The White House confirmed on Thursday that Donald Trump awarded the National Medal of Arts to artists, including Ricky Skaggs and Toby Keith, at a time when Congress was preparing to challenge him a second time.
Medal honorees also included Earl “Rusty” Powell, the oldest director of the National Gallery of Art, and Mary Costa, the opera singer who voiced Aurora in the Disney film Sleeping Beauty. Another honoree, photographer Nick Ut, best known for his Vietnam-era photography, The Terror of War, defended his decision to accept Trump’s tribute due to last week’s siege of the Capitol.
The National Medal of Arts was created in 1984, with recommendations submitted to the president by an advisory committee of the National Endowment for the Arts. Trump distributed his first artistic medals in 2019 to a group that included Jon Voight, Alison Krauss, U.S. Army musicians and Sharon Percy Rockefeller. Unlike this ceremony, the White House did not give access to the press to Wednesday’s event.
On Wednesday, Trump also handed the National Humanities Medal to Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation; James Lighthizer, president of the American Battlefield Trust; and the National Museum of World War II.