Have you seen our president lately?
Donald Trump—the six-foot-three billionaire whose political identity has always depended on dominance, stamina and an almost preternatural confidence in his ability to make wealth, celebrity and power bend the world around him—is old.
Not old in the abstract way presidents are old. Old visibly. He is eighty now. The man who once seemed constitutionally incapable of appearing tired often does. His speech wanders further. His public appearances invite a kind of scrutiny that would have seemed absurd a decade ago: not simply What did Trump say?, but Did you see him?
The strange thing is that the nocturnal Trump remains. He still posts late into the night—more often than he did during his first presidency. The insults remain. The grandiosity remains. The appetite for conflict may even have grown. What has changed is the body carrying them.
And that matters, because Donald Trump has spent the last six years receiving an unusually brutal education in what can be taken from a man.
He lost the presidency. His closest allies testified against him before Congress and in court. His tax records were stolen and leaked. Former friends denigrated him publicly. His daughter stepped away from his political operation. Judges placed extraordinary restraints on his business empire. A jury convicted him of 34 felonies. For a time, imprisonment was no longer an abstraction.
Then, while campaigning for the only office on Earth powerful enough to revenge much of what had happened to him, a bullet struck his ear.
Donald Trump returned to the White House older, angrier, intimately acquainted with vulnerability—and, for the first time in his life, unmistakably aware that he is mortal.
I won’t hide my bias. I saw that my country had much to lose from his presidency, but my country—and even some of my friends and family—felt differently. Democracy worked, and we committed four years to his vision, which began with fervor.
Then that vision reached the institutions that make and preserve culture.
02What the vision reached
The Kennedy Center was not some insurgent arts collective surviving on the margins of American life. It was the national performing-arts center, created by Congress as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy. Yet within weeks of returning to office, Trump remade its board, joined it himself and became its chairman. Artists resigned or withdrew. Programming became another front in the country’s political argument. Eventually even the name on the building became contested: a board aligned with the president attempted to put Trump’s name alongside Kennedy’s, only for a federal judge to rule that the board lacked the authority to rename the memorial. The fight continues.
The pressure did not stop where government ownership ended. Stephen Colbert had spent years turning ridicule of Trump into nightly entertainment. In July 2025, days after Colbert attacked Paramount’s $16 million settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against CBS, the network announced that The Late Show would end altogether. CBS insisted the decision was purely financial, and I cannot know otherwise. That uncertainty is almost more disturbing than certainty would be. A president does not need to personally order a comedian removed for political power to become palpable in the room. Paramount was simultaneously seeking federal approval for its multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance. Everyone could see the incentives. Everyone could draw his own conclusions.
Harvard offered an even clearer demonstration of the government’s reach. The administration demanded changes touching the university’s governance, hiring, admissions and ideological composition. When Harvard refused, more than $2 billion in federal research funding was frozen, with hundreds of millions more subsequently targeted. The administration described its actions as a response to antisemitism; Harvard called them an attempt to impose political control over an independent university. A federal judge ultimately found the funding cancellations unlawful and held that the government had violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights. But a court ruling months later could not make the intervening lesson disappear: even one of the richest, oldest and most powerful universities on Earth could be made to wonder whether defiance would cost laboratories their funding, researchers their jobs and students their work.
And beneath these spectacular fights were quieter ones. The National Endowment for the Arts canceled one grant program and rewrote requirements for another. The Institute of Museum and Library Services was reduced dramatically after an executive order directed that the agency be pared back. Museums, libraries and small cultural organizations—places without Harvard’s endowment, CBS’s lawyers or the Kennedy Center’s national profile—were left to discover what happened when a modest federal grant disappeared.
03Where the abstraction became personal
That was where my abstraction about politics became personal.
I realized exactly how powerless I was when I watched my democracy weaken institutions I held dear. We face great powers every day, but the power of poets to move minds can triumph over the power of men to launch armadas. My heart broke as funds dried up, institutions contracted and individual voices fell silent. Governments can end careers. They can close stages, eliminate grants, scatter staffs and make particular works impossible. What they cannot extinguish is the human compulsion to create.
The power to defund art erases no art at all. It smothers it quietly until no one remembers it was ever there.
04What disappears first is not creation but witness
The designer still sketches. A drag queen still spends three hours constructing a face before walking onto a stage in a room Washington has never heard of. A furniture maker still discovers something beautiful in wood. A singer still writes a song no grant committee will ever encounter. What disappears first is not creation but witness: the reporter who would have covered it, the institution that would have preserved it, the stage that would have presented it, the photograph someone would have kept, the record proving that a person was here and made something worth remembering.
I could not restore a federal grant, reverse an executive order, or force a television network to keep a show on the air. But I could document what was still being made around me. I could learn the names, trace the lineages, preserve the credits, and make sure that work which might otherwise disappear left a record behind.
Mankind will still create.
So I am choosing to archive it.
I started close to home, documenting the designers, performers, craftspeople, venues, institutions and creative lineages of North Carolina one attributable fact at a time.