A second Trump term could be great for the arts

Don’t laugh. Trump might not know a lot about William Shakespeare or what the latest important novel is about, but he can facilitate a major shift in the culture that would be as positive as any policy about immigration or government spending. Trump can move America away from its obsession with politics and into a much healthier space where time is spent learning and appreciating literature, dance, and music.

Believe it or not, there once was a time in America when we did not think about politics every day. It would be nice to return to that sanity. As it stands now, there are far too many cable channels on TV talking about politics far too much. MSNBC, CNN, and Fox would do well to dedicate some programming hours to cultural enrichment. They should feature concerts and book reviews. X could do the same.

Before the internet and cable TV, the public could go days, weeks, and even months without hearing about what was going on in Washington. Of course, many subscribed to newspapers, but not everyone read the front page. 

Summers were a particularly rich time to explore the arts. Great movies were in the theaters, there were jazz festivals, and the beaches were filled with people reading books.

So what was the passion that filled our days, if not the news of who’s going to be the new secretary of transportation? Art. We talked about, read about, and argued about art. Novels, plays, bands, movies, and even poetry were all topics of debate and conversation. This was appropriate as these are the things that speak to the human soul more than what’s going on in Washington. 

Back then, a journalist such as Tom Wolfe, a conservative who wrote books about the space program and modern art, was a celebrity. People knew who Leonard Bernstein, Ella Fitzgerald, and Andy Warhol were. Even a poet such as Charles Bukowski was famous. These artists were guests on talk shows, the subject of documentaries, and featured in newspaper profiles.

The great urban historian Fred Siegel, who died in 2023, once wrote an article revealing how culturally literate people were in the 1950s. Whereas in the 1930s, “you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York, [in the 1950s] we sell Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities,” he wrote.

Siegel noted that ”the public’s expanding taste and increased income produced a 250% growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955. In that same year, 1955, 15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games, while 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.” 

In 1956, NBC spent $500,000 to broadcast a three-hour version of Richard III starring Laurence Olivier. It drew 50 million viewers, and as many as 25 million watched all three hours.

This is worth bearing in mind as Republicans take control of Washington. Earlier this year, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of protecting $200 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK) had proposed two amendments to the fiscal 2025 Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act that would have slashed funding for both agencies by nearly a quarter, cutting $48 million each from their proposed budgets. Then he requested some $50 billion in cuts to “woke, weaponized, and wasteful” government spending. The amendments failed.

Yet supporting the arts under the new Trump administration is not a matter of spending more money as much as it is just having our existing media companies act as better platforms for art. The left-wing, late-night talk shows are all cratering in the ratings. Why not cut the ridiculous salaries of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel and gear their shows toward showcasing great artists such as Kurt Elling or the Catholic poet Dana Gioia? Just this week, one of America’s greatest novelists, Richard Price, released a book, Lazarus Man. Why can’t he be on Jimmy Fallon?

It would do the country a real service if we spent less time on politics and more on the things that rouse the spirit and feed the soul.

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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.