Sara Pequeño: Trump’s anti-art crusade goes beyond Kennedy Center ego trip | Opinion

There is no facet of American life that President Donald Trump hasn’t touched in the past year. That includes the art world – even when Trump isn’t the subject.

In the past several months, Trump has taken over the Kennedy Center, having himself elected chair by the organization’s board and putting his name on the institution in December. This has resulted in artists canceling performances and other events at the center, from a Christmas Eve jazz concert to a gala hosted by “Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz.

This, alongside the dissolution of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Trump’s threats directed toward the Smithsonian, equates to a very precarious time for publicly funded arts and humanities. Back in July, renowned artist Amy Sherald canceled a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery after the museum considered removing her painting depicting a transgender woman as the Statue of Liberty.

Trump has gone so far as to say that he is interested in eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2025, he led his administration to cancel NEA grants.

And while there is some diversity among ongoing NEA-funded projects, recently appointed Chair Mary Anne Carter stressed that the agency is not going to give preferential treatment to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“Don’t apply for us to fund your DEI director, because we’re not going to,” Carter told an audience at the recent Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference.

Art, no matter the medium, is deeply political. Art that is sanctioned by the state without the ability to criticize the state, as Trump wants to see, is no better than propaganda. With the future of public funding for the arts hanging in the balance, this is yet another place where United States residents should push back against the continuous creep of authoritarianism.

Republicans defunding the arts isn’t new, but Trump’s effect is.

Republicans have been trying to cut arts funding within states and across the country for years. In 1997, the conservative Heritage Foundation published a report with 10 reasons to end the NEA.

Ryan Bourne of the conservative Cato Institute argued in 2025 for the end of the NEA, stating that “there is no robust economic case for direct taxpayer funding of art.”

We can argue in circles over whether art that is funded by the government can ever truly critique the institution in its past or present iterations, but what is clear is that Trump wants to make it harder for any publicly funded art to criticize him. Beyond that, he doesn’t seem to want it to be publicly funded whatsoever – even though that deeply affects what people have access to in their communities.

At the APAP conference, Carter stated that 22.5% of U.S. counties rely solely on NEA funding to keep theaters, museums and other arts organizations afloat. There is no private funding coming into these areas, which are mostly rural. That means that if NEA funding were to disappear, as many conservatives want to see, arts programs across the country would cease to exist.

Trump’s anti-art agenda goes far beyond the Kennedy Center

Trump’s desire to take over the arts allowed in our museums and theaters begets a larger agenda to stop publicly funding the arts altogether. Funding for the NEA is now $207 million, even though Trump’s proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year proposes eliminating it altogether. The $207 million was only recently agreed to in Congress and still has several steps to go before it’s official.

But artists are affected by more than grants. Every element of Trump’s government takeover, from Medicaid cuts to tariffs to attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, affects the lives of artists. People are unable to create art if they are unable to afford necessities.

My late grandmother was a public-school art teacher in Virginia. In 1996, she was awarded the Virginia Art Education Association’s “Elementary Art Teacher of the Year.” In her application, she explained that many of her students would never visit an art museum unless she organized a field trip to one.

I wonder how many people would go without seeing art if Trump’s decimation of public arts funding goes into effect.

Follow USA Today columnist Sara Pequeño on Bluesky: @sarapequeno.bsky.social