When President Donald Trump announced a takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last year, he claimed to be fighting a specific sort of cultural rot at the Washington, D.C., institution. "We don't need woke at the Kennedy Center," he said in February 2025. "So I'll be there until such time as it gets to be running right."
The president abandoned that in May 2026, after a federal judge ruled that the center was illegally renamed after Trump. Trump's remedy for a "woke" Kennedy Center was to replace one alleged strain of political capture with another.
