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What’s a party without a little music? This year, the National Mall was meant to host a free summer concert series in celebration of the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. Now President Trump may be replacing it with a different kind of performance: a supersize MAGA rally, with “Only Great Patriots invited.”
The concert series—which is still officially on, at the time of writing—had already been facing significant challenges before the president’s proposal on Saturday. First announced last Wednesday by a Trump-affiliated organization called Freedom 250, the event was set to feature nine musicians, at least six of whom have since dropped out. The rapper Young MC wrote that he was put off by the event’s “politically charged” nature; Celebrity Apprentice alumnus Bret Michaels called it “divisive”; and the country singer Martina McBride claimed that she’d been presented with a chance to celebrate America in a nonpartisan way, but “that turned out to be misleading.” (One wonders why these artists were so surprised: Freedom 250 does bill itself as nonpartisan, but it was created by Trump himself in an executive order.)
The president’s enjoinder to “cancel” the event was clearly a desperate bid to reframe an unfolding PR disaster. But it also revealed something about how Trump sees himself, and how he understands the role of art in bolstering his political project. In one post, he called himself “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime.” Trump often talks about his own greatness, but here he’s nodding to his capacity for showmanship, positioning art and politics as interchangeable arenas for promoting the MAGA agenda.
Take the Kennedy Center, which has been the primary site of Trump’s attacks on the arts during his second term in office. Last year, not long after his inauguration, he fired the members of the institution’s board who had been appointed by Joe Biden and replaced them with his own appointees. The new board elected Trump chairman of the Kennedy Center and voted to add his name to the building. (On Friday, a federal judge ruled that his name would need to be removed from the facade.) Trump has explicitly acknowledged his intent to remake an ostensibly nonpartisan stage in his own image: During his announcement of the Kennedy Center’s annual honorees last year, he said that “If we make it our kind of political,” the institution will see greater success. Many performers withdrew from planned shows over the institution’s new association with the president. Ticket sales plummeted. In February, Trump announced that the center would close for two years “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country.” Instead of celebrating the occasion with music or dance, the building would fall silent.
Art is often political, and good art often creates controversy. But the White House isn’t simply curating performances and exhibitions that carry political meaning; it’s linking them to the president and his agenda. An executive order last year attempted to exert control over the exhibits at the Smithsonian museums, pushing the institution to promote “American greatness.” Amid the cost-cutting efforts of DOGE, department officials tried to revoke National Endowment for the Humanities grants, pulling federal funding for projects that clashed with the administration’s anti-DEI priorities.
The federal government reoriented its plans for the Venice Biennale, the international arts expo, around similar mandates. Typically, the government outsources its artist-selection process to a committee of art-world experts. This year, the State Department gave that responsibility to Jenni Parido, a former pet-food-store owner with ties to the Trump administration. Some prominent artists turned down the chance to display their work in this newly Trump-inflected setting. The department’s press release announcing the final pick, Alma Allen, suggested that his work showcased “American excellence.” Reviewing the pavilion last month, my colleague Spencer Kornhaber called it “a very pretentious form of propaganda.”
Trump is also putting his own personal stamp on the nation’s aesthetics. This is especially apparent in the realm of design and architecture: A new White House ballroom will be clad in Trump’s signature gold, and a proposed triumphal arch at Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., will be topped with gilded statutes. (It will also be 250 feet tall, in honor of America’s 250th anniversary.) As my colleague Sebastian Smee has written, the completed arch will not only look bad; it will also contort the meaning of the nearby Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. Trump has made the semiquincentennial all about himself—if he gets his way, even our currency could bear his likeness.
The White House clearly recognizes the soft power of art in promoting its agenda, even as it’s unable to compel individual artists to accept its new status quo. The fact that the president sees a hyperpartisan rally as a reasonable substitute for a week of live music reflects his fixation on art’s ability to reflect ideology. No performer can deliver the MAGA message as well as the president himself.
Related:
- The arch is atrocious, Sebastian Smee writes.
- Trump is focused on becoming one of history’s “great men.”
Today’s News
- Iran launched missile and drone attacks across the Persian Gulf today, killing one person in Kuwait and damaging the country’s main airport. U.S. Central Command said late yesterday it carried out what it described as “self-defense strikes” against an Iranian military ground-control station on Qeshm Island.
- The House is set to vote today on a measure requiring President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or obtain congressional approval to continue the war. The vote highlights growing bipartisan concern over the conflict, which is now in its fourth month.
- Senate Republicans are moving ahead with a $72 billion immigration agency–funding packageafter the Justice Department said it would abandon its controversial “anti-weaponization” fund, easing concerns that had threatened support for the package. Lawmakers also dropped a proposed $1 billion Secret Service–funding provision tied in part to Trump’s White House ballroom project after facing Republican opposition.
Evening Read
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
By Ted Chiang
Anthropic is regarded as a giant among AI companies, but perhaps what it really excels in is anthropomorphism. Earlier this year, the company released an 84-page document titled Claude’s “constitution,” Claude being the name of the large language model that is the company’s flagship product. The first sentence reads, “Claude’s constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behaviors.” It goes on: “The document is written with Claude as its primary audience”; “we want Claude to be able to use its judgment once armed with a good understanding of the relevant considerations”; “Claude’s moral status is deeply uncertain”; and “Claude may have some functional version of emotions or feelings.”
This anthropomorphism is by no means limited to the document.
More From The Atlantic
- Canned cocktails will smash you to the ground.
- The David Frum Show: How to save the Supreme Court from itself
- Alexandra Petri: We’ve made some totally planned changes to America’s 250th.
- China’s economy is taking everyone down.
- The arch is atrocious.
- The left needs to rediscover its patriotism.
Culture Break
Reflect. The Anacostia Community Museum was a pioneer in preserving Black history, Camille Borders writes. Will that be enough to save it from President Trump?
Take a look. A Met exhibition devoted to the Renaissance painter Raphael shows the artist letting loose, Susan Tallman writes.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post Trump Is Remaking Art in His Image appeared first on The Atlantic.
