The President’s recent announcement that he is kicking out the chairman and a host of board members of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and installing himself as the new boss with the promise of ushering in “a Golden Age of Arts and Culture” seemed almost like a dash of comic relief in the midst of all the other pronouncements pouring out of his office like torrents of acid rain.

There is nothing funny about it, of course, except in the most deeply ironic, gallows-humor sense. And compared to other actions of the new administration it might seem like small potatoes, a quirky act of vengeance or vanity or disruption for the sheer pleasure of it. We are undergoing a cultural and political onslaught, a full-force offensive of shock and awe in which attacks pile on so swiftly and frequently that by the time you respond to one a dozen more have landed. The Musk/Trump Administration has come to a game of checkers loaded for bear, and it is firing freely and furiously.

On Monday Trump announced he was naming his ally Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence, as the Kennedy Center’s interim executive director, a position that did not previously exist. And on Wednesday, by a vote of his newly named board after purging it of all of its Biden appointees, he was elected as the center’s chairman – hardly a position that a sitting president of the United States, who has countless other crucial civic duties to perform, should be taking on.

If the importance of the Kennedy Center takeover seems to pale against other radical measures of the new administration, it is part of a larger pattern that could visibly weaken Oregon’s and the rest of the nation’s arts and cultural life. The first Trump administration attempted to kill off the Public Broadcasting System, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Public Radio, and other cultural outlets.

Those groups are targets again, this time with Trump’s party in control of both houses of Congress and Elon Musk taking a chain saw to any and all federal agencies and programs he doesn’t like. Among the many federal funding freezes that Trump and Musk have attempted to put in place (several freeze orders have been stalled by the courts) are grants to libraries, archives, and museums – which, combined with the aim to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, amounts to an all-out war on learning and knowledge, which are intimately entwined with culture and the arts, and thus with the nurturing of an informed and broadly thinking electorate.

The loss of the NEA and NEH in particular would have a deep impact across the nation, because federal money from those endowments flows to state boards such as the Oregon Arts Commission, which then pass them along for grant opportunities and programming across the state. Federal funding amounts to close to a third of the arts commission’s budget. The Oregon Cultural Trust, which also supports state arts and cultural groups, does not receive federal money.  The federal share is about 10 percent of the two agencies’ combined budgets.

With the destruction of the federal-to-state system, “a Golden Age of Arts and Culture” would become unlikely, indeed – especially since it would come on top of more local financial squeezes. The Oregon Legislature, for instance, has tough decisions to make about how to spend a limited amount of money. On Wednesday evening, Feb. 12, the Legislature’s Arts & Culture Caucus will hold a gathering at the Elsinore Theatre in Salem at which it will announce its legislative priorities for the session. It’ll be interesting to see what those priorities are, and, later, how successful the caucus will have been in getting its legislation passed.

Meanwhile, the City of Portland, which has recently set up its own Office of Arts & Culture, is facing an estimated deficit of more than $100 million as it grapples with issues ranging from housing and homelessness to an attempt to revive downtown: Under those circumstances, arts funding, like a lot of other priorities, is almost certain to take a hit.

The concept of President Trump leading “a Golden Age of Arts and Culture” is a bit like claiming that Nero and his fiddle led Rome into a golden age of symphonic music. And the president’s rationale for this takeover of the small yet vital Kennedy Center, following his earlier dissolution of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, is equally absurd. Trump declared he was taking over the Kennedy Center board because it had sponsored Broadway Drag Brunches, during which drag performers belted out show tunes. He linked the events – a tiny part of programming at the center — to pedophilia, “specifically targeting our youth,” although there is no evidence that minors attended.

Drag artists, of course, are on the same presidential no-no list as transgender people, gay and lesbian people and the physically disabled, such as New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, whose arthrogryposis, a disease that causes a loss of muscular control, Trump mocked during his 2016 presidential campaign by making little rabbity chewing gestures when referring to Kovaleski and flapping his hands about uncontrollably.

One can, of course, approve of or disapprove of or be neutral about drag performance without insisting that everyone else adopt the same position. And the fact is that drag in one form or another has been with us for centuries, and was integral, for instance, to the plays of the revered William Shakespeare, whose female characters were played by boy actors, and whose audiences were enthusiastically in on the gender-switching joke when, in several of the comedies, a boy played a woman who might be doing a double-switch by pretending to be a man, which in fact in real life “she” was.

It’s a matter of subtlety and wit and art’s role (or one of its many roles) of butting its head against convention and suggesting other possibilities. “Other possibilities,” of course, can be a danger to an autocratic system, which thrives on unforced or forced agreement. And so Trump’s war on arts and culture, even as he declares a “golden age” of them, begins to make a kind of twisted if irrational sense.

Meanwhile, arts organizations large and small across the nation are still struggling to regain their footing after the financial disaster that accompanied the Covid pandemic. Disruption in government funding, even if funding from foundations and individuals holds steady or even increases, threatens the whole nonprofit structure of arts and culture in the U.S.

How does all of this stack up against the administration’s other wrecking-ball moves? As a reminder, here’s an incomplete look at the larger picture (a New York Times editorial a few days ago goes into more detail):

• Pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization.
• The attack on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which, if carried out, would result in wholesale deaths by starvation and disease around the world and very possibly a flip in the global balance of power toward China and Russia.
• The order to strip all mention of or action on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from government and schools and any organizations, including museums and other cultural and scientific centers, that receive federal funding, thus tumbling the nation back toward the dark days of its white supremacist past.
• The appointing of a vaccine-denying zealot as the nation’s top health administrator.
• The attempted freezing of already approved grants to organizations ranging from scientific and health labs to museums, archives, and libraries.
• The willy-nilly strip-mining and discarding of government workers and programs by the world’s wealthiest human, with no oversight or congressional consent.

We are talking here not about a dispute over a small slice of programming by the Kennedy Center, but about the destruction of an entire federal system providing not just arts and cultural assistance, but aid to citizens who need it in all sorts of ways. This amounts to less a “golden age” than … well, a perverse and destructive drag.