Jeffrey Blehar writes at National Review Online about one of President Donald Trump’s recent controversial decisions.
Remember how, last December, Trump slapped his name onto the Kennedy Center, Washington’s most prestigious concert and theatrical venue? It’s now “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center”: Ignore the ungrammatical extra “the” and focus instead on the fact that Trump put his name on a “memorial center” despite not being dead yet. It seemed at the time like an obviously ill-starred act of hubris, designed to troll the world of the arts for its wholesale rejection of him. …
… [A] specific impulse lay behind his drive to place his name on this particular building. Trump’s desire to see his name associated with Kennedy glamour and showbiz glitz is positively palpable, an aspirational product of his own New York–centered childhood — and in that sense is pathetically anachronistic. (Doesn’t he know that theater is dead?)
But now I have little left to add, because it seems the Kennedy Center itself is dead until Donald Trump leaves office! On Sunday night, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was shuttering the Kennedy Center completely, during America’s Semiquincentennial year of celebration . . . for, uh, two years of retooling and refurbishing. …
… Everybody knows the real reason the Kennedy Center — after being renamed after Donald Trump — is suddenly closing for the rest of Donald Trump’s term in office: Artists simply will not play there anymore. …
… I think President Trump is many things, but a fool is not one of them; he knows exactly how much he is hated, and he is especially well-informed about who specifically hates him. He renamed the Kennedy Center after himself precisely because in his limited time left in office, he was amused by the idea of watching luminaries from the hated artistic class forced to bow and scrape and play in King Trump’s Beautiful Memorial Building. It really goes no deeper than that.
