Culture

Trump's Failed Kennedy Center Takeover Shows Why Art and Government Don't Mix

The president's remedy for a "woke" Kennedy Center was to replace one alleged strain of ideological capture with another.

Billy Binion | 6.5.2026 3:41 PM

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(Illustration: Jeremy Bigwood/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom/Midjourney)

When President Donald Trump announced a takeover of the Kennedy Center last year, he explained it was to combat a specific sort of political and cultural rot. "We don't need woke at the Kennedy Center," he said in February 2025 aboard Air Force One. "Some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on. So I'll be there until such time as it gets to be running right."

Or did he mean running Right? The president's recent reversal, in response to a federal judge's ruling that the Kennedy Center had been illegally renamed after Trump, provides an instructive window into the answer.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper also issued a preliminary injunction against the impending two-year closure, because the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees had "neglected to consider the full range of its statutory obligations," he wrote, although he did not preclude repairs from continuing or a future lawful closure. Kennedy Center lawyers on Thursday directed employees to remove Trump's name from "email signatures, email communications, letterhead, website, brochures, promotional materials, press releases, signs, references in........

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