Trump Is Destroying JFK’s America
Kennedy’s vision of a country built up through the service of its citizens is fundamentally incompatible with the vulgar cynicism of the current president.
OVER THE PAST TEN MONTHS, a theme has emerged from the actions the Trump administration has taken to reshape American government. Consider the following:
The Peace Corps has undergone a leadership shakeup and could still be facing cuts.
USAID for all intents and purposes does not exist anymore.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has had most of its national council and two-thirds of its staff fired and many of its grants cut.
The National Endowment for the Arts has undergone cuts that have in turn put a squeeze on museums across the country.
NASA is faced by funding cuts so dire the agency may be forced to cancel the “return” part of the Mars Sample Return mission.
AmeriCorps is facing a steep drop in funding and possible outright dismantlement in 2026.
What do all these programs have in common? Two things: They are deeply connected to the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and the Trump administration appears keen to destroy them.
Trump often expressly links his administration to presidencies he likes—Andrew Jackson is the standout point of reference—and he seems to almost compulsively refer to the two predecessors he loathes, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. But Trump’s connections to JFK are more limited: He released the Kennedy assassination files, and he appointed Kennedy’s nephew to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. But as the above survey should help to make clear, Trump has a strong connection to the Kennedy administration: He has enacted a program of destruction targeting what was best about Kennedy’s administration.
Few administrations have an aura as strong as Kennedy’s. Because of his youth, his moment in history, and his assassination, the Camelot story remains a vivid source of romance, intrigue, and paranoia in the national imagination. But more important than the aura was the ethos: one of national service, a deep sense of national purpose, and a belief that our moral convictions could help us reach to the moon—figuratively but also quite literally. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” has a permanent entry in the American political chrestomathy for a reason: Kennedy’s earnest exhortation to Americans to embrace service for the common good expresses an authentic national type.
Kennedy’s vision did not end at our national borders: He also called on Americans to see their mission as serving the world. Faced by the question of why Americans should do this, Kennedy responded, “There is no escaping our obligations.” For Kennedy, these obligations were to an “interdependent community of free nations” to a “world of largely poor people” and to resist “the adversaries of freedom.” He saw these actions as in our national interest but he nonetheless framed his call to service of country and service of the international community in the terms of a collective national moral obligation. There can be no American greatness without American goodness, and goodness serves.
It was that ethos that led Kennedy to found the Peace Corps and USAID. Both were meant to call Americans to service of this country and of the broader world. If President Trump thinks dead soldiers in Normandy were “suckers,” God knows what he thinks of people who go to sub-Saharan Africa to help secure clean water access. The Kennedy legacy lives on in the thousands who have committed themselves to service under the auspices of these programs over the decades since. It lives on in the college students I encounter who are thinking of giving up on such service because of the dwindling number of career paths that remain open to them as options to live this out amid Trump’s cuts and mismanagement.
Other programs that Trump is gutting, such as Voice of America and the Fulbright Program, were established prior to Kennedy, but he passionately supported them. Earlier this year, I spoke with a student who decided to turn down a Fulbright because of the attempts of Trump and Republicans to cut that funding. Serving her country by representing it abroad suddenly became a dead option for her. No doubt there are many more students giving up on either the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, to our larger detriment.
While both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities were founded in 1965 during the Lyndon Johnson administration, the groundwork for them was laid by Kennedy. In fact, LBJ saw his administration as carrying out Kennedy’s work with the Civil Rights Act and War on Poverty. The latter itself was based on a deep sense of national service Kennedy articulated in his inaugural address: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
KENNEDY’S LEGACY LIVED ON after Johnson. Notably, AmeriCorps was established in 1993 by the same president who signed into law the act of Congress that reorganized USAID as an independent agency in 1998: Bill Clinton, who articulated the mission of both organizations as remaining consonant with Kennedy’s vision for them. And JFK’s theme of service is also discernible in President George W. Bush’s support of volunteering, founding of the USA Freedom Corps, and creation of the PEPFAR program.
The Kennedy administration was brief, but its legacy was long. Not every aspect of JFK’s administration was good, of course; his legacy also includes interventions that led to the quagmire of Vietnam. There are many legitimate critiques of him, his idealism, and his own personal behavior. But his summons to Americans to be a people of national service, to ask what we can do to serve our nation and our world, feels like a distant memory now—it’s almost impossible to believe in those ideals in our cynical moment. President Trump now sits where Jack Kennedy once did. I invite you to imagine Trump attempting to say these words with a straight face: “Whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.”
The Trump ethos is rather different from Kennedy’s. Put simply, JFK’s focus on service has been replaced by Trump’s focus on self-service, which motivates his work of destroying any aspect of our government that serves. Trump’s response to those who served, suffered, and sometimes died in the armed services was: “What was in it for them?” It cannot be overstated how far Trump’s egoistic view of the world is from Kennedy’s vision of a nation built up by those willing to put the nation’s interest ahead of their own.
In this era of self-service, corruption is rampant. The administration put black tape over USAID’s name plaques and condemned to death hundreds of thousands of people who had relied on its programs simply because Trump’s on-again, off-again ally Elon Musk personally hated the agency. Trump is attempting to extort universities and news networks whose coverage he finds disagreeable; some of our biggest companies are attempting to purchase his favor by making donations to his pet projects, including the construction of a White House ballroom over the rubble of the East Wing and the Jacqueline Kennedy Rose Garden. When you factor in Trump’s desire to reset our country’s foreign alliances on an expressly transactional basis and destroy the networks of international trade that have helped maintain peace and encourage prosperity, all in order to reposition the United States as a regional hegemon instead of the leader and encourager of an “interdependent community of free nations” to which we owe “obligations,” the scale of the difference between Trump’s America and Kennedy’s becomes even easier to see. Reality has even provided a fitting metaphor to capture what is happening: After Trump took over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, attendance cratered, and one lawmaker introduced a bill to rename it for Trump.
In spite of all this, it remains possible to revivify Kennedy’s ideals. Indeed, resisting Trump effectively requires that we recover the best of the Kennedy ethos.
It’s important for the leaders who would lead us out of the MAGA wilderness to show us how to cultivate a spirit of national service again, even in this time of Trumpian grift and corruption. Overcoming Trump requires a deep renewal of republican values of civic virtue and service. It requires giving young people a real reason to think such service opens up viable career paths. Our next leaders need to show us what they propose for renewing, reviving, and reforming programs like USAID, the Peace Corps, and the many related programs of service and cultural enrichment that have taken so many MAGA blows. And to decisively move beyond Trump, we should all start to ask ourselves, “What can we do for our country?”
The answer, I still believe, is “everything.”
Terence Sweeney is a professor in the Honors Program and Humanities Department at Villanova University.
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