President Trump’s recent announcement that he was seizing control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by installing himself as head of the Center’s board of directors and long-time confidant Ric Grenell as interim executive director was met with predictable howls of outrage from the cultural left.
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Trump had evidently had enough of the embarrassing woke circus.“I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” he tweeted out on Truth Social. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA, ONLY THE BEST …Ric shares my Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture, and will be overseeing the daily operations of the Center.”
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In another sense, however, politics can, and does, shape culture. The popular culture of the Camelot era of the JFK presidency was heavily influenced by Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s White House and its somewhat self-conscious emphasis on sophistication, high culture, and the arts. Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” politics of patriotic optimism and American renewal characterized much of 1980s popular culture in America, from movies such as Indiana Jones, Rambo, Rocky, Star Wars, Back to the Future, and Ferris Bueller to musicals like Big River and television shows such as The Dukes of Hazard and The Cosby Show.

Despite the sneers and jeers of our cultural elite, the prospects that President Trump’s takeover of our premier cultural platform will lead to an American cultural renaissance are actually relatively high. If not a full-fledged return to the “golden age” of American dominance of the popular arts, it at least augurs the end of an aggressive wokeism, whose very measure of success is the degree to which it offends popular taste and the commonly held values of Western civilization.