#president-johnson — Public Fediverse posts

Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center is showier, emptier and more political – The Washington Post

Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center is showier, emptier and more political

In 10 months, the president has transformed Washington’s cultural hub. Now comes his biggest night yet: the Kennedy Center Honors.

Updated today at 12:48 p.m. EST, 16 min
By Travis M. Andrews and Janay Kingsberry

On the day in February that President Donald Trump took over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, his new board ousted Deborah Rutter, the longtime president of the institution. She gathered her staff to offer a hopeful farewell. That evening, she welcomed other leaders to her home to mourn.

“As with any wake, you drink a little too much, and you tell stories, and you laugh, and you cry,” Rutter told The Washington Post in a conversation in the spring.

Rutter had planned to step down at the end of 2025 after leading the Kennedy Center through a decade in which it had diversified its offerings, endured the 2020 lockdown and emerged to boast robust ticket sales and, according to publicly available tax filings, steadily grown revenue.

She still had four major items on her to-do list: growing the center’s endowment; furthering its work as an arts educator around the country; strengthening the financials of the National Symphony Orchestra; and renewing the contract with CBS or finding a new broadcast partner to air the Kennedy Center Honors.

Those plans died. But the Kennedy Center did not.

The center is now guided by a board of Trump loyalists and a new staff including the center’s president, Richard Grenell, a pugnacious veteran of the first Trump administration. They have terminated much of the former staff, lambasted the former leadership and made changes including the addition of high-wattage events like the World Cup draw. They have embarked on a $257 million renovation, in line with Trump’s broader effort to leave his mark on Washington’s cityscape. They’ve boasted about hefty fundraising.

Now, nearly 10 months in, a picture of a transformed institution has come into view. Standbys of the Kennedy Center’s stages like the National Symphony Orchestra have been strained by plummeting ticket sales and organizational uncertainty. Traveling productions and acts have pulled out. And a new kind of right-leaning programming has begun to take root.

So what is the Kennedy Center now?

For one thing, it’s getting a Trumpian revamp. He ordered new marble and the repainting of the exterior columns in austere white. Portraits of the first and second couples now hang in the center’s Hall of Nations, and the building exterior is occasionally lit up in red, white and blue (a move that, many staffers joke, makes the building look like the flag of France, not America).

“It was in rough shape,” Trump said at an event Saturday ahead of the Kennedy Center Honors. “But we’ve fixed the White House, and we’ve fixed the Kennedy Center.”

Even the medallions for the Honors, created by Ivan Chermayeff and made for nearly 50 years by a D.C.-area family, have been redesigned by Tiffany & Company.

And — wittingly or not — the new leadership has made the center a political football for the first time since its opening in 1971. House Republicans have suggested renaming it for Trump (the whole building) and the first lady (just the Opera House). Conservative groups have flocked there to host conferences and meetings. Senate Democrats are investigating the Kennedy Center, accusing Grenell of “self-dealing, favoritism, and waste,” which he has denied.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center is showier, emptier and more political – The Washington Post

#1971 #DonaldTrumpSKennedyCenter #Emptier #FiredBoard #History #JFK #KennedyCenterHonors #MorePolitical #PresidentJohnson #Takeover #TicketSalesDown #TrumpSKennedyCenter

Letters from an American – August 5, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, August 5, 2025 (Tuesday)

By Heather Cox Richardson, Aug 05, 2025

Sixty years ago tomorrow, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies.

The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.

Southern states always held elections: it was just foreordained that Democrats would win them.

Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II.

During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that Black Americans fought in segregated units, and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if Black and Brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances.

Meanwhile, Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on their former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-5-2025-tuesday

August 5, 2025 (Tuesday) by Heather Cox Richardson

Read on Substack

#2025 #America #CivilWar #DonaldTrump #Education #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #LyndonBJohnson #Politics #PresidentJohnson #Resistance #Science #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #VotingRightsAct

Ewwwww. Gross!

Mike Johnson was technically US president for 'about 37 seconds' — here’s why
https://www.alternet.org/mike-johnson-vance-presidency/

#MikeJohnson #PresidentJohnson #NoRepublicansEverAgain #USPol

Song of the Day April 11 2024

In commemoration of the 56th Anniversary of President Johnson signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 aka The Fair Housing Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968

President Lyndon Johnson - Remarks on Signing the Civil Rights Act of 1968

https://youtu.be/Q11kvbJy0cs?si=zVpogIMxRROUyr4h

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2024 #April11 #PresidentJohnson #CivilRightsAct #FairHousingAct #1968 #BlackHistory #AmericanHistory #LyndonBainesJohnson #LBJ #CivilRightsAct #Justice #FairHousing #MartinLutherKing