Earlier this month, the board of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the prestigious American national cultural hub in Washington DC, appointed President Donald Trump its chairman.Days previously, on February 8, Trump had declared that he would take over the position, fire the chairman of the board, and make the Center “GREAT AGAIN”.Since becoming chairman on February 12, the President has fired several members of the board appointed by President Joe Biden, and put in place other members personally loyal to him, including Richard Grenell as interim executive director.What is the Kennedy Center, why has Trump gone after it, and are his actions even legal?It’s the most prestigious national cultural institution in the United States.On its website, the Kennedy Center describes itself as “a vibrant cultural hub that connects thousands of artists with millions of people each year”.It got off the ground in 1958, when President Dwight D Eisenhower signed bipartisan legislation to create a national centre for the performing arts in America’s capital.Story continues below this adIn 1962, President John F Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy launched a campaign to raise funds for the Center, and soon after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, President Lyndon B Johnson signed into law an Act to designate it as a memorial to the late President.In the years and decades since it opened in 1971, the Center became the iconic heart and enduring symbol of American cultural life.It is America’s busiest performing arts centre, which is open every day from 10 am to midnight, hosts more than 2,000 events and sees more than 2 million visitors every year. The Center gives the prestigious annual Kennedy Center Honors to five artists for their lifetime achievements in the performing arts.The Center is funded by a mix of government-appropriated funding, private donations and ticket sales revenue, The Washington Post reported.Story continues below this adIts operating budget was $268 million last year, a little less than half of which – roughly $125 million – came from earned revenue such as ticket sales. Another $95 million from private donations and fundraising, $45 million from federal appropriations, and $4 million from its endowment, The Post report said.On February 10, President Trump told reporters in an interaction that he was “going to be chairman of [the Centre], and we’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke”.Also Read | Endgame in Ukraine: How Trump will end the war Putin started“…We took over the Kennedy Center… [because] we didn’t like what they were showing and various other things,” he said. A day previously, he had said that “some of the shows were terrible” and “a disgrace”.In his Truth Social post, Trump complained that “just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth”. This, The New York Times said, appeared to be a reference to a drag-themed show called “Dragtastic Dress-up,” which was marketed as being aimed at “LGBTQ+ youth under 18”.Story continues below this adTrump’s MAGA base has been exulting over the takeover of yet another bastion of Washington’s liberal elite.On his podcast, Stephen K Bannon, who worked closely with Trump during his 2016 campaign, declared that “This Kennedy Center thing is big, folks — big”, and “They’re crushed over there.”The Kennedy Center, he said, was “the high church of the secular, atheistic administrative state that runs the imperial capital”, and asked listeners to now “Just watch the meltdown of the Washington elite.”American media has also pointed to a personal grudge that the President appears to bear against the Center, stemming from the hostile reception he received during his first term in the White House (2017-21).Story continues below this adThe New York Times recalled that “the trouble started in August 2017 when the television producer Norman Lear said he was skipping a White House reception for his Kennedy Center Honors award”. The Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan said she would tell Trump about the contributions of immigrants to America. Dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade pulled out in protest against Trump’s reaction to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.Trump “ended up canceling the reception and shunning the annual awards ceremony all four years of his first term”, The NYT report said. Earlier this month, Trump told reporters that he had never been to the Center, and he “didn’t want to go” because “there was nothing [that he] wanted to see”.Can Trump do it? The takeover is without precedent, but it is probably not illegal.According to American media reports, before this month’s purge, the 36-member Kennedy Center board was staffed by Biden and Trump appointees in roughly equal numbers. It is now made up almost exclusively of Trump loyalists.Story continues below this adSeveral artists connected with the Center have left, and many are cancelling their scheduled or planned shows.Asked if Trump could, under the law, oust the board of an institution like the Kennedy Center, Deborah Rutter, who served as president of the Centre from September 2014 until this month, told NPR in an interview:“[The] 36 [members of the board] are appointed by the President of the United States to serve for a six-year term. [The statute] is silent on whether or not the President can remove them… It is unprecedented for the Kennedy Center to have the President of the United States as a member of the board, and it is, therefore, unprecedented that the board would elect that individual to be chair of the board.”Asked to clarify if “unprecedented” did not necessarily mean illegal, Rutter said: “I can’t speak to that, but that is what the statute and our bylaws call for.”Story continues below this adThe Center itself has said that “it did not see anything in the law to prevent” the purge of the board members, The NYT said in a report. Both Trump and Biden have removed office-bearers in the past, and the removals have been backed by the court, it said.