The trouble started in August 2017 when the television producer Norman Lear said he was skipping a White House reception for his Kennedy Center Honors award. Another honoree, the dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, pulled out after President Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Va.
Mr. Trump, who ended up canceling the reception and shunning the annual awards ceremony all four years of his first term, got his revenge last week when he purged the bipartisan Kennedy Center board of Biden appointees, fired the center’s president and made himself the new chairman.
The question now is what a thin-skinned showman will do with an institution of music, theater and dance that has been central to Washington’s cultural life for more than 50 years.
Stephen K. Bannon, the longtime Trump adviser, thinks there should be an opening night performance of the J6 Prison Choir, made up of men once imprisoned for their role in the assault on the Capitol but now pardoned by Mr. Trump. The president could also emulate one of his favorite authoritarians, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into state-sanctioned art to glorify the nation and his leadership.
The prevailing view in a stunned Washington is that a center that offers a smorgasbord of more than 2,000 events a year — everything from a towering production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle to “Sesame Street: The Musical” — will now feature more country music ahead of 2026, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Notably, the country singer Lee Greenwood, a Trump supporter whose signature song “God Bless the USA” has become a Republican anthem, is on the board.
Whatever the center’s future, conservatives exulted that Mr. Trump’s domination of Washington has extended to artistic expression and a pillar of the city’s establishment.