He is abusing his office to force cultural institutions to bend the knee and allow MAGA to place their version of our American history in museums, universities and media companies.
The annual Kennedy Center Honors will take place for the 48th time on December 7, and will be hosted for the first time by a sitting president. By purging all Democrats from the Kennedy Center board, replacing them with loyalists, and installing himself as chairman, Donald Trump also made himself the main attraction of this momentous event.
His predecessors in the Oval Office did not organize the event or participate in selecting the honorees, but Trump boasted 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 Voxters.” Regarding his hosting duties, the president said he doesn't want to be the center of attention. “I was asked to host,” he said at an August press conference for the gala. “I said, ‘I’m the president of the United States. Are you fools asking me to do this? “Sir, you will get much better grades.” I said, “I don't care. I'm the President of the United States, I won't do that.” They said, “Please”… I said, “OK… I'll do it.”
On the one hand, it's just Trump, who once said his “ultimate job” would be running a studio for the silver screen era; who said that being on a reality show is “like being a rock star”; and who famously opined that “when you're a star… you can do anything” while pursuing his lifelong dream of joining the elite. What he could not buy as a developer, Trump can now appropriate for himself as president. “I wanted one, but I never got one,” he said of the Kennedy Center honors. “And I said, 'Screw it, I'll become chairman and honor myself.'
But Trump doesn't just want to sit at the popular children's table—he wants to make it his own. And he is supported in achieving this goal by the like-minded MAGA movement. MAGA politics of grievance and grievance have long been fueled by the idea that “the left”—an umbrella term for all cultural institutions from Hollywood to hip-hop to Harvard—has amassed the entire cultural capital of the country. The movement now has a chance to establish itself as elite in a way it never could have done organically. The goal is not simply to seize the prestige they have always envied, but to use it to strengthen their power—to rewrite the history that shapes our shared public memory, to erase truths that contradict their patriarchal white supremacist ideology, and to ensure that every museum exhibit, television show, and classroom lesson conveys their worldview.
Just weeks after Trump's re-election Wall Street Journal published an article “How Trump Can Rid Washington of Wokeness,” co-authored by a member of Project 2025. “Take back control of museums, starting with the Smithsonian,” the authors advise. “Dissolve the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” they added. In a section beginning with “End Woke Campus Practices,” they endorsed the president's plans to “protect free speech,” which in conservative parlance means allowing racist rhetoric while punishing dissent.
Done, done and done! After his inauguration, the president criticized the Smithsonian's view of “how bad slavery was” and removed 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 anti-Semitism, administrators are threatening to withhold federal funds and deport foreign-born students in response to student protests.
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The MAGA cultural takeover extends beyond museums and college classrooms to popular culture. Disney, ABC's parent company, dropped The Jimmy Kimmel Show after FCC Chairman and “Project 2025” co-creator Brendan Carr objected to Kimmel's remarks about the MAGA movement politicizing 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, the company that owns 32 ABC affiliates, said it would continue to advance the show. Nexstar is in the midst of a pending $6.2 billion merger with TV company Tegna, which requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). On ABC's side, the network had already demonstrated its willingness to shut down months earlier when it settled Trump's frivolous libel lawsuit for $15 million.
Paramount followed the same path. After Trump sued 60 minutes because of a campaign interview with Kamala Harris that he didn't like, Paramount paid out $16 million in damages. When late-night host Stephen Colbert joked that the fee was a “big bribe” to secure the company's merger with Skydance, Paramount canceled his show on CBS. Skydance, led by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, then agreed to install a “bias monitor” to monitor CBS and announced it would acquire the right-wing media company. Free press will include a top job at CBS News for co-founder Bari Weiss, a conservative whose schtick is pretending to be a disgruntled liberal. Meanwhile, as of this writing, TikTok is close to being acquired by a consortium consisting of Silver Lake, Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz—the latter two of which are owned by Trump's billionaire donors. And don't forget that X owner Elon Musk spent more than $250 million to elect Trump and other Republicans.
So here it is. America's “liberal media” – as it will undoubtedly continue to be called – will soon be largely in the hands of tycoons linked to Trump. It may seem that these institutions do not need to agree with Trump or give in to his demands, given that the laws are on their side. But it's hard not to think that they are already preparing to create a country in which Trump's threat of retaliation outweighs everything else. After all, fascism is often defined as the fusion 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. Come December, when Trump takes the stage at the Kennedy Center as emcee, it may seem like just a vanity project. But know that you are watching American culture being weaponized—one stage, one station, and one late-night TV show at a time.
