I’ve been referred to as a collaborator for organising conversations with Trump voters throughout the US since 2016, as a part of a socially engaged artwork undertaking. The accusations got here from individuals who believed that the act of sitting right down to dinner with the opposite aspect was a type of betrayal. A number of individuals who have labored at Washington, DC’s John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts throughout Donald Trump’s second time period have been likened to Nazi collaborators, however none of us is a collaborator. The phrase is thrown round too loosely.
An actual collaborator is a real believer, somebody who is aware of what they’re serving and does so with conviction. Accusing somebody of being a collaborator sounds dramatic and satisfying, and it makes the accuser be ok with their righteousness. There are actual collaborators on the Kennedy Middle, and they’re straightforward to sentence.
Anybody who took a job there after that knew precisely what they had been doing
Opportunists, in the meantime, gown themselves up as pragmatists or wrap themselves in the concept that you are able to do extra good from the within. Opportunists who would by no means describe themselves as ideological allies of this administration take the job when proximity to energy turns into accessible. What they miss is that they’re constructing the infrastructure that ideology must operate. They supply legitimacy. They supply cowl for actual injury. Worse, they erase the individuals who constructed the establishment and deserve the credit score.
Naïveté can not absolve an opportunist on this administration. Lower than a month after his inauguration, president Donald Trump fired Deborah Rutter, who had led the Kennedy Middle for over a decade, and purged the board, changing it completely with loyalists. Drag performances had been cancelled. The social impression programme was eradicated. Richard Grenell, the centre’s appearing director and president from February 2025 to March 2026, picked a public struggle on social media with a Black artist who dared to ask questions. By the summer time of 2025, there was no ambiguity left. Anybody who took a job there after that knew precisely what they had been becoming a member of.
The argument that principled individuals contained in the establishment may act as guardrails, softening the administration’s worst instincts, doesn’t absolve the opportunists. The concept of guardrails had benefit in Trump’s first time period, however he got here again in his second time period having studied precisely the place they had been and dismantled them first.
Looking for absolution
The opportunists now have an issue. The tide has turned. The administration that gave them their jobs has turned towards them. They want a narrative about themselves that lets them stroll away clear. Some are professing their errors on podcasts, asking us to forgive and transfer on now that they’ve seen the sunshine. Others are writing essays in main publications, positioning themselves as truth-tellers, resisters or saviours. They’re asking you to reframe what occurred, to see their presence not as complicity however as braveness, to let their model of occasions turn out to be the report. In the meantime, the individuals who truly constructed the Kennedy Middle are nowhere within the story being informed.
The individuals who deserve recognition for the centre’s greatness are those who had been already there, who constructed careers on the establishment, who beloved it earlier than it grew to become a car for another person’s ambitions, who tried to protect it and who left when leaving value them one thing actual. They’re absent from the narrative now being written concerning the Kennedy Middle’s seize and fall. That’s its personal form of injustice.
I labored alongside a few of them, briefly. They embodied what John F. Kennedy meant when he referred to as artwork “the nice democrat, calling forth artistic genius from each sector of society, disregarding race or faith or wealth or color”. This isn’t an elegy. It’s a report of individuals the opportunists have written out of the story.
Philippa Pham Hughes is an artist, curator, author and a former social follow resident on the John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts
