Trump as Art Czar: No, Stranger Things Haven’t Happened

The NEH gets a second wind, the Kennedy Center will get millions for building rehab, a museum director gets the axe, and will Bette Davis get a statue? 

W hoever thought Trump 2.0 would make art-news headlines, day after day? This round, President Trump is the art impresario in chief. What’s happening?

I’ve been to the Kennedy Center only once, to see my old professor Vince Scully get an award. It’s the home of the National Symphony Orchestra but stages Broadway touring companies, concerts, the Mark Twain humor prize, and the Kennedy Center awards. It’s mostly middling, recycled fare, with a few singing scruffs for retired Baby Boomer bureaucrats, all millionaires from fat public pensions. Still, the Kennedy Center raises the tone in what used to be a culturally inert town.

Days after the presidential inauguration, Trump shocked and mortified Washington by firing half the center’s board — the Biden flunkies and their adjacencies — and its CEO, all for the sin of PC programming. Too many drag queens spoil the Beethoven sonatas and much else. And then there’s the Social Impact performance series, “emphasizing community, joy, justice, and equity through the arts.” Yuck. Ric Grennell, having had a good run speaking truth to smug, self-serving, dummkopf Germans when he was our ambassador to Berlin, is now running the place. Trump is now chairing the board.

It’s hard to know what’s really happening there. In protest, Lin-Manuel Miranda pulled Hamilton from its 2026 slot at the center. No great loss, but, still, I suspect that the zeitgeist is chaotic. Since the National Symphony Orchestra is a national gem, I hope for chill from all sides. Whatever dings the Kennedy Center dings the NSO. And Grennell can’t run the Kennedy Center long-term. He’s doing other things as a Trump troubleshooter. Who’ll take the job? Is the chalice poisoned? Trump is working wonders in pushing $225 million through Congress to renovate the Kennedy Center, which, we’re told, is crumbling. Chances are, it’ll be closed for a while.

DOGE sacked the Institute for Museum and Library Services, on whose board I served as a Trump appointee since 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Staffers were placed on paid leave and hundreds of grants were rescinded. Court cases and a sense of fair play seem to have brought some workers back to their offices and reinstated many grants, and I think that’s good. The grants were promised, and the recipients aren’t loaded. Race-driven grants, climate-kook grants, and grants for the “Death to America” crowd can go into the shredder, but most grants support culture unsullied by political fads. The three agencies are now honoring these commitments.

Trump’s grand art-patronage project is the National Garden of American Heroes. It isn’t a bad idea, though it could easily go wrong. It responds to civic cannibalism and the desecration or dismantlement of works of public art memorializing Washington, Jefferson, Columbus, and other icons of American values. Trump’s idea, explained in an executive order and partly funded with cash moved from the NEA and the NEH, is a landscaped park with 250 sculptures of Founding Fathers, business titans, inventors, athletes, activists, artists, war heroes, politicians, entertainers, clerics, and a public intellectual or two. These are people who accomplished positive, tangible things rather than kvetching their lives away or, worse, sending Mao a valentine every February 14.

The garden is tentatively planned for a spot near Mount Rushmore and meant to be ready for America 250. The sculptures must be marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass. No raffia skirts à la Simone Leigh, no rainbow-colored beads à la Jeffrey Gibson, no used tires à la Chakaia Booker, and no ceramic puppies with celebrity faces à la Jeff Koons. Sculptures must be “realistic” and not “modernist” or “abstract,” all loaded terms. Artists — selected by a committee — will get $200,000 per sculpture.

The Trump EO lists the subjects. It veers right — think John Wayne and Charlton Heston — but on the other side are Ruth Bader Ginsberg and nag Eleanor Roosevelt as well as the Catholic Trotskyite Dorothy Day, socialist singer Woody Guthrie, and pacifist Jeannette Rankin, who, as a Montana representative, voted against American participation in both World War I and II. Voters tossed her out after each of her two, single terms, correct though she was in 1917. Barbara Jordan had the voice of God and sculptural girth. Ted Kennedy isn’t on the list, though he’d suit a spot near a water feature.

Together, the 250 subjects make a fair and balanced cohort.

Nice surprises include Todd Beamer of Flight 93 and “let’s roll” fame, computer pioneer and Navy admiral Grace Hopper, and Lou Gehrig, Sergeant York, Margaret Chase Smith, and Helen Keller, all once nationally known and revered but fading. I’d ditch Lauren Bacall. “Put your lips together and blow” is hardly heroic. Davy Crockett can go, since Daniel Boone is to be honored. Francis Scott Key? He wrote a tune few can sing. Ansel Adams? Calendar art. Nathan Hale was an incompetent spy. William Howard Taft? “A fat loser,” Trump might say. How about Robert Taft, his son and a Senate giant?

Where’s Bette Davis? “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride” seems like the ideal motto for the Trump era. Everett Dirksen? With that craggy face, he’s a sculptor’s delight. Whistler? He was the most written-about artist of the 19th century. Mary Pickford? Both a star and a czar, at least of a movie studio. Edith Wharton? She’s fabulous, over and over, and classy. You can ditch Ernest Hemingway, a bore, for her. “The Earth moved,” indeed. Where’s Washington Irving? Creator of more than the Headless Horseman and Rip van Winkle, he’s our best-selling historian. Madam C. J. Walker was America’s first self-made millionairess. Where’s she? Billy Wilder? He deserves a statue just for Some Like It Hot. John D. Rockefeller? He pioneered modern philanthropy, and let’s tip our hat to the “drill, baby, drill” ethos. Secretariat? A horse, I know, but what a champion and athlete.

These are all quibbles about a project with a tight, even urgent, possibly impossible timetable. Sculpture isn’t quick, and, as far as I know, not a single artist has been picked. The site’s not certain, either. Tick, tick, tick. Most commemorative public sculptures — statues of war heroes are plentiful — are rote and dull. They end up as roosts for pigeons. The primacy of realism and a ban on a “modernist” or “abstract” look could make for sameness at best, a mortuary at worst. I hope the Trump aestheticians don’t take these instructions too seriously. And I hope someone on the team, preferably a few someones, knows something about art.

I knew that the NEH wasn’t dead. But, with its staffers sent home on paid leave by DOGE, I assumed it was on Death Row and, institutionally, pondering eternity. A handful of staff is still working, though, and still granting, with $9.55 million awarded in mid-May. What, under the new order, do we find?

Digitization is big, as is most anything that’s not contemporary. If it’s the culture of now, it might be gnarly. Indiana University presented a twofer — digitizing pre-1600 manuscripts in Midwest institutions — and cha-ching to the tune of $349,000 went the NEH slot. A scholar there got $8,000 for a book on the Forma Urbis Romae, a carved marble map of Rome from about a.d. 200. Warning — the map’s patron, the emperor Septimius Severus, debased Rome’s money to pay for forever wars and whacked hundreds of Christians. Johns Hopkins University won $318,000 for a database on Early Modern English-language ephemera. Thees, thous, and doths are back in vogue.

Faith is big, too. Morgan State University in Maryland got $328,000 to digitize the archives of the Sisters of the Holy Family, a black religious order. There’s $500,000 for a documentary on a teenage Orthodox Jewish girl whose Auschwitz diary was found after the death camp was taken by Allied troops. There’s also $350,000 to digitize old broadsides, ephemera, and prints owned by the Jewish Theological Society. A $60,000 grant went to a book on the First Crusade. The University of Southern California got money to digitize the archives of Los Angeles’s Second Baptist Church. All sound like good projects.

Keywords worked wonders. Eureka College got $20,783 for, of all things, its DEI program, but it’s President Reagan’s alma mater. There’s $60,000 to the University of Cincinnati for a book on Nikola Tesla, the Serbian inventor, engineer, and philosopher whose last name, once revered by climate-crazed champagne socialists, now inspires them to hone their Molotov-cocktail skills. The Japanese American National Museum sounds nice. Trump did well with Asian-American voters. It got $350,000 for a digitization project. Trouble is, it’s on the barricades embracing DEI and millions of illegal aliens. It’s raising money from its “Scrub Nothing” initiative, based on the absurd claim that Trump is scrubbing history.

The District of Columbia wasn’t a killer location. It got only one grant– as opposed to a dozen in the past — which went to D.C. staff buddies. Georgetown University got $150,000 to research algorithmic education technology and what it means for students in the U.S. For a fraction of that, I’ll tell them the answer: It’ll pulverize what’s already been crushed by participation trophies, open classrooms, grade inflation, teacher unions, New Math, and the demise of penmanship. NEH, my bill’s in the mail.

Book projects on Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, Anita Loos, who wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and T. S. Eliot, who wrote inscrutable poetry, each got $8,000.

My spies tell me that the May grants were thrown together after the NEH’s new masters told the staff to “pick what looks good, not crazy stuff, and remember, we’re in MAGA time.” Better some guidance than none. The NEH’s acting boss, Michael McDonald, has a Ph.D. in Romance-language literature, is active in conservative legal causes, and worked for years at the NEH. He seems to know what he’s doing and is steadying the ship. Mary Ann Carter, the NEA chairwoman during the first Trump term, is back. She’s a marketing executive from Florida. Keith Sonderling is the acting head of the IMLS. He’s a Labor Department official and politically active in Florida.

It bears repeating that federal arts money is a tiny fraction, maybe 1 percent, probably less, of what Americans spend on the arts. No federal money? American foundations are flusher than they’ve ever been. Nonprofits in the arts correctly should go to them. Many, like the Terra, Mellon, and Ford Foundations, squander millions on DEI programs, climate culture, and Great Satan schtick.

On May 30, President Trump announced that he fired Kim Sajet, the longtime director of the National Portrait Gallery, citing her devotion to DEI. I’ve written about the NPG, a Smithsonian museum, possibly more than any other except the Met and the National Gallery. I like its mission — American portraiture — but its curatorial vision is mixed at best.  Sajet has added lots more portraits of subjects who aren’t dead white men, and that’s good, but the portraits are often bad.

It’s a bungled opportunity and needs a new director, as I’ve suggested more than once. Alas, I don’t think Trump has the power to can her. That job is for Lonnie Bunch, who runs the Smithsonian and should retire, and the Smithsonian’s regents, or trustees. Among the NPG’s low points is commissioning a portrait of Dr. Death-to-Dogs. As if the Covid lab leak, lockdowns, and lies weren’t enough, Fauci funded medical experiments on beagles. A truly horrible human being.