As President Donald Trump inaugurated his personal chairmanship of Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by attending a performance of Les Misérables, he might look to Italy for ways to further his administration’s mission to bring political balance to the performing arts.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whom Trump has praised as a “fantastic leader and person” has had that goal from the beginning of her premiership, in 2022.

“I want to free Italian culture from an intolerant system of power in which you couldn’t work if you didn’t declare yourself of a certain political camp,” Meloni said in a May 2023 speech in Catania, Sicily.

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