The Kennedy Center Honors are the nation’s top performing-arts-achievement awards and their celebration the highlight of the capital’s cultural calendar.

Yet the honorees are typically announced in that most artless of ways — a press release.

Not this year.

You’d think liberals who decry conservatives as contemptible Philistines would be pleased to see a Republican president focus the country’s attention on the arts with something of a show itself.

But no — not when that president is Donald Trump. They slammed the selections too, though the list isn’t much different from those under Democratic presidents such as Barack Obama — and reflects a wide swath of what Americans appreciate and admire in the arts.

Of course, the small spectacle Trump held Wednesday at the John F. Kennedy Center

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