Coral Springs man among arts panel’s resignees
The presidential committee on the arts and humanities — including Andrew Weinstein of Coral Springs —resigned en masse Friday in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s handling of the violent protests in Charlottesville, Va.
Weinstein, like the others who resigned, were holdover appointees of former President Barack Obama. Weinstein said the group decision came about “pretty quickly” after members saw the president’s responses to the deadly violence in Charlottesville. Trump said both
sides — white nationalists and neo-Nazis and the counterprotesters — share blame.
“Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville. The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisers have, without speaking out against your words and actions,” the letter states.
“Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions. … Supremacy, discrimination and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.”
Weinstein, a prominent national Democratic Party fundraiser, has been an outspoken critic of Trump. Earlier this week, after former President Barack Obama’s Charlottesville response quoting former South African President Nelson Mandela became the most-liked tweet ever, Weinstein commented on the milestone.
“Barack Obama now has the most-liked tweet of all time. If Donald Trump wants to break this record he need only tweet two words — I resign,” Weinstein wrote on Twitter.
As of midday Friday, that comment had been retweeted 88,024 times and liked 288,933 times.
Weinstein said the committee serves at the pleasure of the president with no fixed terms.
He said in a telephone interview Friday that the members were “devastated by not only the recent actions but the totality of the circumstances surrounding his first seven months in office and decided this was appropriate and necessary for so many reasons, most importantly the manner in which he constantly seeks to divide the people of our country and levels incoherent and baseless attacks.”
“This, to me, so far crosses that line, and there are so many lines that he has crossed,” Weinstein said. “For this president to fail to immediately and unequivocally condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis is against everything we believe in this country. It’s against what both of my grandfathers fought the Nazis for. It’s hard to wrap your head around.”
But Weinstein added that there’s another reason, related to the mission of the group: “His administration has sought to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is just both heartbreaking and inexplicable. The arts and humanities are such an integral part of who we are as a nation.”
The arts and humanities committee was created in 1982 by then-President Ronald Reagan, who included singer Frank Sinatra among its first members. It advises the White House on cultural matters and advocates for arts and humanities programs within the federal government and throughout the nation. “It has a very wide and diverse portfolio,” Weinstein said.
One of its programs, Turnaround Arts, which employs arts education to help turn around troubled schools, is operating in Broward County, the only Florida location. Before Trump took office, responsibility for the program was moved to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in an attempt to protect it. The National Student Poets Program is now under the Library of Congress.
After members of two White House business groups, the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and the Strategy & Policy Forum, started resigning over his comments about Charlottesville, Trump disbanded the panels.
Weinstein said the mass resignation was spearheaded by Kalpen Suresh Modi, an actor who goes by the stage name Kal Penn. Penn portrayed Lawrence Kutner on the television show “House.” He also played Kumar Patel in the “Harold & Kumar” film series, currently portrays Seth Wright in the ABC drama “Designated Survivor” and hosts a game show called “Superhuman.”
Other artists in the group include Chuck Close, known for his massive photorealist works; John Lloyd Young, a Tony Award-winning actor and singer; Jhumpa Lahii, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer; and George C. Wolfe, a Tony Award-winning theater and film director and playwright.
Other members come from the arts, business and politics.
Trump is sure to to recognize one name. The “Dear Mr. President” letter, signed by all 17 members of the committee, was sent on the committee’s stationery. She didn’t sign the letter, but the name printed at the top is the that of the first lady, “Melania Trump, honorary chairman.”