Politico: “As the Kennedy Center drama prepared to shift into a new phase, Trump realized he lacked someone there who could do his bidding. Loyalist Ric Grenell had left the post of executive director two months earlier, replaced by a longtime District of Columbia official who had been the Kennedy’s Center’s vice president of facilities. Trump barely paused to consider his options.”
“The president looked around the room, and zeroed in on the man who was 10th in the line of presidential succession, whose department had been founded in 1903 with a mandate to ‘foster, promote, and develop the foreign and domestic commerce, the mining, manufacturing, shipping, and fishery industries.’ It now had nearly 50,000 employees working toward those aims. Not a single one of them had been hired for his or her expertise in performing arts administration. It would now be Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s job, Trump declared, to ‘fix’ the Kennedy Center. One of the country’s oldest government posts had been redefined in an instant.”
