After announcing he will close the Kennedy Center for two years in his capacity as chairman of its board, President Trump must have assumed he’d owned the liberals who once frequented events there. No more opera for you, wokerati! (A shame to miss out on “Cats,” though…) Anyway, he’d thrown down the gauntlet—and the final curtain.

But pro-democracy patrons of the arts have so many other concerns today: the shooting of protestors in Minneapolis, immigrant children being detained in record numbers, voting rolls seized in Georgia, intimations of possible kinetic action against Iran. A “time out” for the Kennedy Center is more of a problem for Trump than his adversaries.

Because at its core, the shutdown is to cover up the sad truth that Trump has strangled the Kennedy Center. They can’t sell tickets, and artists won’t play ball. “Anybody that anybody wants to see isn’t willing to perform,” noted Elaine Kamarck, director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings, adding that the closure is about “face-saving.”

“The closing of the Kennedy Center is singularly and solely to stop the bleeding,” one of its longtime event producers told the Daily Beast. “Yes, it’s an older building........

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