It was the night after President Trump had officially taken over the Kennedy Center and made himself its chairman, and two well-dressed Washington women were wandering along the plush red carpet inside its Grand Foyer, so grand it could fit the Washington Monument laid on its side. They reached the eight-foot-tall bronze head of John F. Kennedy that lords over the hall and looked forlornly into his eyes.
How much longer, one woman joked to the other, until the statue of the 35th president gets torn down and replaced with one of the 47th? They laughed bitterly.
It was just last week that Mr. Trump announced his plan to purge the Kennedy Center’s board of its Biden appointees and to install “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” He named one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, interim president and proclaimed that there would be no more “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA” shown. He complained about drag queens performing there and said it had all become too “wokey.” Some artists canceled shows. “Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!” Mr. Trump said on social media, posting an A.I.-generated image of himself waving his arms like a conductor in a concert hall.
Most of the people who turned up at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night to see performances in its various theaters had purchased their tickets long before any of that was set in motion. Now they found themselves at an arts center on the cusp of becoming something different — something Trumpian.
Some speculated what that might look like.
“I feel like we might just have ‘Cats’ on rotation moving forward,” said Pamela Deutsch, a documentary film producer who once worked as an usher at the Kennedy Center. (Mr. Trump, who once had dreams of becoming a Broadway producer, is a longtime fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber.) She was there to catch a set by the comic W. Kamau Bell. So was Louis Woolard, a 73-year-old psychotherapist from Maryland. What sort of cultural programming did he envision under the artistic stewardship of the 47th president? “I don’t know,” said Mr. Woolard. “I guess country music.”
At the other end of the Grand Foyer, American Ballet Theater was putting on a production of “Crime and Punishment,” an effort to make dance out of Dostoyevsky. A 75-year-old real estate investment banker named Wayne Koonce waited in line to have his ticket scanned. “Maybe the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi will be invited back now that he’s cozying up to Putin,” he said.
For the many people in liberal Washington scandalized by Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, Thursday night was like a cross between a wake and last call. Drag performers protested outside in the cold, as students from George Washington University marched around shouting about Mr. Trump. Inside, some well-heeled patrons of the ballet were literally clutching their pearls as they contemplated the future of the institution. At the other end of the foyer, copies of a children’s book called “Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book” were being sold ahead of Mr. Bell’s stand-up routine. (He co-wrote the book.)
“You know, Trump took over, he’s the new chairman of the Kennedy Center,” he said at the top of his set. The audience let out a low boo. “You shouldn’t call it the Kennedy Center anymore,” he said. “Let’s call it the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center.” More booing. “If you’re going to have people running it with no expertise at all,” he continued, “you might as well have it named after the guy with no expertise at all.” (Earlier that day, Mr. Kennedy had been confirmed as health secretary.)
Mr. Bell tore into the president and talked about white supremacy, nationalized health care, oligarchy, fascism, socialism, transgender rights, slavery, kale chips, Nazidom and other such topics that would presumably qualify as “wokey” under new management. The comic also guessed at what sort of changes were in store.
“How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?” he wondered as the audience groaned.
On a settee outside the ballet, a husband and wife — both teachers from Arlington, Va. — tried to figure out what the president meant by “anti-American propaganda.” “I can’t figure it out,” said the wife. “Immigrants,” suggested the husband. “But what does that actually mean?” asked the wife.
Some fretted as to whether they ought to boycott the place going forward. “Like a lot of people in Washington,” said Mr. Koonce, “we’re trying to figure out: Will we continue to come? You want to support the artists, but you don’t want to support anything connected with this philistine, backward movement of the arts, which is exactly what it’s going to be.”
So much of what President Trump is up to in Washington is about payback. He is taking his revenge on a town that snubbed him. Last time he was president, some artists accepting the Kennedy Center honors refused to go to the White House, and in response he and Melania Trump never went to the Kennedy Center.
Vice President JD Vance, and his wife, Usha, though, seem to genuinely enjoy the Kennedy Center’s programming. She has been a member of the opera’s board for more than a year, and the couple took their young children there in December for a production of “Jungle Book” that the Kennedy Center described as being told “through a contemporary lens by framing Mowgli as a refugee trying to find safety in a new environment.” (In other words, possibly wokey.) They enjoyed it so much they went backstage after it was over.
In Mr. Trump’s war against the town’s institutions, the battle over this one can seem low-stakes by comparison. What is a performing arts center compared to the Justice Department, trans-Atlantic alliances, foreign aid and all the rest? Still, it has struck a chord. People perambulating up the Grand Foyer on Thursday — many of whom were federal workers now fearing for their jobs — seemed especially agitated by what was happening there.
Michael Gray, a 63-year-old retired refugee officer who worked for the State Department beginning under George H.W. Bush, was there to see the ballet. Asked what he thought about the president’s proclamation about anti-American propaganda, Mr. Gray said, “I think it’s nonsense.” But he was able to take the long view.
“Things come and they go,” he said, “but the arts don’t, and the love of the arts does not.”
