent, Andrew Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell. Temperamentally conservative novelists like Herman Wouk, Saul Bellow, and John Updike were far more influential than the present bestselling anti-Trump blowhard Stephen King.
These examples from our common cultural heritage prove that the Left’s hold on the arts need not amount to a permanent victory.
Has Trump ever read The Caine Mutiny or seen The Best Years of Our Lives? Probably not. But the president, with his innate sense of what is pleasing to look at or listen to, recognizes that stages are going to be filled, and they can either be filled with a drag show or a celebration of the birth of Christ. Past Republican presidents were content to dawdle on tax cuts and entitlement reform, but Trump, understanding that the values of America are communicated through its art and entertainment, has instead sought to impose his fairly common and generally decent tastes on popular culture. In making such quick work of the Kennedy Center, Trump has awakened a sleeping giant: the silent majority of Americans who prefer their art to align with their values and those of their nation. Just as conservatives turned up at movie theaters to support the Top Gun sequel or Sound of Freedom, they will again occupy concert halls, museums, and galleries that offer something more robust, inspiring, and wholesome than the self-involved woke dreck that has been on offer for so long.
Trump alone cannot make American art great again — that is, unless we are prepared for an endless loop of “Y.M.C.A.” and “God Bless the USA” — but his takeover of the Kennedy Center is a good start that could inspire a movement. To quote one of the president’s favorite pieces of music, it’s “time to say goodbye” to the woke, the ugly, and the dumb in our arts.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.