As the days and weeks have passed since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, organizations both inside and out of the Washington D.C. area have seen disturbingly quick changes to their infrastructures. Whether happily marching in line with the new administration’s attacks on the most marginalized in the LGBTQ+ community, or getting out of the way of supporting the new regime and being replaced by someone who does, the inner workings of many governmental institutions already look very different in a matter of weeks.
Prominent institutions that have been impacted by Project 2025, Trump and the Elon Musk-led pop-up-style “office” of DOGE (“Department Of Government Efficiency”) include USAID, the FBI and the CDC. By mid February, the National Park Service joined the list, when it removed references to transgender individuals and people who identify as Queer from the National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument. Not only were the words “transgender” and “queer” deleted from previous text on the site, but much like the U.S. government’s travel page, every representative letter aside from LGB has been removed from the abbreviation.
Representatives of the present-day Stonewall Inn, located across the street from where the monument sits in a park in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village section, and The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative (a nonprofit organization associated with the historic bar), angrily condemned the changes in a few joint statements.
“This decision to erase the word ‘transgender’ is a deliberate attempt to erase our history and marginalize the very people who paved the way for many victories we have achieved as a community.”
Timothy Leonard, the Northeast program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, a group that advocates for the National Park System and pushed for the Stonewall monument, also expressed displeasure at the shifts in messaging. “Erasing letters or web pages does not change the history or the contributions of our transgender community members at Stonewall or anywhere else. History was made here and civil rights were earned because of Stonewall,” Leonard said.
Around that same time, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the national cultural center of the United States, ousted the center’s president Deborah F. Rutter, along with the 18 members of the organization’s board. Each board member was replaced with the likes of Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles; Dan Scavino, a longtime Trump aide and Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance. Once Trump’s loyalists were all assembled in the formally filled seats, Trump himself was voted in as chairman of the center.
“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” Trump posted on the his social media site Truth Social on February 10. In other anti-LGBTQ+ culture attacks, the Kennedy Center has also canceled an upcoming performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC, which was scheduled to take place May 21-22, in conjunction with World Pride 2025.
Jeffrey Weisner, a member of the National Symphony Orchestra, recently posted on Facebook a response to the cancellation:
“We were scheduled to perform for the first time with Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington On May 21st as part of World Pride in Washington DC 2025. The concert was abruptly canceled without explanation and removed from the KC website. However, they forgot to scrub it from the search engine.
“This post is for any LGBT folks who think that the Trump admin isn’t targeting our entire community,” he continued. “Expect moves to remove us from antidiscrimination laws, plus lawsuits aimed at giving the Supreme Court the chance to overturn decisions that gave us rights.”
Trump told reporters that his administration “took over the Kennedy Center” because “we didn’t like what they were showing and various other things,” adding “we have, I guess, a whole new group of people going in . . . and we’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke.”
While describing the shows presented at the national venue as “terrible” and “a disgrace,” Trump also admitted that he’s never been to the center and “didn’t want to go” because “there was nothing [he] wanted to see.”The outcry from the Trump regime’s hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center can be heard inside the center as well as out. Prolific names that held positions in the organization, such as soprano superstar Renée Fleming, singer and songwriter Ben Folds, and Shonda Rhimes, creator of many noteworthy shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” resigned from their roles as artistic advisors and treasurer of the center.
“I’ve treasured the bipartisan support for this institution as a beacon of America at our best,” Fleming said in a statement. “I hope the Kennedy Center continues to flourish and serve the passionate and diverse audience in our nation’s capital and across the country.”
The Kennedy Center has historically been run by bipartisan boards in the past. As with many of the constant firings in the U.S. government after inauguration day, the ousting of the center’s entire board, whose elected officials normally serve six-year terms, has no previous precedent.