Donald Trump took over as chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – which he told reporters he had never visited – on the birthday last week of Abraham Lincoln, who was a frequent theatergoer. 

Attitudes and actions involving the arts have varied considerably from president to president, and Presidents Day, a federal holiday that this year is being celebrated today, seems a good time to sample that history.

George Washington

Washington is a good person with whom to start, and not just because Presidents’ Day is still officially Washington’s Birthday, although it has come to honor all U.S. presidents. 

To the first president of the United States, support for the arts was an act of patriotism: “To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.”

A theatergoer in his youth and a longtime patron of the arts, President Washington signed the first copyright law in 1790, protecting the work of writers and artists

Two years earlier, the former leader of the Continental Army wrote  to the Marquis de Lafayette: “Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to poets, of their own as well as former times…In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.” 

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson had sometimes accompanied Washington to the theater in Virginia; he also played the violin. But his interest in the arts focused primarily on architecture and design. In a letter to James Madison in 1785, Jefferson insisted on the plans for a more beautiful Capitol building than the one that apparently  had already started construction: ‘You see, I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world and procure them its praise.”

Abraham Lincoln

People who know little else about Lincoln know that he was a  theatergoer, because he was assassinated while attending a play.  He was a lover of both opera and theater — and perhaps fittingly, has been the central character on the Broadway stage more often by far than any other president. Lincoln understood the power of the visual arts, encouraging photographers and painters to cover political people and events. Lincoln himself, although he lacked formal education, was a man of letters. a reader and writer of poetry. He admired William Shakespeare, frequently quoting from the Bard’s works, and even weighing in on their relative merits, writing once to a theater critic: “I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful. Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the soliloquy in Hamlet commencing ‘O, my offence is rank’ surpasses that commencing ‘To be, or not to be.’”

Franklin Roosevelt

Under FDR, the federal government established a massive Works Progress Administration in 1935 to provide employment during the Depression, including for artists of many stripes. Among the WPA programs, the Federal Theatre Project, under Its director Hallie Flannagan, generated  high quality theater at low prices for thirty millions Americans throughout the country – one-quarter of the entire population at the time, two thirds of whom had never see live theater before. The plan was for a theater “national in scope, regional in emphasis and American in democratic attitudes.” Congress shut down The Federal Theatre Project after four years, for political reasons — an early glimpse of  the red-baiting that fully flowered in the two decades that followed and the culture wars half a century later, But the Federal Theater Project is frequently held up as a model – and the posters were terrific.

John F. Kennedy

“Through his words and examples, President Kennedy raised awareness of the importance of the arts in America.” – from the Kennedy Center website. Robert Frost read a poem at JFK’s inauguration, and Kennedys, reportedly spearheaded by the First Lady, played host to an unprecedented series of concerts, ballets and operas inside the White House.

Kennedy waxed eloquent and prolific about the importance of the arts

“There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art.”

“I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty…an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.

“The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose…and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.” –

“We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” 

Kennedy issued an Executive Order power to establish the President’s Advisory Council on the Arts, but did not live to see its creation.

Lyndon Johnson

President Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts & the Humanities Act in 1965, which created the National Endowment for the Art: Although the NEA’s budget has always been relatively miniscule — for fiscal year (FY) 2025 it is $210.1 million, which is about 0.003 percent of the federal budget — it remains to this day by far the largest single source of support for the arts in this country. It also carries with it prestige that helps the recipients of NEA grants attract other funders.

The Act also created he National Endowment for the Humanities. the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Council on the Arts. Johnson swore in this council’s founding members, who included Isaac Stern, Gregory Peck, Helen Hayes, Ralph Ellison, Leonard Bernstein, and Agnes DeMille.

LBJ also signed the bill creating the National Cultural Center – which was christened the JFK Center for the Performing Arts.

“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner version which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Richard Nixon

Nixon played the piano and the violin, and, if he is infamous for coming off poorly on television, he actually performed a piano concerto of his own composition on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar. Nixon approved increases for the National Endowment for the Arts. Critics point out he also kept an infamous enemies list included prominent performers.

Ronald Reagan

Reagan, the only professional actor to become president, established the Presidents Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1982, an advisory committee on cultural issues made up of prominent artists and scholars as well as public officials.

One of his appointments on the separate (Johnson-created) National Council on the Arts, however, told the press he thought too much government support for the arts was dangerous, and was not sure the NEA should even exist “in the best of all possible worlds.”

Barack Obama

Like the Kennedys before them, the Obamas were arts lovers and made the White House a hospitable place for performers. Lin-Manuel Miranda performed the first songs of what became “Hamilton” in the Obama White House, and President Obama introduced him at the Tony Awards.
“The arts have always been central to the American experience. They provoke thought, challenge our assumptions, and shape how we define our narrative as a country.”
But arts advocates don’t credit the Obama administration with putting a particular priority on arts initiatives.

Joe Biden

If not especially known as an arts aficionado, Biden certainly attended the Kennedy Center. He was a supporter of the arts throughout his long political career, and during his presidency, his American Rescue Plan  provided life-saving programs for artists and art educators, including the NEA emergency relief fund, and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG), which provided $1.25 billion to help self-employed workers and businesses in the creative sector. 
He also reversed several arts-related policies of the first Trump administration.

Donald Trump

At the age of 23, Donald Trump was an associate producer of a play on Broadway entitled “Paris Is Out,” which ran for 96 performances. He is better known for his later partnership with Wrestlemania.

His first term as president didn’t reflect a special love for theater or the arts.

Immediately after assuming office, he placed a ban on visitors from a number of majority-Muslim countries that blocked entry for artists in every discipline.

Each year of his presidency, his proposed federal budget eliminated funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. But NEA survived, not because Trump ever changed his mind, but because Congress saved it.

Trump disbanded the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Coincidentally or not, its members had already resigned to protest his defense of white nationalists after the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

Trump gave out National Medals of Arts only twice during his term.

In his second term, he has already disbanded the Reagan-created Presidents’ Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, put restrictions on NEA grants to eliminate any effort at diversity, equity and inclusion, and purged the board of the Kennedy Center, taking over as chairman.

“We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center, and we don’t need — some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on.” 

He told reporters he hadn’t actually visited the center but received reports on it.

“I didn’t want to go. There was nothing I wanted to see.”

More on Trump arts actions in American Theatre and Washington Post