Donald Trump responded to Philip Glass’s withdrawal of his Lincoln symphony from the Kennedy Center the way he usually does when confronted by someone of real stature: with a sour-grapes, self-aggrandizing rant.
The tirade was petty, frivolous, and quickly forgotten. But the episode itself deserves attention because Trump’s insult, unsurprisingly, missed the broader point of Glass’s gesture.
Glass, 89, a towering figure in modern composition whose place in the history of music is secure, did not merely pull a much-anticipated work that is likely his last symphony. He pointedly sounded the symphony’s theme as a direct protest to the dangerous authoritarian rule under Trump.
Glass wrote, “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.… Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.” And he announced his withdrawal on January 27—exactly 188 years to the day after Lincoln gave the speech that inspired the symphony.
Symphony No. 15, Lincoln, draws centrally from Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address, generally considered his first great speech. Lincoln delivered the address to a group of young professionals in Springfield, Illinois, when he was just 28—an age when Trump was still shining his father’s shoes.
Trump, who one suspects has never read the Lyceum speech or listened to a Glass symphony, viewed the gesture, as he invariably does, as a personal affront. In fact, it was far more. It incorporated Lincoln’s prescient warning about democratic collapse, a warning that lands with unsettling accuracy on the dangers of Trumpian rule.
In the Lyceum, Lincoln was already grappling with the question of how republics fail. He begins by asking where the danger to American self-government will come from. Not from abroad, he insists. No foreign army, no invading conqueror, no modern Bonaparte. If destruction comes, Lincoln says, “it must spring up amongst us.” If the republic falls, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
Lincoln identifies the mechanism of that self-destruction with striking clarity. It begins with an “increasing disregard for law,” a willingness to substitute “wild and furious passions” for “the sober judgment of courts,” and the replacement of lawful authority with mobs. This condition, Lincoln warns, is “awfully fearful” in any community—and it would be an insult to intelligence to deny it where it exists.
The specific outrages Lincoln recounts—lynchings, burnings, mob executions—belong to his era. But his insight is structural. The deepest danger of mob law, Lincoln explains, lies not in the immediate violence but in the example it sets. When lawlessness goes unpunished, “the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice.” Having known no restraint but fear of punishment, they become “absolutely unrestrained.” They come to regard government as their enemy, rejoice in the suspension of its operations, and “pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”
Lincoln also warns of a subtler and more corrosive effect: habituation. As lawlessness persists, the public grows accustomed to it. What once shocked begins to seem normal. Expectations shift, standards erode, and defiance of lawful authority becomes ambient rather than exceptional behavior. This slow corrosion is what makes democratic collapse possible without a single dramatic rupture.
At the same time, Lincoln observes, law-abiding citizens begin to lose faith. When rights are held only at the “caprice of a mob,” attachment to government erodes. A republic without the affection of its best citizens, Lincoln warns, cannot endure. The danger is not merely that the lawless grow bolder but that the lawful grow disenchanted.
This dynamic, in turn, creates the opening for a particular kind of leader. When reverence for law collapses, Lincoln argues, men of ambition will not be lacking. Such figures seek distinction above all. And when the glory of building has already been claimed by others, these ambitious men will seek distinction by tearing down. Lincoln’s language is stark. A man of towering ambition, he says, will pursue fame “whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”
It’s impossible to read this description without seeing how exactly it fits Trump’s conduct. His contempt for law is not episodic or rhetorical; it is foundational. Courts matter only when they serve him. He casts legal accountability as persecution. He elevates loyalty over legality, impulse over judgment, grievance over governance. Mobs are not an aberration but a tool—summoned, legitimated, and excused. The result is precisely the “mobocratic spirit” Lincoln warned would rot a republic from within and prepare the ground for despotism.
Lincoln’s remedy is as important as his diagnosis. He does not call for charismatic saviors or heroic leaders. He calls for simple “reverence for the laws”; what he famously terms, in high Enlightenment rhetoric, a “political religion.” Lincoln is explicit that bad laws may exist and should be repealed. But while they remain in force, they must be obeyed, for the sake of example. “There is no grievance,” he insists, “that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” The alternative is not liberty but a descent into lawlessness that invites tyranny.
The Lyceum Address is not poetry but prose—a plainspoken diagnosis of how democracies fail. Lincoln identified contempt for law as the root condition of democratic collapse and traced how it hardens into despotism from within.
Glass has long aligned his work with serious engagement in democratic and constitutional life, including by making his music available to projects devoted to sustained legal and civic discussion. He has also contributed his music to Talking Feds, the podcast I host. That Trump met Glass’s gesture with bullyboy insults only sharpened the contrast between Lincoln’s gravity and Trump’s intellectual unseriousness.
Glass’s withdrawal was not a partisan gesture but a civic one: To premiere a work grounded in Lincoln’s defense of law under an institution now explicitly branded with Trump’s name would have recast the symphony as an endorsement of the very lawlessness it was written to oppose. Trump’s callow response only underscored the point. Lincoln warned that contempt for law is the republic’s gravest danger. Trump, without intending to, has demonstrated exactly why.
