WASHINGTON — Heather Dune Macadam still remembers one thought that bubbled inside her as she stepped onto the stage decades ago at the Kennedy Center for a dance competition: “Wow, I made it.”
Then, just last month, when she heard about President Donald Trump’s appointment as chairman of the Kennedy Center and the replacement of its board, she thought back to a parallel experience she had during the Reagan administration.
It was May 1981 when the then-21-year-old dancer had her first professional dance gig at the Kennedy Center. That same night, the Reagan administration cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, as she recalled. The day after their competition, without the pay they had expected to receive, the Wayne State dance team put their pennies together to buy enough gas to get back to Detroit.
Macadam said the funding cut wasn’t only a hit to their pocketbooks and felt like a betrayal of hope and the arts. In the years since, Macadam became a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company and later a Holocaust biographer and documentary filmmaker of “999: The Forgotten Girls.”
Now Macadam, like many other performing artists and creative people, viewed President Donald Trump’s appointment as chairman of the Kennedy Center and the replacement of its board with trepidation about the consequences for artistic freedom.
“I fear for my country,” Macadam said. “I fear for my country's moral and ethical conscience, which I think the arts hold us accountable to. And without that moral compass, where will we go?”
One entrance hall of the Kennedy Center displays flags from all 50 states and Washington D.C. Valerie Chu/MNS
The recent upheaval at the Kennedy Center started with a Feb. 7 Truth Social post from Trump, in which he announced the immediate termination of multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees who “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” To some artists, it marked a startlingly authoritarian approach to the arts that started when he abolished the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities hours after his second inauguration.
The Kennedy Center was established under the Eisenhower administration by the National Cultural Center Act in 1958 and later renamed in another law to serve as a “living memorial” to President John F. Kennedy.
A Kennedy Center statement captured by archive on Feb. 8 but no longer available said the center was “aware of the post made recently by POTUS (Trump) on social media” but had received no official communications from the White House regarding changes to their board of trustees.
“There is nothing in the Center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board,” the statement said.
In less than a week, multiple Biden appointees were purged from the Kennedy Center. The new board then elected Trump as its chairman. No previous president had ever assumed that role.
Changes to the Kennedy Center’s programming have already started. On March 6, “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and lead producer Jeffrey Seller told the New York Times that the musical about the birth of American democracy would not be performed next year at the Kennedy Center.
“The recent purge by the Trump Administration of both professional staff and performing arts events at or originally produced by the Kennedy Center flies in the face of everything this national cultural center represents,” Seller wrote in the statement. “Given these recent actions, our show simply cannot, in good conscience, participate and be a part of this new culture that is being imposed on the Kennedy Center.”
On Feb. 18, the Kennedy Center canceled a pride concert planned for May 21 that would have featured the Gay Men’s Choir. And on Feb. 14, actress, comedian, and television producer Issa Rae canceled her sold-out show, “An Evening With Issa Rae.”
Marshall Coid, a musician who has performed at the Kennedy Center multiple times, said that the Kennedy Center should not be turned into a sanitized place that caters to “undeveloped and narrow-minded tastes.” He raised concerns that the new board would villainize art forms such as drag performances, whose elements and history extend far beyond what most people initially picture drag to be.
“The Kennedy Center, to me, represents the nation,” Coid said. “And that’s everyone’s art. There’s room for it all.”
Coid studied violin at Juilliard and has performed as a countertenor and violinist at the Kennedy Center, including as a soloist in Tom O’Horgan staging of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” for the Center’s 10th Anniversary Celebration. He has also performed as an onstage violin soloist with Jinkx Monsoon while she played Matron “Mama” Morton in CHICAGO on Broadway, and he acted in several roles himself that included cross-dressing.
Coid said he was worried the Kennedy Center’s new leadership would interfere with programming, including banning drag. In Trump’s Truth Social post, he said: “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP.”
Coid described the Trump administration's move to control the Kennedy Center as something that left him and other performers he knows “heartsick, appalled and horrified.”
“We may not have so consciously been carrying around a sense of what it meant to us, but when it's taken away, we realize,” Coid said. “I think we took it for granted and never thought that it was vulnerable. And now it has been clearly demonstrated to be vulnerable, and as far as I'm concerned, under attack and being grotesquely diminished by this intrusion, by people that have no business having anything to do with it and should be nowhere near it.”
Singer, songwriter, and performer Gwen Levey said stories would go untold, and government censorship of the arts would likely increase. She predicted that social justice, which the Kennedy Center showcased previously, would no longer be promoted, and the variety of music would be reduced. She pointed to the diverse board of people appointed by previous presidents who resigned in the wake of Trump’s takeover, such as “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes, soprano Reneé Fleming, and singer-songwriter Ben Folds.
“The diversity is basically being sucked out of the Kennedy Center,” Levey said. “And I wouldn't be surprised if, like most things with this administration, it becomes very whitewashed.”
Neither the Kennedy Center nor the White House responded to multiple requests for comment.
Still, despite its uncertain future, in the weeks after Trump named himself chairman, music continued to fill the Kennedy Center’s halls like normal.
At a concert featuring Cody Fry, LANY, and Sleeping At Last, the artists made jokes, the audience whooped and clapped, and some even sang together during one song.
“Sometimes, I look out into the world, and it feels like optimism is like this radical act of bravery,” singer-songwriter Cody Fry said when introducing his last song. “And I want to focus my mind on the things that are good because I truly believe that the good outnumbers the bad.”
Valerie Chu is a Northwestern University student majoring in journalism, data science, and international studies.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.