How did Trump so easily take over the Kennedy Center?
Manuel Roig-Franzia, Travis Andrews
In September 2021, Sean Spicer - the former Trump administration press secretary and peripatetic cable news opinionator - received a politely threatening email from President Joe Biden’s White House.
The note offered him a choice: “please” resign from a Naval Academy advisory board that President Donald Trump had appointed him to before leaving office, or Biden would fire him - that very evening.
The tersely worded, four-line missive set in motion a series of events that would, in ways both sinuous and counterintuitive, make it easier for Trump to abruptly purge the Kennedy Center board of Biden loyalists last week, install himself as chairman and give himself an unprecedented role in shaping American arts. It was as Trump himself has crowed, “a takeover.”
It all seemed so sudden. But the groundwork had been laid long before. What took place between Biden’s threat and Trump’s power grab turns out to be a saga of legal cunning, political retribution and chutzpah. In short, it’s a story about Washington.
One of the many cool things about being president of these United States of America is that you get to put thousands of people on boards and commissions, handing out seats like so many gifts from on high. Some of these boards have real power and require Senate confirmation. But there are dozens of others with hundreds of available seats that the Senate doesn’t trifle with because they tend to be more like honorifics bestowed on political allies and donors. Some appointees have expertise they can bring to those boards, some don’t.
“These boards - the Naval Academy Board of Visitors and different kinds of honorific boards - they tend to be historically relatively noncontroversial,” said David E. Lewis, a Vanderbilt University professor and nationally recognized expert on presidential appointments. “But recently they’ve been kind of caught up in the political polarization that affects other parts of government.”
Spicer got his gift in 2019, during the third year of Trump’s first term in office, when he received a three-year presidential appointment to the Naval Academy Board of Visitors. He’d been loyal to the president, perhaps best known for overhyping the size of Trump’s 2017 inauguration crowd while serving as press secretary, an episode he later spoofed during a surprise appearance at the Emmys. After leaving the White House, he was a reliable pro-Trump voice while hosting a program on the conservative network Newsmax and made a splashy appearance in a ruffled, lime-colored suit on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.”
The year after Spicer’s Naval Academy appointment, another loyalist - Russell Vought, who now serves as Trump’s powerful Office of Management and Budget director, the same job he held in the president’s first term - was named to the Naval Academy’s board.
The Board of Visitors is one of those boards. Its members perform laudable services keeping an eye on the education of America’s future Navy officers. It’s a nice honor to put on one’s webpage bio, but its efforts are pretty low-key. Among its goals is putting together a report on matters such as the morale, curriculum and condition of equipment at the Academy.
Given the below-the-radar nature of serving on a low-profile board, Spicer was somewhat surprised to receive an email on Sept. 8, 2021 from Katherine L. Petrelius (remember that name) in the White House personnel office with an attached letter from Catherine M. Russell, the personnel office director.
“On behalf of President Biden,” Russell’s letter began. It went on to give Spicer a choice between resigning or being fired, and closed with the words, “Thank you.” Vought got a similar letter.
(Petrelius and Russell did not respond to interview requests. A Biden spokesperson did not comment after being reached by The Washington Post.)
Spicer’s term had been set to expire in just three months. There was no way he was quitting. So Biden fired him and Vought, as well as Trump appointees on other military boards.
“It was a stupid move,” Spicer said in an interview this week with The Post. “This decision was going to come back to bite them.”
In the White House briefing room, Biden press secretary Jen Psaki defended the firings, saying she’d “let others evaluate” whether Spicer and others “were qualified.”
The comment rankled Spicer, who responded angrily on his Newsmax program, noting that he’d served in the Navy Reserve for more than two decades and has a degree from the Naval War College.
In the aftermath, Spicer said, an idea was born at a right-wing group called America First Legal, headed by the Trump confidant Stephen Miller: Let’s sue Joe Biden!
Spicer explained that he never expected the lawsuit to restore his board seat, which was set to expire in a matter of months. No lawsuit could be resolved that quickly. He didn’t expect to win, he said. In fact, the whole point of the lawsuit, he said, was that it would serve a purpose for him and other Republicans whether they won or lost.
And losing might be the best outcome of all.
“The idea,” he said, “was what can we do to codify a future president’s power, so in the future we can say, ‘It was Joe Biden who gave us the power to do this.’”
Especially appealing to Spicer and the America First team was the idea of establishing a president’s power regarding board purges in case an overly cautious Republican president should be elected in the future.
“A lot of Republicans lack a backbone,” Spicer said. “They say, ‘We can’t do this.’”
His born-to-lose lawsuit might give such a Republican legal cover.
So Spicer and Vought, with America First’s guiding hand, sued Biden, Petrelius, Russell and a couple Board of Visitors officials within weeks of the firings. Predictably, a federal judge in Washington ruled against them the next year, and the decision was upheld on appeal.
Now all they had to do was wait for a Republican to get elected president.
They got their wish in November when Trump was elected to a second term. A few days before Trump was inaugurated, Spicer decided to write a New York Post opinion column revisiting his victoriously failed lawsuit, headlined “Biden booted me off a nonpartisan board - precedent for Trump to clean house.”
Late in the editing process, Spicer said he added an explanation of the types of boards filled by presidential appointment. He mentioned one board by name: the Kennedy Center.
On Feb. 7, that board became a Trump target. On Truth Social, Trump announced that he was firing multiple Kennedy Center board members and making himself chairman. Among those who Trump would eventually remove from the board was Petrelius, the former Biden White House official who’d sent Spicer and Vought emails asking them to resign from the Naval Academy Board of Visitors. She’d been put on the board by Biden.
In the frenetic early weeks of Trump’s presidency, many of his unilateral decisions have been challenged in court, such as his attempt to end birthright citizenship and various efforts to trim the federal workforce. Some expected the Kennedy Center board - stacked with wealthy and well-connected members - to fight the president’s decision.
But the Kennedy Center wasn’t fighting. Several days before Trump was formally elected chairman, The Post asked why. A Kennedy Center spokeswoman responded by pointing to an obscure lawsuit: Sean M. Spicer, et al v. Joseph R. Biden Jr., President of the United States, et al.
The Kennedy Center’s reliance on the precedent set by the judicial decisions in the lawsuit Spicer and Vought had filed has received some criticism. Norman Ornstein, a political scientist who is a prominent Trump critic, took to social media to argue that the Kennedy Center, which is a public-private partnership, shouldn’t have to play by the same rules as the Naval Academy, which is a government entity.
But, for now at least, that argument does not seem to have been embraced by the Kennedy Center or by the ousted members of its board. Trump was elected chairman Wednesday by a newly reconstituted board. Lewis, the Vanderbilt University presidential appointments expert, said Trump’s decision would be difficult to reverse.
“I don’t see any legal reasons for making a distinction between these quasi-public and totally public organizations,” Lewis said.
Spicer, who now hosts a streaming program, “The Sean Spicer Show,” hadn’t heard about the Kennedy Center’s reliance on his case until The Post contacted him this week. He was giddy.
“Now all of these Biden appointees are paying the price for what Biden did,” Spicer said. “To watch President Trump do this knowing that I played a small part in giving him the authority to do that is amazing. This is pretty cool.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.