President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrive to attend the opening night of “Les Miserables” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, on June 11. Photo by Alex Wroblewski / AFP / Getty Images
By Talya Zax
July 22, 2025
One of my favorite operas is Dead Man Walking, the composer Jake Heggie’s shattering take on the true story of a man on death row, and the nun who becomes his spiritual advisor. It is so difficult to watch — and so transformative — that I could not bring myself to attend its fall 2023 run at the Met Opera. In the raw moments that followed the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the launching of the subsequent war in Gaza, I feared that seeing it might crack my heart open.
Instead, the last time I saw Dead Man Walking was at the Kennedy Center Opera House in 2017. It was less than two months after the start of President Donald Trump’s first term, and I had trekked to Washington, D.C., specifically for the occasion. At intermission, I wandered the grand halls, preparing myself for the pain to follow.
Then I saw former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who, in 1996, introduced a bill that would have given non-violent marijuana smugglers the death penalty. Yes, Gingrich had since publicly professed that he’d had a change of heart, and become open to the possibility of abolishing capital punishment. But, seeing him there, I was stopped short by the contrast between the enthusiastic ideas about state-sponsored execution that he’d once ardently supported, and the tragedy playing out onstage. Art helps show us how much of life we don’t understand. I wondered what this opera, at this time, was showing him.
Now, Republicans in the House of Representatives have proposed renaming that same opera house after First Lady Melania Trump. (An initial vote in the Appropriations Committee was one of the last actions of the Congressional term, which unexpectedly ended early amid a crisis over the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.) The same first lady who, a year and a half after I saw Gingrich at the Kennedy Center, wore a jacket emblazoned with the slogan “I really don’t care, do u?” to visit a Texas detention center for migrant children. The wife of a president who, on the first day of his second term, signed an executive order advocating for “restoring the death penalty and protecting public safety.”
I wonder what Dead Man Walking would show them, too.
The Kennedy Center has been under assault since Trump resumed office in January. He fired the cultural institution’s leadership; replaced its board of trustees with loyalists; and announced that he had been unanimously elected as that board’s chair. The first details that the new, Trump-appointed president of the center shared about his ideas for the forthcoming season involved a “big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”
Trump understands that art is instructive. What he may not fully grasp is that it is impossible to ensure that an audience takes away the “right” lessons. When he and Melania went to see Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center in June, he seemed, to the scornful delight of his detractors, to entirely miss that the musical is about a working-class rebellion against autocrats. That is proof of concept: The left might have liked for the Trumps to walk away newly introspective about the perils of loving power too much, but no one could force them.
The idea of the Melania Trump Opera House is a message, to those who would choose to attend shows there, that they had better come out with a specific set of ideas about what they’ve seen. Trump wrote, in February, that under his watch the Kennedy Center would witness “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA.” At the Melania Trump Opera House, audiences might be expected to emerge humming the national anthem, no matter what they’ve just watched.
Except it doesn’t really work like that. The history of propaganda being laughed at, purposefully misunderstood and subverted to work in favor of those who oppose it is as long as the history of propaganda itself. Sure, Charlie Chaplin didn’t make The Great Dictator, his 1940 sendup of Adolf Hitler, inside Germany. But he was working with the same source material that the Germans were witnessing, and it’s hard to imagine that one or two of the most resistance-minded among them didn’t see the same absurd hilarity in Hitler’s actions as Chaplin did. You can tell people what to think, but you can’t make them actually think it.
I’d hazard a guess that, if the Melania Trump Opera House comes to be, it will be a long time before anyone sees Dead Man Walking on its stage again. If they did, they might be struck by a climactic moment in which the nun, based on Sister Helen Prejean — who spoke out against the spate of federal executions Trump oversaw in the last weeks of his first term — pushes her spiritual ward to confess his crimes. As he approaches his execution, he still thinks that if he controls his narrative, he can somehow, improbably, control his state-determined fate.
Prejean isn’t fooled. Instead, she tries to teach him what she knows: The only thing any of us can control is what happens in our own minds, and how we act on it.
