“Why must every president overplay his hand?” Christopher J. Scalia wrote on X the other day. Scalia, the son of the famed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and hardly a raging progressive, was referring to a presidential communication Feb. 7 that declared Donald Trump’s intention to “make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” suggesting this president was planning a new career as an artistic director.

Actually, Trump already tried (and failed) as a Broadway producer. Alas for all of us, apparently the itch remains.

Most likely, Trump also figured that taking control of the Kennedy Center was a new way to reward his loyalists. We attended the last night of the Republican National Convention. We heard from Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Dana White, Lee Greenwood and Tucker Carlson, a most entertaining lineup. But we are not looking for the list at the next Kennedy Center honors to be reprise of the run of show on that July night in Milwaukee.

Trump and his administration well know that in the scheme of pressing federal governmental tasks, messing with the multivenue arts center that presents classical and popular concerts, Broadway tours, children’s theater and a few of its own productions and sits across from the famed Watergate office building hardly should be top of any presidential priority lists.

But the MAGA crowd also understands the Kennedy Center’s symbolic value as the home of its namesake honors, not to mention its imposing physical presence in the nation’s capital.

The center is a national monument to President John F. Kennedy. In the mind of the current administration, this is a Camelot-like temple to the shimmering, sparkly liberal elite, a glittering, “deep state” progressive playground all so easily noticed from the presidential helicopter or motorcade. Especially when the White House’s occupant still harbors a grudge against the New York chattering classes who always snubbed him as too gauche and now are feeling the brunt of his revenge.

One thing we already know about this young administration is that they have a much clearer sense of what they are against — much of it symbolized by the Kennedy Center — than what they are actually for.

They must not demand art as propaganda as a condition of support. That is wholly un-American. And dangerous. Republicans should understand why.

Under its former president, Deborah Rutter (whom we knew well and admired when she ran the world-class Chicago Symphony Orchestra), the Kennedy Center presented and produced (we doubt the White House knows the difference) a variety of programming, both Apollonian and Dionysian in nature. Mindful of its location and the role of the federal government in taking care of its physical plant, it has strived (more than most of its peers) to be bipartisan.

It would be naive to suggest that Trump is the first politician to meddle in the Kennedy Center’s affairs just as it would be to claim that the staff there is filled with Trump supporters or that it has not sometimes presented work whose political messages exceed its artistic quality. Greenwood, best known for the stirring country anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.,” already has been added to the Kennedy Center’s board and that’s fair enough, given his stature and the propensity of prior administrations, Democratic and Republican, to install far less qualified supporters.

We think Greenwood, whose own son once worked in the performing arts in Chicago, likely agrees with what we are saying here. We suspect Vice President JD Vance, who has attended performances at the Kennedy Center, does too.

But we doubt that Trump gives a hoot about all the columnists’ outrage, the resignations of board members and the affiliated artists like opera singer Renée Fleming, the cancellations, the talk of boycotts from progressive artists. On the contrary, that was his entire purpose in moving to control the place.

We understand the impulse to stay away. But artists who refuse to perform now at the Kennedy Center actually are playing into Trump’s hands and risk increasingly the likelihood of its transformation into a MAGA echo chamber, wherein dissent cannot be brooked. We don’t want to see the long tradition of dance performance there turning into Trump-style gyrations to “YMCA.”

After Trump has indulged in the pleasures of sowing chaos and confusion among the opposition, the president will not be interested in any day-to-day details at the Kennedy Center.

So our wiser friends in Washington should just quietly double down on doing what the Kennedy Center is supposed to do, which is to stand for artistic excellence reflecting rigorous public debate and eschewing partisan politics of any kind. We urge the same about the staffers at the National Endowment for the Arts, which Trump apparently wants to remake into some ersatz sponsor of patriotic pabulum, the very act of which insults true American patriots.

The freedom from political intrusion into cultural content is a core component of the freedom of speech Americans must not take for granted. Nothing is trivial about this incursion.

Honor excellence, Mr. President, not agreement. Are you hearing us, too, Mr. Vice President? Republicans in Congress? Any of you?

Who wants to live in an America where a great artist cannot stand on a stage and speak or sing or dance their mind about whomever occupies the Oval Office?

Not us, that’s for sure.

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