Donald Trump isn’t exactly known for his wide-ranging interest in the arts. His aesthetic tastes tend toward gilded clutter, heroic statuary, old pop tunes, and an overall disdain for modernism. So last month, when he took over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—none of whose 2,200 annual presentations he has ever attended—it seemed like a chest-thumping gesture in the autocratic style of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Seizing control of arts institutions in his country, Orbán has shown how culture is a ready sphere for consolidating power, stifling pluralism and dissent, defining national identity and demarcating who belongs to it, and most of all, limiting our ability to imagine how else the world might be.

Thankfully, that is harder to achieve in the United States, with its vast, varied, and diffuse arts sphere, though the Trump administration is doing its best to reduce the nation’s arts sectors into platforms for the MAGA creed. So far—according to some two dozen arts leaders who spoke with The Nation, as well as the public statements and social media posts of many more—arts organizations, with a few high-profile exceptions, are feeling shaken and alarmed but not bowing down.

The handful of American cultural institutions that are in some way federal—by virtue of being housed on the national mall in Washington, DC, or being controlled by a government agency, for instance—have been easy targets for Trump’s authoritarian incursions. After his executive orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and declaring trans people nonexistent, most of these institutions quickly capitulated: The National Gallery of Art scrubbed its website of DEI language and closed its Office of Belonging and Inclusion. The Smithsonian Institution did the same. The National Cryptology Museum (operated by the National Security Agency) went so far as to tape brown paper over plaques honoring women and people of color who served the NSA. (They uncovered them after facing criticism from NSA retirees.)

Two exhibits scheduled to open this month at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, featuring Black and LGBTQ artists, were abruptly canceled in February. The US Marine Band axed a concert program with high school student musicians of color from across the US. The National Park Service erased the word “transgender” from its website for the Stonewall National Monument in New York, and it disappeared the “T” and later, the “Q+” from any mentions of LGBTQ+.

At the Kennedy Center, Trump installed as president his envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, a man with no experience in arts administration, and most recently in the news for helping the avowed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, and his brother Tristan, leave Romania, where they face charges of human trafficking, rape, forming a criminal gang, and money laundering. Grenell’s latest special mission is apparently to protect audiences in Washington, DC, from the perils of sequins and feather boas.

“NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA,” Trump crowed in a post welcoming Grenell to his new job. Engagements that run afoul of MAGA dogma were quickly canceled, among them the comedy show “Riot! Funny Women Stand Up,” the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC, and Finn, a children’s show about a young shark who discovers and embraces his difference from other sharks. The International Pride Orchestra, which was completing a contract for a concert scheduled for June as part of WorldPride events, found itself abruptly disinvited.

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In these respects, “arts and culture aren’t being singled out by this administration,” said Jamie Bennett, interim co–chief executive officer at the advocacy organization, Americans for the Arts. “The good news is, we’re being treated as a core part of the federal government. The bad news is, they are taking a wrecking ball to core parts of the federal government.”

But beyond these government-yoked, emblematic institutions in the capital, there are some 131,000 nonprofit arts organizations that serve communities in nearly every one of America’s 3,144 counties. They are not centralized and cannot be DOGEd. And this is likely the reason that the arts aren’t even mentioned in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, which has been guiding the MAGA gutting of essential government functions and services and providing language for its culture-war talking points. These independent nonprofits—though facing funding threats and intimidation—are standing up to MAGA bullying.

One of them, for instance—the Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda, Maryland—has picked up the International Pride Orchestra concert banned from the Kennedy Center, including its emcee, the Bay Area iconic drag queen, Peaches Christ. And the venue’s website still asserts that it is “relentlessly committed to engaging the full diversity of our community.”

While Trump can’t tamper directly with the numerous arts groups that pursue and proclaim such principles, he is trying to control them through the priorities and purse strings of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which announced 1,474 awards totaling $36.8 million for the first of two granting rounds for fiscal 2025 just days before Trump’s inauguration. While these figures pale next to European per capita arts subsidies, an NEA imprimatur often leads to further funding from local government agencies, private foundations, and individual donors, and even a small NEA grant can make or break an organization in remote or rural areas. Trump has been trying to imperil those funds—bypassing congressional appropriations—by imposing ideological criteria.

First, new application guidelines encourage projects that “celebrate and honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.” Though the associated America250 program was established by Congress in 2016 and the NEA invited applicants to address related themes before Trump’s inauguration, the prompt has become ominous in the context of the Trump agenda: an executive order calling for American schools to promote “patriotic education” and the deletion of statistical data related to global warming, demographics, and other areas, all in an effort to reshape reality. Along these lines, the NEA canceled its “Challenge America,” program, launched in 2001 to provide $10,000 grants to small organizations reaching “historically underserved communities with rich and dynamic cultural identities”—a description that flies in the face of the broad attack on DEI. Last year’s 272 Challenge America recipients, to cite just a few examples, included a dance company in Chicago developing “community programming for low-income families,” an art museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania, providing accessible “engagement opportunities for people living with dementia and their caregivers,” and, in Concho OK, an animated film based on a traditional Cheyenne story.

Meanwhile, new application guidelines posted in January for the general “Grants in Arts” program required applicants to pledge their allegiance to Trumpism by adhering to executive orders that prohibit DEI activities and the promotion of “gender ideology.” After a federal district court enjoined DEI executive orders in late February, an addendum went up on the NEA website, stating that the DEI restrictions “will not apply to your award as long as this preliminary injunction remains in effect.” And on March 6, the ACLU filed suit on behalf of artists and theater groups objecting on First Amendment and other grounds to the “gender ideology” stipulation. The next day, the NEA partially backed down, removing the pledge requirement, but maintaining that any projects that appear to “promote gender ideology” will not receive an award. The ACLU is seeking a preliminary injunction on this prohibition ahead of the grant application deadline of April 7. A hearing is scheduled for March 27.

Despite this progress in the courts, arts leaders remain fearful even as they hold fast to their missions. They can’t help worrying: What if the preliminary injunction does not remain in effect? Even if the courts rule against the executive orders in every appeal, what if the administration concocts a constitutional way to impose the same conditions? Or simply flouts rulings in the artists’ favor? What if the restrictions are applied retroactively, and grants already approved are revoked?

Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, co–executive director at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a multigenerational community arts incubator, whose website asserts their commitment to “disrupting narratives and structures that perpetuate white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism,” can even imagine that the administration might strip organizations’ nonprofit status. It’s not so farfetched a suspicion given that Trump temporarily froze the bank accounts of climate groups that received EPA funds and that, last November, the Republican-dominated House passed a bill, currently under consideration by the Senate Finance Committee, that gives the Treasury Department unilateral power to rescind the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that it alleges support terrorism. Still, BAX is forging joyfully ahead with its drag classes for adults and kids (among a wide array of other programming).

Several arts leaders who spoke to The Nation requested anonymity. “There’s not one art nonprofit in the country that isn’t doing some form of what they call ‘DEI’ work,” said an administrator for a Rhode Island multidisciplinary arts center that includes racial justice programs among its offerings, who didn’t want to “put a target on the organization’s back.” And those who did speak on the record have encountered colleagues afraid to e-mail, text, or talk about their fears on the phone. When Courtney Wasson, executive director of the Kansas City Artists Coalition, reached out to local counterparts to discuss how to respond to the NEA restrictions, one insisted they meet in person rather than communicate in a form that could be surveilled or later subpoenaed. Some 450 artists signed a letter to the NEA initiated by the pioneering theater artist Annie Doresen that implored, “The arts community, which the NEA both supports and is a part of, must stand together in the face of those who would erase our memories, cramp our imaginations, and blinker our vision.” Only a few allowed their names to be made public.

“Everything feels so up in the air and chaotic,” said Benjamin Burdick, the producing artistic director of the Boise Contemporary Theater in Idaho, which was granted $25,000 by the NEA for its BIPOC play festival to take place this summer. “We’re just not sure, when we ask to be reimbursed for expenses coming up in couple of months, if we will get that money.” But canceling the festival is out of the question.

Amid what Dorsen described as widespread “panic, fear, and confusion,” many organizations—from the small literary publisher Tupelo Press in western Massachusetts to the Playwrights Center and Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis—posted defiant refusals to comply with the proposed NEA regulations. Off-Broadway’s Public Theater and New York Theatre Workshop, along with New Haven’s Long Wharf and Portland, Oregon’s Center Stage, issued a joint statement proclaiming their steadfast commitment to DEI and promising to “continue to uplift the work of transgender, non-binary, and queer artists and offer all our venues and programs for their stories. We will not endorse or agree to the NEA guidelines that seek to suppress or limit those efforts.” As the director of the New Harmony Project in Indianapolis summed up, “Our values are not for sale.”

Though Trump threatened to zero out the NEA budget every year of his first term, only to be rebuffed by Congress, the last major governmental assault on the arts took place some 35 years ago: A conservative Congress required NEA grant recipients to sign a pledge affirming they would not create work that was obscene, including work depicting homoerotic themes.

The clause was soon challenged as unconstitutional, so Congress passed a more vaguely worded revision that required funded artworks to adhere to “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” In the meantime, four performance artists were denied grants for alleged obscenity, even though panels of experts had approved them on the grounds of artistic merit. The NEA 4, as they came to be known, sued in 1992, and the case crawled up to the Supreme Court. In 1998, the Court ruled that requiring a consideration of decency did not infringe on free speech, and the provision stood.

However the court also noted that if the decency clause had barred speech because it expressed a disfavored view, it would have been unconstitutional, explained Vera Eidelman, the ACLU staff attorney leading the current lawsuit against the “gender ideology” restriction. With this prohibition, she said, “the NEA has crossed that line.” What’s more, back then, it was Congress that enacted changes to NEA guidelines, as falls within its purview; an executive order lacks the authority to set NEA policy. At issue, then, said Eidelman, is both “what the change is and who’s making it.”

Beyond the breaching of the law, the tenor of the current attacks has shifted. In the 1990s, denouncing the federal funding of a few sensationalized artists functioned essentially to undermine the idea of taxation by riling people up over the charge that their tax dollars were paying for “filth”; now, according to Eddie Torres, president and CEO of the national association Grantmakers in the Arts, “the subtext has become the headline of the administration.” The old agenda to cut government spending has become an unchecked system for transferring public wealth into private, kleptocratic hands.

But compared to other federal agencies, NEA allocations are minuscule. The National Institutes of Health, for instance, received $47.3 billion in federal dollars 2024, the NEA $207 million. So why would Trump even bother?

Simple, said Holly Hughes, one of the NEA 4, who has felt chills of déjà vu these last weeks: The “ultimate goal—apart from authoritarian control—is to impoverish and destroy community institutions. When there are no civic institutions, it’s not safe to gather,” she said. And theaters, galleries, concert halls, and other arts spaces, as much as anything, invite people to encounter ideas, consolations, provocations, puzzlements, contradictions, and more, along with other flesh-and-blood humans in real time. So artists are doubling down on the work itself more than organizing what may be splashier protests. As the administration barrels calamitously through universities, libraries, and scientific research agencies, and attacks and overwhelms professional journalism, our last best hope for publicly sharing, shaping, and wrangling over independent ideas may turn out to be America’s scrappy and disparate arts spaces. If, that is, they can hang on financially.