Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, Donald Trump has taken over the Kennedy Center, appointed himself as chairman, and is now working to remake the most storied cultural institution in Washington, D.C., in his own image.
Since 1971, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—founded by Kennedy as an “artistic mecca” and renamed by Congress as a “living memorial” to the president two months after his assassination—has hosted a wide range of performing-arts and music genres and has made a point of being bipartisan in its curation. But since retaking the White House for his second term, Trump has stacked the Kennedy Center’s board with trusted MAGA allies, promised to purge “drag shows” and “woke” content from the venue, and barred the National Endowment for the Arts from funding works that promote “gender ideology.”
When Broadway superstar Lin-Manuel Miranda announced he was canceling next year’s run of Hamilton at the venue due to this “shift in the Kennedy Center’s ideology,” Trump responded by revealing he never really liked the play—an opinion consistent with the president’s general distaste for the Founding Fathers.
Trump’s official debut will be on June 11, when he is expected to host a fundraising event followed by a performance of Les Misérables, the musical based on Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel about a former convict on the run from his past.
At least 10 cast members have already planned to boycott the show. The newly appointed president of the center, Richard Grenell, a Trump acolyte who is currently serving as the special presidential envoy for special missions of the United States” (yes, that is his real title), responded by blasting the cast members as “vapid” and “intolerant,” warning that “any performer who isn’t professional enough to perform for patrons of all backgrounds, regardless of political affiliation, won’t be welcomed.”
Les Mis is, apparently, one of Trump’s favorite plays. The president is obsessed with blockbusters from the 1980s and undoubtedly counts himself among the pop-culture staples of that era. He has often incorporated songs from the musical into his campaign rallies, repeatedly blaring the anthemic “Do You Hear the People Sing?” through loudspeakers at his events—and prompting the creators of the stage musical to complain about the weaponization of a song in which the oppressed call for the overthrow of a tyrannical regime. When the U.S. Army Chorus performed the same song at the 2025 White House Governors Ball, some were left wondering whether it was a tongue-in-cheek message aimed at the president.
The glaring irony, though Trump has so far not acknowledged it, is that the president is inaugurating his woke-free Kennedy Center with a show that could not be further from the ethos of his administration. The moral landscape of Les Mis is the reverse image of MAGA world. The heroes of the play resemble the villains of today’s reality, and vice versa. The highest virtue of Hugo’s characters is mercy, while Trump’s role models thrive on retribution. The only people who seem to deserve the president’s pardon are the January 6 attackers, twistedly portrayed as hostages.
Jean Valjean, the protagonist of Les Mis, is a fugitive on parole who begins his journey to redemption through an act of mercy by the Bishop of Digne. In Trump’s world, Valjean would be immediately deported and jailed in El Salvador, with Kristi Noem in full combat gear glaring at the camera while he desperately sings, “Sweet Jesus, what have I done?,” behind bars. The bishop would face prosecution as an accomplice of a serial offender.
The Trump administration, by contrast, seems filled with Javerts—the fanatical inspector who cannot let go of his obsession with the law and refers to Valjean only as “Prisoner 24601.” Javert is as obsessed with catching Valjean as F.B.I. director Kash Patel seems to be with foiling the plot against King Trump. “Lord, let me find him / That I may see him / Safe behind bars / I will never rest / Till then,” Javert sings in his grudging monologue. His philosophy of justice dovetails with that of a government that has promised to arrest and deport millions of undocumented immigrants—and with that of a president who once declared that “anyone convicted of a crime should spend time behind bars.”
The youth revolt in the streets of Paris in 1832 ends in violent suppression by an authoritarian regime pushing its people further into misery. In 2025, peaceful protesters on U.S. campuses are arbitrarily arrested and stripped of their rights. The play is a cry for help from the world’s derelicts, while today, funding cuts to U.S.A.I.D. programs are endangering millions of marginalized people around the globe.
Hugo wrote: “Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: ‘Open up, I am here for you.’” This is the ultimate meaning of the work Trump will soon display as a trophy in the Kennedy Center—remade to reflect the MAGA worldview.
Mattia Ferraresi is the managing editor at the Italian newspaper Domani. You can read his past AIR MAIL stories on Trump’s mini-me and Pope Francis’s manuscript thief here
