Trump has been on a revenge spree aimed at pretty much anyone and any organization, big or small, that he thinks in some way opposed him before, whether that is real or imaginary.

In the latest move, he has fired the national archivist, presumably because of that organization’s tole in the classified documents scandal in which he was involved. The thing is that she wasn’t even in that position at the time.

Trump dismissed Colleen Shogan as the archivist of the United States, White House aide Sergio Gor posted on X Friday night.

Trump had said in early January that he would replace the head of the National Archives and Records Administration. The government agency drew his anger after it informed the justice department about issues with Trump’s handling of classified documents. Shogan, the first woman in the post, wasn’t the archivist of the United States at the time the issue emerged.

In 2022, federal agents searched Trump’s Florida home and seized boxes of classified records. He was indicted on dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified records and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. He pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing. A judge dismissed the charges, ruling the special counsel who brought them was illegally appointed. The justice department gave up appeals after Trump was elected in November.

And getting even pettier, he has appointed himself, yes himself, as the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is appointing himself as chairman of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, adding that he is immediately terminating multiple people from the board of trustees and the current chairman.

“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

The Kennedy Center is the country’s national cultural center and is run through a public-private partnership. The idea for such a center began with Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s and was authorized by Congress in 1958 . It’s doors officially opened in 1971. The center is known for hosting music, theater, dance, artwork and performance art, and has hosted acts ranging from Tina Turner to Led Zeppelin.
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The Kennedy Center’s current chairman is David Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist and the co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group. Rubenstein has held the position since 2010 and was set to retire this year. After Trump was elected, the Kennedy Center said it had failed to find a new chair to replace Rubenstein and that he would stay on until September 2026.
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Trump said the reason for terminating Rubenstein and some members of the board of trustees is that they don’t “share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture”. In his Truth Social post, he also brought up the topic of queer people, something he has raised repeatedly since being sworn into office, saying that the Kennedy Center “featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth – THIS WILL STOP”.

The Kennedy Center is very much a venue for highly upscale audiences (out of reach for the hoi polloi) and it is up in the air whether they (apart from those people seeking to curry favor with him) will turn out for whatever kinds of shows Trump will insist be put on. Beauty pageants? Perhaps he will have the things he used on the campaign trai like the Village People singing YMCA? Lee Greenwood singing that he proud to be an American? Kid Rock singing whatever the hell he sings? Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt? Elon Musk jumping up and down?

But there may be another reason for taking control of the Kennedy Center. It is well known that Trump suffers from a deep sense of insecurity from being perceived by the old money elites as nouveau riche, a parvenu, and looked down upon by them as such. Maybe he thinks that this will finally make them accept him as an equal.

Trump and his cronies like Musk are taking a wrecking ball to the government as a whole in the attempt to undermine so many major government organizations such as USAID, the National Park Service, FBI, CIA, National Science Foundation, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the last being the invaluable body that monitors the weather and climate and provides us with increasingly accurate weather forecasts and storm warnings among other things.

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

Rosenberg noted it had been a longtime goal of corporations that rely on Noaa data to prevent the agency from making the data public, instead of giving it directly to private corporations that create products based on it, such as weather forecasting services.

He also argued there was no legal authority to abolish Noaa or reduce its budget, outside of reducing it through Congress.

“There’s no real transparency. They just show up wherever they want, do whatever they want. They’re following through on major budget cuts and major staffing cuts,” Rosenberg added. “I think the strategy here is: ‘Well, we’re just going to do it and dare somebody to stop us, and by the time they stop us, we’ll have destroyed it.’”

In response to the prospect of potential cuts of personnel, budget or mission at Noaa, Beth Lowell, US vice-president of the ocean conservation non-profit Oceana, said doing so “will have a ripple effect that sacrifices the communities, jobs, and coastal economies that rely on healthy oceans. And the National Weather Service, part of Noaa, provides daily weather forecasts and lifesaving storm alerts that protect our communities across the country and mariners at sea.”

Project 2025, written by several former Trump staffers, has called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized”, claiming the agency is “harmful to US prosperity” for its role in climate science.

It is mind-boggling how Trump, even as he goes after major agencies, has time to involve himself personally in relatively minor organizations like the Kennedy Center.