Much about the nature of the second Trump presidency could be grasped throughout 2025 in its imperious conduct toward The Kennedy Center. The president will host the next Kennedy Center Honors event himself, he has declared. To peruse the Kennedy Center website now is to see a fractured country in microcosm. Letting jazz artists engage in free expression at The Kennedy Center would undercut the state-sponsored revisionism underway in the museums. We are blameless, say the MAGA culture warriors; it is someone else’s fault.