In a slew of new political appointments announced Tuesday, President Donald Trump has appointed ten new members of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees. The most high-profile among them are actor Jon Voight and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
Other appointees include Carl Lindner III, co-CEO of Ohio-based American Financial Group and Trump super-PAC donor; Kelly Roberts, a hotelier and onetime nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to Slovenia; Karen Tucker LeFrak, an author of children’s books set in museums and ballet and musical performances; Daryl Roth, producer of dozens of Broadway musicals, including Kinky Boots and the revival of The Normal Heart; Kelcy Warren, a billionaire and owner of Energy Transfer Partners; Heather Washburne, a GOP fundraiser; and Marc I. Stern, chairman of the TCW Group, an asset-management firm. Trump has re-appointed longtime arts philanthropist Adrienne Arsht, who already sits on the board, to another term.
Voight, a Republican, Oscar winner, and until-recently estranged father of Angelina Jolie, has long been a supporter of Trump’s, writing in an op-ed for Breitbart News ahead of the 2016 election that the then-candidate “is funny, playful, and colorful, but most of all, he is honest.” Huckabee, meanwhile, is father to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and has supported Trump since suspending his second presidential campaign in 2016. He also plays the bass.
Per U.S. Code, the president is responsible for appointing the Kennedy Center Board’s 36 general trustees. Each member’s term lasts six years, meaning that this new set of appointees would remain in their positions until 2024. The current body of general trustees mostly includes appointments made by former President Barack Obama, including his senior advisor Valerie Jarrett and former national security advisor Susan Rice.
Other positions on the board are automatically appointed based on government job title, including the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Education, and the Librarian of Congress. The D.C. mayor and the city’s chancellor of public schools are the board’s local representatives.
The board’s role, as described in the code, is “to maintain and administer the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and site thereof as the National Center for the Performing Arts, a living memorial to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” That includes preparing the budget, supervising the slate of performances and artistic programs, and approving all construction and expansion projects (which presumably include the center’s long-planned REACH expansion).
Trump has remained largely uninvolved in the Kennedy Center’s doings: He skipped the annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony for the past two years, making him the first president to decline to attend more than once. 2018 honoree Cher reportedly said she would not attend the awards if Trump were present.
Meanwhile, nine general trustees are nearing the end of their terms, including journalist Giselle Fernandez, actress and JFK descendant Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, and Shonda Rhimes, creator of what feels like every drama on ABC.
Lori McCue