Ben Folds Tells Congress Trump’s Kennedy Center Takeover Reduced Art to Propaganda

Ben Folds addressed a bicameral congressional forum on Tuesday with a plain statement of damage. The musician, who served as the first artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center from 2017 until his resignation this February, described an institution stripped of its nonpartisan identity by a presidential takeover.

“For the first time in history, a president took control of the Kennedy Center’s programming and messaging,” Folds told lawmakers. “The firewall between politics and the Center’s nonprofit mission was eliminated. The result was a hyper-politicized environment. Gone was the apolitical sanctuary the Kennedy Center always provided.”

He made explicit what that shift produces. “When you politicize art, you’ve got propaganda,” Folds said. The five-and-a-half-minute statement, given at a hearing titled “Monumental Waste: How Donald Trump Is Spending Millions Destroying American Landmarks,” laid out practical consequences beyond rhetoric. Folds pointed to an incident last September, when guitarist Yasmin Williams was heckled by conservative activists after questioning changes at the venue, then criticized from the left just for performing there. “Treated as if she was a scab crossing a picket line,” Folds noted, capturing the impossible position the new order creates for artists.

The takeover, he argued, has upended the Center’s operations. What was built as a neutral ground for American cultural life now runs on a logic of loyalty, not art. Folds framed the structural shift plainly: a board purged, a chairman installed from the White House, programming overhauled, and a business model broken.