Trump Wants Sylvester Stallone to Head the NEA, Says Daily Mail

Stallone photo by Georges Biard (license); Trump photo by Gage Skidmore (license)

Yo, Washington!

The Daily Mail (yeah, we know) is reporting that Donald Trump will tap Sylvester Stallone to head the National Endowment for the Arts.

Various artists have chaired the NEA before, though most have also had more of an education/arts funding background. None have been nearly as famous as Stallone. The current chair is Jane Chu, an artist and musician with a background in philanthropy and education.

“It’s been widely and wrongly assumed that a Trump presidency will be hostile to the arts,” a source told the DailyMail’s website. “But Mr. Trump feels this sort of A-list appointment is precisely the shot in the arm that the industry needs.”

The NEA is an independent government agency founded in 1965 that funds artists. It perennially serves as fodder for Republicans, who either don’t like the idea of arts funding at all or don’t like the types of projects the NEA occasionally funds. In recent years, locally it has funded everything from shows by 1812 Productions to BalletX to the Barnes Foundation to Koresh to the Library Company to the city’s preservation of its sculptures.

The chairperson of the NEA is not a cabinet-level position, though the Senate would have to confirm the man who made fictional Philadelphia boxer Rocky Balboa famous.