Remembering the Kennedy Center

With more than 300,000 Haitians in America on the brink of being sent back to their tragic country, you’d think worrying about the Kennedy Center’s future would be a luxury. And that it is, but I think it is an important luxury, both for what the Center has been and for what Mr. Trump is doing to what it represents.

First, he took over managing it. Then, he put his name before Kennedy’s name. Now, faced with performers backing out of contracted shows by the dozens, he decides to close it for two years for “renovations.”

We lived in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a Washington suburb, from 1975 to 1982. The Kennedy Center was fresh and new and spectacular. We most often visited it for performances of the National Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall, with famed Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich on the podium. I particularly remember hearing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, featuring two of the three soloists on my prized premier recording of the work.

Another clear memory is the December afternoon when our Southern Maryland Choral Society performed Bach and Respighi in the 630-foot long lobby. Singing in that hall didn’t feel like second best at all!

I think Maxine and I attended performances in the Center’s other theaters as well, but I cannot name them.

Maxine and I have been regular viewers of the Kennedy Center Honors program each December for just about as long as it has been broadcast. Those programs told the stories of prominent musical artists representing many genres, some of which I confess I do not much appreciate. But we always sat in awe of the stories of talented people honing those talents into high artistic achievement.

Although the Kennedy Center and its programming are somehow related to our Federal Government, I never worried about the politics of the place. The President welcomed the Honors’ winners to the White House, and sat in the premier box during the show. If any president ever had a hand in choosing who performed at the Center, or who was honored by it, I never knew about it. I am willing to guess that, beyond an occasional suggestion or two, the process was non-partisan.

Donald Trump changed all that, just as he has changed almost everything about how we do politics in this country. In my mind, he is exercising presidential power and prerogative beyond any we have ever seen before, while Congress and the courts sit idly by, unwilling to challenge even his most dictatorial moves. State and local governments are doing what they can, and people are in the streets. But still he marches on, our own little would-be Lion King, lording it over all us apes.

I care about what happens to the Haitians now in our midst. Sending them back to Haiti will be a death sentence for many of them. And that’s worse than what happens to the Kennedy Center. But both matters are strands in one huge cloth of hate and fear-driven narcism and racism that know no internal limits. None of this will come out well.

If anyone who could stop Trump’s ruining of the Kennedy Center fails to do so, then I think the least Congress could do would be to rescind whatever action it once took to name it as memorial to John F. Kennedy, and let whatever Trump builds be called the Trump Center for the Performing Arts. Associating President Kennedy’s name with it will no longer be an honor, because the place of his memorialization will have been desecrated beyond recognition. It will, in fact, deserve to be called nothing more than “Trump.”

Our Exceptional Nation of Immigrants?

“Exceptional” is one of political conservatives’ favorite adjectives to describe our country. Taken for what the word itself means, to call the United States “exceptional” is to assert that it lies somewhere outside the norms of nations. There’s no moral, ethical, or legal value to a nation simply being exceptional. In its adverbial form, the word can mean exceptionally good, or exceptionally bad, or exceptionally mediocre.

“Exceptionalism” is a lens through which conservatives often view the United States. By assuming that “exceptional” can only be followed by the likes of “good,” when exceptionalism considers the state of our union, it sees good everywhere and all the time. American exceptionalism filters out anything that might be bad or negative—such as slavery—so as to keep the lens focused on our claimed exceptional good.

With the above in mind, I call your attention to the opening lines in Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American blog for January 31, 2026:

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”

One legitimate reason to call the U.S. “exceptional” is that U.S. citizenship is not based on blood alone, but also, for those not born here, on their freely given pledge to “support and defend (our) Constitution and laws.” We are exceptional because we are “a nation of immigrants,” and that is good, and we are proud of it.

Apparently Mr. Miller does not like that aspect of our being exceptional. He does not think being “a nation of immigrants” is a good exception to the norm of nations. He breaks ranks with those who gaze at us through “exceptionality’s” eyes. When it comes to immigration, he wants us to stop being the exception.

It is not hard to believe that to Mr. Miller, the only good immigrant might be one whose skin is white, as with the white people from South Africa this administration eagerly welcomes. He has said as much in the past. His imported immigrant “labor class,” never to become one of us, would no doubt be dark-skinned and forever poor. Such a commodity (after all, it is imported) would be slavery dressed in new clothing. Mr. Miller does not accept the ideal of the United States welcoming peoples of all races and nations into a truly exceptional national community.

His post is full of holes, but his rejection of our “nation of immigrants” exceptionalism strikes me as deepest of them all.