Culture does not want to take part in a political show

US President Donald Trump has just announced that the Kennedy Center, Washington’s premier performing arts venue, will close for two years, starting July 4, 2026 – the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Although Trump says the hall is closing for reconstruction, everyone knows the real reason: since Trump took over the center and redubbed it the Trump Kennedy Center, attendance has plummeted, and numerous artists have cut ties with the institution, including the opera singer Renee Fleming and the team staging performances of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton. With the composer Philip Glass having already canceled the premiere of his Abraham Lincoln symphony, an event that was supposed to coincide with the anniversary celebrations, the closure merely formalizes what has already happened.

Trump’s approach to politics has often been compared to authoritarian and even fascist leaders who depend on grand political spectacles to project power. But these accounts conflate shock with spectacle. As thinkers from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault have understood, political spectacles can shore up political legitimacy and instill a sense of obligation among citizens, and theater and art are especially well-suited to produce such outcomes.

Hence, Hitler co-opted opera, mythologizing the 19th-century composer Richard Wagner, including his flagrant antisemitism, to fit his own vision of an Aryan nation. His cultural envoy, Joseph Goebbels, kept a tight grip on Deutsche Oper and Berlin Staatsoper, arranging for the conductors Karl Böhm and Wilhelm Furtwängler, as well as the famous soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, to perform for the Nazis.

When faced with the recent Kennedy Center cancellations, Trump’s own cultural czar, Richard Grenell, issued press statements so whiny that they verged on the comical. He critiqued woke musicians and lined up comedians such as Jeff Foxworthy, who has made a career out of playing on stereotypes of “white trash.” Whereas Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will still offers a powerfully chilling reminder of the lure of Hitler’s spectacle, the best Trump and Grenell could do was put on a viewing of Amazon’s pay-to-play vanity project for the first lady, Melania.

Trump has failed repeatedly to produce the “aesthetics” of genuine spectacle. His June 2025 military parade was an embarrassing flop, and his vision for a new White House ballroom has been widely ridiculed. Incapable of reaching the level of spectacle, he has opted for shock instead.

In doing so, he has told us three things about himself. First, he knows that shock is perfectly suited for the age of social media. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi can have his spectacles, delivering his own public performances from Delhi’s Red Fort. Trump would prefer to insult heads of state in the Oval Office, at Davos, or wherever else he shows up.

Trump’s bullying and foul language on these occasions (and many others) are catnip to his white-supremacist “Christian” supporters. They celebrate his every utterance with their own four-lettered expletives on social and underground media. Trump knows exactly how to please them: just share an AI-generated video in which you dump feces on your opponents.

Second, Trump may still secretly crave a spectacle, but he is incapable of producing one. With his rambling speeches, ill-fitting suits, and too-long ties, he consistently falls short. No one outside of the cult is remotely impressed by unruly rallies with giant flags and a loud airing of grievances. By relying solely on shocks that have no appeal beyond his supporters, Trump cannot continue to consolidate his power.

But this points to a third, foreboding explanation of his behavior. What if Trump is not the protagonist, and the real power lies with those who goad him to produce shocks? In the Hungarian director István Szabó’s film Mephisto, based on Goethe’s telling of the medieval Faust legend, Klaus Maria Brandauer plays the German actor Hendrik Höfgen, who sells his conscience to the Nazis in exchange for fame and an ability to beguile his fellow actors. Although he plays Mephisto (the devil) on stage, the film’s denouement makes clear that the real Mephisto is not the actor, but the Nazis who implicitly control him.

Who are the Mephistos in and around the Trump administration? They are neo-fascists like the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; cretinous opportunists like Vice President JD Vance; wannabe crusaders like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; and organizations like the Heritage Foundation, whose rank-and-file staff include many Fuentes supporters. Anywhere from one-sixth to one-third of MAGA supporters are neo-Nazi sympathizers, and Trump, as the lead actor among this rogues gallery, must represent their views. This is why he pardons far-right insurrectionists, removes the names of black and minority soldiers and war heroes from Arlington National Cemetery, purges women and people of color from military leadership, and allows his cabinet to display or cite white-supremacist phrases.

But the neo-Nazis won’t win. With the inability to produce public spectacles, their numbers may dwindle. They are already complaining that Trump is catering to moderate conservatives. The killing of innocent civilians in Minneapolis and the failure of the Trumpified Kennedy Center show the limits of Trump’s wannabe fascist shtick.

Whereas bigoted shock politics aim to debunk the truth, art resurrects it. When the racist Daughters of the American Revolution banned the contralto Marian Anderson from performing at Constitution Hall in 1939, she performed from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead, singing for millions of Americans. The memory still gives goosebumps.

All the world’s a stage, and Trump is merely a player catering to the worst in American society. When the curtain drops on this shameful performance, the audience may have already left.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026. www.project-syndicate.org