Updated on February 7, 2025 at 4:30 p.m.

Artists embarrassed Donald Trump when he came to Washington for the first time. Now that Trump is back in power, he is determined not to allow that again.

Trump plans to announce the discharge of several members of the Kennedy Center Board as soon as a group that will probably include the youngest representative of former President Joe Biden. Among those in the current board are the democratic political strategist Mike Donilon, the former press spokesman for the White House, Karine Jean-Pierre, and the Financial Chair of the Democratic National Committee Chris Korge. The White House has also had discussions that Trump himself was installed as chairman of the board, two people who were familiar with the cleaning who asked for anonymity to describe plans that are not yet public.

A spokesman for the White House rejected a statement.

“The Kennedy Center has not received any formal notifications from the White House about what you have reported,” said Eileen Andrews, the Vice President of the Center for Public Relations, according to the published article.

During his first term, Trump never took part in the annual gala event of the Kennedy Center, protested against his administration as an artist and threatened to boycott the Kennedy center in the White House. Now Trump makes it clear that he is not excluded from the most famous cultural institution in Washington again.

“The attitude is different this time. The attitude is Go and fuck you“Said one of the people familiar with the planning. “It has been ridiculous for Trump and Melania for four years:” We don’t go to the Kennedy Center because Robert de Niro doesn’t like us “Event.)

Trump’s relationship with the art world has long been tense. During his first year of office, all 17 members of the Presidential Committee for Arts and Humanities, a non-partisan advice center, whose members had been appointed by President Barack Obama at that time, White-Nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump later dissolved the group instead of replacing the committee founded by Ronald Reagan.

Later this year, three of the five artists who were recognized in the annual honors of the Kennedy Center stated that they would not take part in front of the gala or would consider a boycott of the traditional reception of the White House, whereby Trump’s leadership quoted various objections . In response to this, Trump made the reception and was the first seating president who has never participated in the gala since his foundation in 1978.

Trump showed a similar lack of interest in the national medal of arts, the highest prize of the government for artists and artists that the president monitors. During his first term, Trump only distributed nine medals, including an award to the musicians of the US military. Obama had awarded 76 medals for over eight years, and Biden gave 33.

Trump was more prudent regarding the Kennedy Center and praised alternately and criticized federal financing for the institution. “You need funds. And I said, ‘Look that was a democratic request. That was not my request. But they have to give them something, ”said Trump in 2020 when they were asked as part of a Covid relief law after additional funding of $ 25 million. “The Kennedy Center, they do a nice job – an incredible job.”

Weeks later he changed his position. “I hated to take it into the bill because it is simply not appropriate,” he said about the financing.

If Trump became the chairman of the Kennedy Center Board, he would replace the Philanthrop David Rubenstein, who had held the post for 14 years, but signaled that he will continue after September 2026. A week after Trump’s second inauguration, the President of the Kennedy Center, Deborah Rutter, announced her own plans to withdraw at the end of the year.

For his second term, Trump pursues a more assertive approach to a number of cultural institutions. Within a few hours after his inauguration, he completed the Presidential Committee for Arts and Humanities, which Biden had revived in 2022, which occurred any possibility of a further resignation of masses. He then showed his own views of state -financed cultural projects.

Nine days in his second term, he signed an executive order that restored the planning for an idea from his first term: a national “garden of the American heroes” that was determined. Trump had previously chosen 244 award winners – 52 of them women – who received statues, including figures from science, sports, entertainment, politics and business and some founders of the nation. (The family of at least one potential award winner, the anti -communist Whittaker Chambers, later asked that it was not included.)

Trump also moved quickly to impose his vision on the plans for the 250th anniversary of signing the declaration of independence – July 4, 2026, also known as a semi -quincentennial. He founded a new advisory committee called Task Force 250, with which he will support the chairman of an organization financed by Congress, which has already started to plan events.

During the presidential campaign, Trump said that he wanted the Semiquincentennial celebrations more than a year from the Memorial Day 2025 – only 15 weeks away – until July 4, 2026. He suggested a “large American state mass” in Iowa as a component, a tribute to the state’s own summer mass, but pavilions from every state. He also promised the creation of a new national high school sports competition with the title The Patriot Games, which takes place next to the fair. “Together we will build it and they will come,” he said in 2023.

Trump’s newly discovered interest in the arts represents a kind of departure. In his first term, Trump repeated the funding for the National Foundation for the Arts and the National Foundation for the Humanities, two main sources of support for art and cultural programs in whole country. But the adults in the congress have overridden him, and by the end of his term, the annual financing rose easily from the beginning of his term in office at more than $ 167 million for each agency. (The number rose to 207 million US dollars during the presidency.)

This time Trump asked the chairs of both the arts and the humanities to connect Task Force 250. She is confident that Trump’s interest in the 250th celebration will provide a “very good lifeline” for the financing of the foundations.

Nevertheless, Trump’s executive regulation, which demands the “termination” of all diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government, will become a source of tension – and another way for him to assert his will in the arts. In the latest budgets under bidges, House Appropriors praised the foundations for “justice through the arts” and “Diversity at the National Foundation”. “The (medium) committee indicates the NEA to further prioritize the diversity in its work,” says a section of the budget for the 2023 financial year.

In view of the changes that have already started under Trump, Ozlu Tunceli said: “These programs are definitely removed.”