Marlow Stern, writing in The Daily Beast:

[R]eports [have] surfaced that Trump, a Philistine whose favorite film is forty-five assorted minutes of Bloodsport, was planning to cut the National Endowment of the Arts. It’s a classic dictator move, stifling artistic freedom in the service of nationalism.

Let me get this right, (possibly/probably) removing (some) public funding from the arts is “a classic dictator move”?

On the contrary, public funding can be a useful instrument of political control by someone prepared to abuse the power of the taxpayers’ purse, and it’s not necessary to look at dictatorships (although you can) to make that point.

Let’s go back instead to one Jonah Goldberg, writing in Townhall in the early days of the Obama presidency:

It seems Rocco Landesman, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, didn’t get the memo, literally.
On Sept. 22, stung by controversy over the administration’s effort to turn the arts community into proselytizers of its very special brand of hope and change, the White House issued a stern warning to all government agencies: Keep politics out of the arts.
The White House denied that was ever the intent. Many in the media, as is their wont, took the Obama administration at their word.
But not the Web site Big Government (which broke the story) and the Washington Times. They demonstrated that from the earliest days of the presidential transition, Barack Obama’s political operation sought to entrench the arts community in its “outreach” operations. Bill Ivey, Obama’s transition advisor on the arts, admitted in June: “I wanted to see some real connection between administration objectives and the capacity of all the cultural actors in government. I made some progress. I got some agreement.”
That “progress” mostly came in the form of enlisting arts groups — groups that received stimulus money — in Obama’s national service agenda.
Three days after Landesman was confirmed as the head of the NEA, his communications director, Yosi Sergant, told NEA grantees in a conference call: “I would encourage you to pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment — you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service.”
Two days later, a host of arts organizations endorsed Obama’s health care plan: “We call on Congress to pass: A health care reform bill that will create a public health option. … There is little time to waste …” Of the 21 groups signing the statement, 16 had recently received grants from the NEA or were affiliated with organizations that had.
Sergant was thrown under the bus, and the Sept. 22 memo put an end to the story for the supportive media.
But the story continues. Last week, Landesman gave the keynote address to the 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference. In fairness, Landesman did not reaffirm the White House and NEA’s obvious initial intent to turn the allegedly independent government agency into an adjunct of Obama’s “Organizing for America” operation. He was more subtle than that.
Instead, Landesman embraced a timeless tactic of power politics. He debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. “There is a new president and a new NEA,” he proclaimed. “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”

Landesman evidently knew about as much about history as Stern, but let that pass; it was his underlying message that mattered, and it wasn’t pretty.

Back in 2004, roughly halfway through the George W. Bush tyranny, I criticized the tyrant’s decision to increase funding for the NEA as hurling “money the country doesn’t have at an institution the country doesn’t need”. I’ll stick with that view.

I also added this:

Even if it is agreed that government should be directly funding ‘culture’ (I don’t think government should, but that’s a different debate), the president’s decision is bound to backfire. Remember O’Sullivan’s law. Any organization that is not explicitly conservative will ultimately end up in the hands of the left. Dana Gioia may indeed be doing splendid work at the moment, but neither he nor George W. Bush will be in office forever. At some point in the future, maybe under a future Democratic administration or maybe just as a result of bureaucratic drift, the NEA will inevitably fall back into its old, bad habits – only this time on a much bigger budget.

And so it turned out (even if the budget later took a battering thanks to the Great Recession).