The Kennedy Center adopted bylaws earlier this year that limited voting to presidentially appointed trustees, a move that preceded a unanimous decision this month by board members installed by President Donald Trump to add his name to the center.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2025/12/31/kennedy-center-board-trustees-bylaws/
This underscores the comfort level with rigging elections at any cost. For Trump 2.0, process does not matter; only results. Whomever or whatever is damaged or dismantled in such Hobbesian stratagems is, sadly, immaterial.
John Fabian Witt's 12/24/25 New York Times piece The Idea That Once Held America Together Died in 2025 talks about the importance of process and "basic procedural fairness" to functioning, responsive democracies. As Witt writes:
At the apex of their midcentury authority, the processes of American government rested on a sense of shared purpose and mutual trust. Regaining some of that ephemeral collective sensibility will be America’s struggle in 2026 and the years to come. A persistent, if battered, attachment to the value of basic procedural fairness suggests that there may be some common ground yet.]
