Donald Trump (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)

If I were given to cynicism, and if I thought I could get away with it, this week I would have submitted the same column as the one published on March 24 of last year. Why? Because we return to the same topic: President Trump and his antagonism of the arts.

The president has, for the second time in his presidency, submitted a budget to the US Congress eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Never mind that the new budget will balloon the national debt above and beyond the long-term damage done to the US by the tax cut passed in December – a plan that rewards the ultra-rich while penalising the rest of the country.

No, the president and his henchmen still want to make a statement against creativity, arts and scholarship. It would be a meaningless save in the context of the budget itself. But it’s catnip to those perceived as his core supporters.

Underlying Trump’s effort to wipe out the NEA, NEH and CPB is the fact he failed to do so last year. He’s hardly the first politician to use these entities as a political punching bag; they have long been convenient targets for the right who see them as pursuits limited to those who are politically on the left.

Certainly if the right, which always proclaims the value of free markets and self-sufficiency, wanted to prove that the arts don’t need federal support, they might have produced a conservative version of Sesame Street for commercial TV. Or perhaps we would have a wildly successful theatre company dedicated to works based on the writings of Ayn Rand and her acolytes. But as we know, that’s not the case.

Oh, sorry, but maybe I am getting cynical. It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.

Nowadays, I get calls to action to defend funding for these tiny slices of the federal budget via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and occasionally still from the post office. But I can recall the era when mail, phone calls and faxes – remember those? – were the organising tools of choice to face down these perennial assaults, whether they came from within the Oval Office or under the Capitol dome.

There’s no question that the efforts to minimise or eliminate these agencies have had an effect, since funding today is less than it was 25 years ago. Even with relatively steady funding of late, the net effect is to reduce the federal impact, since costs rise while the available monies remain the same. Should we hit a period of inflation, the impact would prove even greater, even if the numbers on the ledger remain the same.

All these efforts to wear down the agencies’ advocates must take its toll on the detractors too, right? But instead, each side plays its designated role, battling to, more or less, a draw.

Not to diminish the importance of the funding situation, but this exercise in political gamesmanship is almost like some vintage cartoon series, with antagonists fighting in endless variations on the same theme, only to take up their enmity again in the next instalment.

But fight we must. The identity of the wolf at the door may vary, but the goal is the same. The arts, the humanities and the public broadcasting outlets and their supporters cannot let the government wipe an entire professional discipline from its attention and funding programme.

This year, the battle even faces a new twist, since the changes in the tax code have reduced the tax benefits of charitable deductions for many citizens and the impact of that policy won’t be fully known until donations are tallied at the end of 2018.

And so we organise to hold back those who would overrun us. We make the case for our value spiritually, creatively and economically, as inventively, persuasively and as loudly as possible.

While some political pundits have already suggested the president’s budget is dead on arrival and Congress will assemble something at least marginally more saleable – to each other and to the public – we can’t take the risk that this is the year when our interests might get bargained away.

Yet again, to the barricades (to be very clear, not a wall). And to the phones, the computers and maybe even the fax machines.

Ivanka Trump performs in The Nutcracker (Photo: Ivanka Trump/Twitter)

Let’s start with the positive, though I’m afraid that won’t last long.

In her New York Times article, “Might Ivanka Trump Speak Up If Her Father Guts The Arts?,” Robin Pogrebin makes a series of suppositions rooted in an aspect of arts education that is rarely discussed. That element is the reality that the vast majority of students – elementary, secondary, university – who study or participate in the arts won’t probably go on to careers in the arts. However, their exposure might yield a lifelong affinity. This isn’t something that’s unique among the many subjects students are exposed to in education – many people study biology without becoming scientists or doctors. Yet whereas one who retains an interest in biology can’t necessarily spend a free evening in an operating theatre, someone who was exposed to or participated in the arts in their youth may well choose to attend the opera, the ballet, the symphony and so on for the remainder of their lives.

Under that theory, coupled with reports that Ms. Trump and her husband Jared Kushner may have intervened with her father on behalf of LGBTQ rights, Ms. Pogrebin theorizes that as a childhood student of ballet and present-day collector of fine art, Ms. Trump might emerge as an arts advocate on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s a lovely theory, and if it came to pass, it would no doubt be welcomed, but it is spun from the slightest of threads.

In fact, Ms. Pogrebin’s review of Ms. Trump’s personal arts history is formed from very little evidence. It rises only to the level of article, as opposed to editorial or op-ed, because it is padded out with a lengthy quotation from Ms. Trump’s 2009 book The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life about her dance lessons and – in an experience shared by virtually no one else on the planet – her youthful fear that attendance by her neighbor Michael Jackson at a Nutcracker performance in which she had a role would distract from the event itself. In all, in an article of 1,045 words (as calculated by Microsoft Word), Ms. Pogrebin offers us 504 words directly from Ms. Trump’s book, 48% of the total piece.

Certainly no one can call the extended quotation from The Trump Card fake news, because it is a) legitimately a quote from the book, and b) like any work of autobiography, the entirely subjective point of view of the author (and perhaps their ghostwriters, should that apply). But the thesis of Ms. Pogrebin’s piece is essentially invented. “Might” asks the headline; “could” Ms. Trump “emerge,” wonders Ms. Pogrebin. In fact, when Pogrebin requested an interview on the matter, all she got back was a prepared 67-word ballet-centric statement in support of the arts, which makes up another 6% of the article. Given the opportunity, Ms. Trump did not offer any solace to the NEA and its supporters. “Might” her failure to win a role in Les Misérables be working against the interests of the NEA?

The National Endowment for the Arts and the arts in America are certainly in need of support. At this time, the NEA may well need a savior. Could that savior be Ivanka Trump? Sure. But there’s no evidence on the table that she will be. This Times article is all supposition, not even managing to produce anonymous sources.

In covering the newest threat to the NEA, Pogrebin’s 1,000+ words would have had more value to the national conversation had they involved seeking out the arts backgrounds, writings and statements by members of the US Senate, particularly the Republicans, because the arts aren’t a strictly partisan issue. Senators may not be able to whisper in Daddy’s ear to potentially rescue pet projects, but it would only take a few Senators standing fast in support of the NEA, blocking the budget, to have an effect that doesn’t require the manipulation of family ties in order to determine the trajectory of one small program with a great impact on American life. If the public, if advocates, knew more about the stances of Senators, then the American people might know with whom they could best make their case, or how little chance there may still be.

One last note: we don’t know whether Ms. Trump spent much time taking humanities-related electives while getting her economics degree at the Wharton School, or whether she liked Sherlock, Downton or tales from Lake Wobegon. Does this mean the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are utterly out of luck? Sad.