The Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts

On the one hand, it isn’t hard to imagine who’d be the most unqualified person on the planet to become chairman of a significant performing arts center. Yep. That would be the artistically impaired bloviated Gadfly in Chief, Donald J. Trump. On the other hand, his questionable appointment would be 100% consistent with his exceptionally unqualified cabinet picks in Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel, now running our military, intelligence agencies, public health agencies, and the FBI with highly questionable skillsets.

Shortly after the Orange Blob in Chief appointed 14 new Kennedy Center trustees, on February 12 the new board elected Trump as Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, replacing Bush appointee David M. Rubenstein. Having served as president of the Kennedy Center since 2014, now former president Deborah Rutter is also out of a job.

As Trump continues his blizzard of branding, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, an aide inside the White House has leaked that Trump is now considering renaming the Kennedy Center eponymously as the Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts. The aide said, “The president mentioned the name change while he was also signing an executive order to change the name French fries to American fries.”

Some of you, dear readers, might recall that back in 2003, there was a movement to call that lunchtime staple, “Freedom fries.” It was a political term used in protest of France's opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The fries even showed up on the menu in the Congressional cafeteria.

Now living in a world that doesn’t require evidence, in fact, rails against it, seeing things through the same lens that our current President looks through to see his world, all my reporting is uniquely camouflaged as the truth.

The culturally constipated Donald Trump said, “So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn't like what they were showing and various other things…I'm going to be chairman of it, and we're going to make sure that it's good, and it's not going to be woke.”

Suffice it to say, don’t expect to see a production of “Hamilton” playing at the Center any time soon. And You probably also won’t catch any production of “Porgy and Bess” in the foreseeable future. Good thing The Apollo Theater already received Kennedy Center special honors in 2024 as an iconic American institution.

In addition to the Kennedy Center’s prestigious programming, the Acropolis of the Arts highlights "a spectrum of many skills within the performing arts." Honorees include actors, musicians, and artists for their lifetime contributions to American culture.

A few of the past Kennedy Center HONOREES include Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, James Cagney, Lucille Ball, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, Billy Wilder, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Mel Brooks, Lorne Michaels, Berry Gordy, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, George Abbott, Johnny Carson, Sesame Street, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Isaac Stern, Richard Rodgers, songwriting duo Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Beverly Sills, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Smokey Robinson, Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell, Tina Turner, Tony Bennett, Bruce Springsteen, Linda Ronstadt, and members of Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Eagles, Earth, Wind and Fire, and the Grateful Dead.

Trump also told reporters that he had never been to a show at the Kennedy Center because "there was nothing I wanted to see." When someone has a cultural vacuum filling the center portion of his brain, wonderful symphonies, operas, ballet, alternative dance, and top-shelf Broadway shows, understandably don’t spark interest in his vacuous head.

Former chair Deborah Rutter described the Kennedy Center this way: “The Kennedy Center is, by congressional mandate, the national cultural center. And we have a mandate from 1958 that calls for it to be the national performing art center and the national advocate for arts education. In 1964, they added the living memorial to John F. Kennedy. So, this is more than just the local performing art center. It represents America to the world, and it invites the world to our nation's capital to be a showcase for all of the arts.”

John F. Kennedy, our 35^th President, for whom this performing arts center was named, delivered his last speech at Amherst College One month before his assassination. He was celebrating the life of Robert Frost. His words and actions will forever stand in stark contrast to the words and deeds of our bloviated artistically oblivious 47^th President.

“I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens.” JFK

One can only wonder if the Center will maintain its June 11, 2025 SCHEDULED kick-off with “Les Misérables,” since it features a convict who raises a young girl after her unwed mother dies. Questionable family values, eh?

In the Mean Time, catch the musical “The Book of Moron,” directed by Elon Musk, soon to be playing at the Center all year round. That is, of course, assuming you can tolerate Village People music being piped into the lobby of the Kennedy Center as you enter its doors.

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