Trump Knows That Political Power Is Not Enough
He’s abusing his office to force cultural institutions to bend the knee, too—to let MAGA install its version of our American story at museums, universities, and media companies.
On December 7, the annual Kennedy Center Honors will be held for the 48th year, and for the first time, a sitting president will be the host. Having purged all the Democrats from the Kennedy Center’s board, replaced them with loyalists, and named himself as chairman, Donald Trump has also made himself the main attraction of the marquee event.
His predecessors in the Oval Office had neither hosted the event nor involved themselves in selecting the honorees, but Trump has bragged that this year’s list—George Strait, KISS, Michael Crawford, Gloria Gaynor, and Sylvester Stallone—“all went through me,” adding that he rejected a “couple of wokesters.” As for the hosting duties, the president claimed that he was reluctant to take the spotlight. “I’ve been asked to host,” he said at an August press event for the gala. “I said, ‘I’m the president of the United States. Are you fools asking me to do that?’ ‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I’m president of the United States, I won’t do it.’ They said, ‘Please’…. I said, ‘OK… I’ll do it.’”
On the one hand, this is just Trump—who once said his “ultimate job” would be as a silver-screen-era studio head; who declared that having a reality show was “like being a rock star”; and who famously opined that “when you’re a star…you can do anything”—chasing his lifelong fantasy of joining the glitterati. What he couldn’t buy as a real estate developer, Trump can now commandeer as president. “I wanted one, I was never able to get one,” he said of the Kennedy Center awards. “And I said, ‘The hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honor.’”
But Trump doesn’t just want to sit at the popular kids’ table—he wants to make it his own. And in that goal, he’s backed by a like-minded MAGA movement. MAGA’s politics of grievance and resentment have long been fueled by the idea that “the left”—a catchall term for every cultural institution from Hollywood to hip-hop to Harvard—has hoarded all of the country’s cultural capital. Now the movement has a chance to crown itself the elite in a way it never could become organically. The goal isn’t merely to seize the prestige they’ve always envied, but to use it to reinforce their hold on power—to rewrite the history that forms our shared public memory, erase the truths that contradict their white-supremacist patriarchal ideology, and ensure that every museum exhibition, TV broadcast, and classroom lesson imparts their worldview.
Just weeks after Trump’s reelection, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed, “How Trump Can Rid Washington of Wokeness,” coauthored by a contributor to Project 2025. “Retake control of museums, starting with the Smithsonian Institution,” the authors advised. “Dissolve the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” they added. In a section that begins, “End woke university practices,” they supported the president’s plans to “protect free speech,” which in conservative-speak means allowing racist rhetoric while punishing dissent.
Done, done, and done! Since the inauguration, the president has criticized the Smithsonian’s representation of “how bad slavery was” and purged a number of Black history artifacts from its collection. In July, Congress voted to eliminate funding for public media. And, of course, on college campuses, under the guise of fighting antisemitism, the administration is threatening to withhold federal funds and deporting foreign-born students in response to student protests.
MAGA’s cultural takeover isn’t just about museums and college classrooms but popular culture, too. Disney, ABC’s parent company, yanked Jimmy Kimmel’s show after Federal Communications Commission chair and Project 2025 coauthor Brendan Carr objected to Kimmel’s remarks about the MAGA movement’s politicization of Charlie Kirk’s death and threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcast license. After a public outcry, Disney reinstated Kimmel less than a week later, but Nexstar, a company that owns 32 ABC affiliates, said it would continue to preempt the show. Nexstar is in the midst of a pending $6.2 billion merger with the broadcaster Tegna that requires FCC approval. For ABC’s part, the network had already demonstrated its willingness to fold months earlier, when it settled a baseless defamation lawsuit by Trump for $15 million.
Paramount took a similar course. After Trump sued 60 Minutes over a preelection interview with Kamala Harris that he didn’t like, Paramount forked over a $16 million settlement. When late-night host Stephen Colbert joked that the payment was “a big fat bribe” to ensure the company’s merger with Skydance, Paramount canceled his CBS show. Skydance, led by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, then agreed to install a “bias monitor” to oversee CBS and announced that its acquisition of the right-leaning media company The Free Press would include a senior leadership role at CBS News for cofounder Bari Weiss—a conservative whose shtick is pretending to be a disaffected liberal. Meanwhile, as of this writing, TikTok is close to being bought by a consortium made up of Silver Lake, Oracle, and Andreessen Horowitz—the latter two of which are owned by billionaire Trump donors. And don’t forget that X owner Elon Musk spent more than $250 million getting Trump and other Republicans elected.
So there you have it. America’s “liberal media”—as it will surely continue to be called—will soon largely be in the hands of Trump-affiliated moguls. It might seem that these institutions did not have to settle with Trump or cave to his demands, considering that the laws are on their side. But it’s hard not to think they’re already preparing for a country in which the threat of Trump’s retaliation outweighs all else. Fascism, after all, has often been defined as the merger of state and corporate power. And that’s what we’re seeing now, as Trump and his MAGA movement seize control of institution after institution. In December, when Trump takes the Kennedy Center stage as host, it might seem like a mere vanity project. But know that you’re watching American culture being weaponized—one stage, one station, and one late-night TV show at a time.
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