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President Donald Trump's proposal to become the chair of the Kennedy Center for the Arts Board of Trustees, install his ally as the cultural center's director and exert control over its programming is a clear signal that his second administration will be much more aggressive in its cultural policy than his first one. Breaking with decades of tradition, Trump said he dismissed several political appointees to the Kennedy Center board and would take the seat of the long-serving head of the group, David Rubenstein. A newly constituted board could elect Trump chair.
The idea that the president of the United States, who criticized the center for presenting drag shows, might involve himself with programming at the nation's cultural center is without precedent in the United States, and most if not all democratic countries. Previous chief executives have advocated for the arts and created organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, to support them.
But Trump, who has shown little interest in or knowledge of the arts before, has indicated that he wants to be more than an advocate or patron; he apparently wants a veto over content at one of the country's preeminent cultural institutions.
Nothing has shocked the arts and culture world quite as profoundly since the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s. And as leaders of this sector try to gauge what the future holds, some are coming to terms with a warning: The federal government has potentially enormous powers of coercion when it comes to the cultural and nonprofit sector, from the tax code to visas for artists to novel interpretations of antidiscrimination laws. And it looks as if this administration may use them.
Consider an episode from 1990, when a painting by Vincent van Gogh that for years had been hanging on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was sold at auction to a mercurial Japanese businessman for $82.5 million. The "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" might instead have been donated to the Met if not for a relatively short-lived quirk of the U.S. tax code that greatly limited the deductibility of charitable gifts.
The tax code was later tweaked, making it attractive for donors to give their art to public collections rather than sell it, and art started flowing once again into museums across the country. But the fate of the painting, the whereabouts of which remain unknown to this day, demonstrates how even arcane parts of federal law can have enormous consequences for cultural life and the arts.
In the first few days after Trump returned to office, with a flurry of executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs and work policies, the initial targets included arts and culture groups that directly use federal funding for some part of their budget, including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The former two quickly confirmed that they were in compliance with president's executive orders, and a Kennedy Center spokesperson confirmed the same in an email to The Washington Post.
The rapidity of that acquiescence, from institutions that had previously made equity and access fundamental not just to their hiring but to their programming and identity, prompted deep concern - panic would be a better word - among other groups that suddenly felt vulnerable to attack.
"This isn't about hiring practices," said one arts leader, well connected to large nonprofit funders of the cultural sector, who, like most people interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of endangering their organizations. "It is deeply existential."
It also felt personal to some arts leaders whose staffs include people of color tasked with building diverse audiences and nonbinary and trans people who have been attacked with overtly hostile and threatening rhetoric.
"Some of our staff were being told they don't exist anymore," said a veteran performing arts executive. "It threatens the spirit of who we are, what we do and how we do it."
The day after his inauguration, the president extended his campaign against DEI programs to the private sector with an executive action targeting publicly traded corporations, large nonprofits, universities and more. And then last week, the NEA said that grants for 2026 would no longer include a program for underserved communities and would prioritize projects celebrating the nation's semiquincentennial anniversary.
Those actions, along with the rhetoric of top Trump officials vilifying groups like the Ford Foundation, recent court rulings that have radically reinterpreted laws governing charitable giving, and the basic confusion and lack of clarity about the executive orders, have led to growing alarm about the future of the arts not just in federally funded Washington, but across America.
What if this isn't about DEI, but rather a wholesale attack on the nonprofit world, with the aim of crippling or silencing groups that have traditionally been independent of government coercion?
• In the first few days of the administration, the confusion was most disruptive.
"What we need is clarity as to what is illegal and what isn't," said Andrew Finch, director of policy for the Association of Art Museum Directors. "At the moment, we don't have that."
There was a cascade of questions, and no one to answer them. Did the proscription against DEI programs apply only to hiring? Could a grant that included so-called DEI language be made acceptable simply by removing that language or curtailing that part of the grant's purpose? And what did the curious word "illegal" mean in the original executive order which called for the "termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility' (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government?"
"At the moment, anyone with an open grant is looking at it, and trying to figure out which components are DEI, which of those are legal and which could be impacted," said one adviser to the arts sector.
Future planning was thrown into chaos. Attacks on the federal endowments, including the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities, are a perennial form of Washington theater, and arts leaders are used to the drama. But the endowments have proved remarkably resilient and under the previous Trump administration, Congress actually increased funding for the NEA. And while money from the agencies helps support programming, it is a relatively small part of most organizations' budgets.
But there are federal programs which do play a vital role, especially the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity program, which covers what would be the prohibitive cost of insuring priceless objects loaned to exhibitions around the country, including the National Gallery of Art's celebrated "Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment" and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's equally admired "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350."
What if the Trump administration eliminated that program? And what about its ability to refuse visas to traveling artists, or simply delay their approval until concert dates are missed?
The nonprofit sector, like the subsidiary arts and culture sector, is not monolithic. A hospital may be technically "nonprofit," but not mission-driven and indistinguishable (from the patient's point of view) from a for-profit entity. Large cultural and educational institutions, like the National Geographic Society, may lend their name to and share in the revenue of lucrative commercial partnerships. A wealthy collector may donate art to a museum for altruistic purposes, yet reap enormous tax benefits unavailable to people of lesser means.
Congress is always considering various forms of oversight, regulation and taxation of the large, heterogeneous nonprofit world. The public rarely pays attention until something like a major van Gogh painting slips into the private sector - or a new administration arrives intent on radical change.
During previous crises, many arts professionals were reluctant to talk about hypotheticals for fear of "offering a road map" to government actors intent on mischief. Now there is fear that the road map is already in place.
A court ruling last summer in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals may be part of the map. In American Alliance for Equal Rights v. Fearless Fund, the court bypassed long-standing precedent to decide that a charitable fund created to provide grants to businesses owned by Black women violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based venture-capital firm, settled the case brought by a conservative political group and agreed to close its "Strivers Grant" contest.
Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at the Catholic University of America specializing in nonprofit organizations and philanthropy, said the decision is limited and applies only in the 11th circuit. But it is making waves.
"Obviously, it has a chilling effect, and many charities are aware of the ruling and don't want to be sued because lawsuits are expensive and resource intensive," he said.
The Fearless decision struck at the core of the charity's mission and identity, and could inspire other groups (including the government) to extend attacks on DEI-related hiring practices and programming initiatives.
The tax code, which may have sent the "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" into private hands, is another powerful tool.
"Anything that impacts the tax deductibility of the full market value of a work of art would impact not just our museum, but all of our museums," said one longtime director of a major regional museum.
The tax code might also be changed to harvest revenue from organizations targeted in the president's DEI executive orders: Large foundations and university endowments. In 2021, JD Vance attacked the Ford Foundation for "investing in the racial division all across our country," calling Ford and similar large foundations "social-justice hedge funds." He proposed taxing them at much higher rates than they pay now. There have also been calls for more punitive taxation of large university endowments.
Even if there is no explicit agenda to silence these groups, taxing them more heavily could remove money from the arts and culture ecosystem, especially if donors have to step up to meet social welfare needs as government spending is withdrawn. Universities, which are already wavering in their commitment to the arts and humanities, might make up for lost money by cutting the most vulnerable programs, including the arts.
• At this point, there is no sense of an emerging strategy for countering threats, especially those that might hit at the heart of the cultural sector. One longtime arts leader is worried about generational changes that may make the arts more vulnerable than they have ever been. The Smithsonian once relied on long-serving politicians on both sides of the aisle for defense when funding was cut or exhibitions attacked. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D) and Patrick J. Leahy (D) and Rep. Jim Leach (R) were cited as powerful forces for preserving the institution, but Leach and Feinstein are dead and Leahy is retired.
Many of those in leadership at arts institutions today are too young to have been in the trenches during the culture wars of the 1980s and '90s. And the crisis is fundamentally different this time around. The culture wars were opportunistic battles fought in the media by groups like Bill Donohue's Catholic League, which specialized in targeted homophobic attacks on exhibitions like the "Hide/Seek" show at the Smithsonian in 2010. They were damaging, but more like brush fires, brief and intense but without lasting impact on programming. If the current administration succeeds in chilling any discussion of equity in the public square, the impact will be systemic and catastrophic.
Others worry that poorly administered and overly blunt DEI policies of the past have left them open to the Trump administration's wholesale effort to take equity off the table as a legitimate topic of cultural conversation. In some cases, DEI programs were superficial or performative, a public relations strategy, not genuine restructuring, especially those instituted by larger organizations responding to the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But now any conversation about how the arts can be more accessible will happen under the shadow of a concerted campaign to discredit the idea entirely.
At the moment, fear and disarray are widespread, but some cling to the hope that the basic principles of DEI are well enough embedded in cultural institutions that they will survive the current assault.
"You can get to the core question sometimes just by reframing the language," said one museum leader.
But the language of the executive orders seems to anticipate all of this. The Jan. 20 edict on "wasteful government DEI programs" uses the phrase "under whatever name they appear," and emails sent to department heads encouraged federal employees to act as informants against colleagues who "disguise" a DEI agenda. If there was internal grumbling within the cultural sector about occasional overzealous efforts to police language, the administration seems to have adopted policing language as official policy.
If extended to the private sector, this could look a lot like the McCarthyism of the 1950s, or worse. And that would force cultural groups to make hard decisions about their basic values. We may already be at that point.
"Lawyers can tell you the legal risk of an action and might advise an organization not to take a given chance," said one longtime observer of trends in the museum sector in an email. "But there may be risks of inaction as well - reputational, for example, or damage to mission. When you look at potential dystopic futures, often the path from here to there is made possible from everyone, individually, doing what seems to be safest in the short term."
It's an idea as old as fascism. Last week, the Library of Congress presented a recital by baritone Holger Falk, who sang songs by Hanns Eisler, a German-Austrian anti-fascist composer born in 1898. Eisler fled the Nazis and found refuge in America in 1938. Within 10 years, he was hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and then deported for his support of left-wing causes. Eisler and his favorite lyricist Bertolt Brecht, challenged the naked greed, needless cruelty and cynical patriotism endemic to fascism.
It was bracing to hear, history glistening like a fresh, bloody wound, and one wondered if anyone would complain, and how long it will be before this kind of program elicits extra scrutiny, if it isn't scuttled altogether.