The easiest thing is to expect the worst.
How could Donald Trump, snippy tweeter, reality TV huckster and the only human to give “Hamilton” a bad review — without seeing it, of course — be anything but bad for the arts?
The reality, though, is that the president-elect hasn’t said much on the subject, other than a few noncommittal responses to a Washington Post questionnaire in March.
“The unknown,” is how Anita Walker, the executive director of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, describes Trump. “He didn’t have any fully fleshed-out policy position on the arts. Neither of the candidates really spoke about them. So we actually have no idea where the incoming president is coming from.”
We do know there has been grumbling. Arts leaders on the coasts, where politics lean harder left, have not been shy. “Upset, bewildered, betrayed,” says James Cuno, president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, when asked to describe his response to Trump’s victory. Molly Smith, the artistic director of Arena Stage, compared Nov. 8 to these moments in history: The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, 9/11 and the Newtown massacre.