Lights, Camera, MAGA!
Under Donald Trump’s supervision, the Kennedy Center is playing the hits.
To her enormous frustration, psycho Trump sycophant Laura Loomer still hasn’t managed to land a White House job. But she’s proven adept during Trump 2.0 at costing other people theirs—whispering in Trump’s ear that this or that functionary is insufficiently loyal, with firings usually following at once.
This morning, though Politico has an interesting piece of palace intrigue about an unsuccessful Loomer hit: The influencer got vaccine regulator Vinay Prasad fired last month, but Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—successfully petitioned Trump last week to bring him back. Susie Wiles, what can’t she do? Happy Thursday.
Making ’80s Pop Great Again
by Andrew Egger
Washington, D.C., in Donald Trump’s telling, may be a festering hellhole worse than Baghdad and Bogotá—but damned if he’s not going to make it a hellhole with some culture. Back in February, Trump appointed himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, complaining that the institution was “in tremendous disrepair” but that “the king of ratings” was going to turn it around. His mind was already afizz with ideas: “The thing that does well is Broadway hits,” he explained.
Yesterday, Trump schlepped back to the Kennedy Center again to make a little news: He’d chosen the honorees for the center’s awards show this December. “They all went through me,” Trump said. He’d “turned down plenty,” he’d added, whom he’d deemed “wokesters.”
Who ultimately made it through Trump’s gauntlet of scrutiny? A battery of decades-past megastars of stage and screen: Sylvester Stallone, the rock band KISS, country legend George Strait, Broadway star Michael Crawford, and disco icon Gloria Gaynor.
“I will say, ‘I Will Survive’ is an unbelievable song,” Trump said.1
I have to confess that I look forward to Trump’s regular jaunts to the Kennedy Center, even if only as a break from the regular parade of horribles. It’s a place where his detestable qualities and his merely odd ones merge and interplay in interesting ways. Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Shawn McCreesh suggested there’s “a kind of yearning for a simpler time” in Trump’s Kennedy Center cosplay—“when he was thought of as a tabloid rascal turned reality television maestro, a mostly in-on-the-joke figure who symbolized greed and commercialism and who appeared in everything from ‘Home Alone 2’ to ‘Sex and the City’ to a Pizza Hut commercial.” They don’t put Trump in Pizza Hut commercials anymore.2 Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
There are other reasons to enjoy the spectacle. The right wing worships Trump as a manly man among men. But this image has always fit oddly on Trump, the complexly coiffed, makeup-slathered cosmopolitan creature with a soft spot for a showstopper.
The Kennedy Center gig brings these contradictions to the forefront. Sure, it’s terrible on the merits to have our nation’s official arts honorees openly screened for permissible opinions about the president—but it’s also funny to imagine that president poring over the lists and picking the nominees on a personal and deeply camp calculus of what’s big, brassy, and Broadway.
American arts culture, in Trump’s view, has gone down the tubes not just because most of Hollywood hates him personally, but because it’s become too disdainful of the classics—a touch too openly gay; not quite closeted enough. In Trump’s America, the Kennedy Center is going to play the hits, dammit, the bigger the better. Those who look down on Andrew Lloyd Webber will be given the option of a televised military tribunal.
Of course, he’ll be center stage the whole time. In his remarks yesterday, Trump let it be known that his aides had wept, pleaded, besought him to host the awards personally. Ultimately, our deeply reluctant president—no fan of the limelight, as we all know—was ground down.
“I’ve been asked to host—I said, ‘I’m the president of the United States! Are you folks asking me to do that?’” Trump said. “‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said, ‘I don’t care, I’m the president of the United States. I won’t do it.’ They said, ‘Please.’ And then Susie Wiles said, ‘Sir, I would like you to host,’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’”
“It’s been a long time,” Trump, who is indeed also serving as the president of the United States, went on. “I used to host The Apprentice finales, and we did rather well with that.”
Cassandra Takes a Break
by William Kristol
I come bearing good news!
I’m off for the next week.
I could use a break. Heavy, after all, is the hand that bears the burden of chronicling our daily tidings of national woe. Arduous is the task of identifying the markers of our steady decline toward a dystopian future.
Come to think of it, is it merely a steady decline? Isn’t it an accelerating slide down the slippery slope towards authoritarianism? From federal troops on the streets of Washington D.C. to assaults on the truth at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from an establishment that is mostly complicit to an opposition that is too often floundering to a judiciary that is increasingly compliant—isn’t it all getting worse faster than most of us would have imagined?
Wait, wait, wait! Slow down! There I go again (my inner Ronald Reagan voice cautions)! That’s why I need a break! I’ve got to get a little perspective! It can’t be as bad as all that!
Actually, it can be as bad as all that. I suspect it is as bad as all that. And I’m pretty sure it’s going to get worse before it gets better—if it gets better. We’re only part way down the path, to quote the Declaration, of “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object” of pushing us towards something very much like despotism.
Oops, there I go again! Enough with the alarms and the laments! A break will be good. And of course Andrew Egger and my other colleagues will do an excellent job of bearing witness to our trials and tribulations in my absence.
I imagine they’ll even be a little less Cassandra-like, a bit less Eeyore-ish, than I’m inclined to be.
Of course I’d remind them that, in fact, Cassandra was proven right. And I’d note that Eeyore (“Good morning . . . if it is a good morning, which I doubt”) is the true and unsung hero of the Winnie the Pooh tales. So if my colleagues aren’t being Cassandra-like and Eeyore-ish, they’re probably kidding themselves . . .
Wait, there I go again!
Enough.
See you in a week.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Demands the Smithsonian Deliver Shiny, Happy History… His fascistic insistence that it eliminate “divisive or partisan narratives” reveals what he doesn’t understand about history and about America, observes THOMAS LECAQUE.
Trump’s Amateur Diplomacy Tests U.S. Allies… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss Secretary Hegseth’s restoration of Arlington’s “Reunion” memorial, the president’s nationalizing of the D.C. National Guard for law enforcement, and Steve Witkoff’s misreading of Putin that led to the ill-conceived Alaska Trump–Putin summit.
Bombs Won’t Win the War on Drugs… The military can interrupt the supply, but it can’t do anything about the demand, writes GEN. MARK HERTLING.
Pitiful GOP Candidate in VA! Goateed Loser Cooking Books! Leningrad...What?! SARAH, TIM, and JVL are BACK for another episode of The Next Level.
How To Prepare for Trump Taking Over Your City… A leading Democratic mayor has a game plan. But he also has concerns that the national party isn’t doing more to support them. LAUREN EGAN reports in The Opposition.
The 18-Year-Old Vigilante ICE Agent Is Coming… The trouble with getting rid of age limits for new ICE hires. ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO in Huddled Masses on what could go wrong.
Quick Hits
I WOULD RATE IT A 10: As he prepares to enter this week’s Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump says his endgame for the war in Ukraine is simple: He wants to end it. Beyond that, who can say what he’ll demand—or of whom he’ll demand it? Earlier this week, Trump threw some of his now-customary bizarro-world shade at Volodymyr Zelensky, blaming him once again for the war breaking out in the first place and scoffing off the idea he should be present for the summit. Yesterday, though, Trump seemed to change course, saying that he’d like to have a trilateral meeting “almost immediately” if Friday’s summit “goes okay.” He even suggested Russia could face “very severe consequences” if he feels after Friday that Putin is not operating in good faith. (An amazing concept, really.)
The principle of “last guy Trump spoke to” may have been somewhat in play here: Trump’s remarks came after a morning call with Zelensky and European leaders, who have been much more in the president’s good books since June’s NATO summit, which they spent agreeing to some of his policy demands and shamelessly buttering him up. “President Zelensky was on the call,” he explained. “I would rate it a 10, very friendly.” Here’s hoping the afterglow of that call lingers in Trump’s mind past the handshakes with Putin on Friday.
LEGAL STANDING > GLOBAL SUFFERING: After the White House turned off the spigot of most foreign aid earlier this year, a number of former recipients of that aid sued the government, arguing that Trump lacked the authority to hold back aid money already appropriated by Congress. But the White House won a significant victory in that fight yesterday after an appeals court ruled that the groups had no standing to sue. Here’s the New York Times:
But by a 2-to-1 vote, the appeals court panel ruled that under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, only the Government Accountability Office, which serves as Congress's independent watchdog, could challenge the president’s efforts to withhold foreign aid funding. . . .
Barring further action from the courts, the ruling gave the Trump administration leeway to slash the funds, cut the agencies that administer foreign assistance programs and terminate entire aid programs that Congress had funded. . . .
Under the law, the accountability office has the power to sue to force the release of impounded funds, but it has not done so thus far, letting lawsuits launched by outside groups play out. The agency’s leader, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, previously described a legal challenge as a last resort.
Well, Comptroller General Dodaro, You may wanna get on that.
Cheap Shots
It’s always the ones you least expect.
What can you say—when he’s right, he’s right. [Editor’s note: The cover by Cake is even better.]
Though we wouldn’t put it past him to start a jumbo slice joint—“Trump Slice”—on 18th Street as part of his D.C. makeover.
Trump's conversation about the Kennedy Center, so his pretense of being asked to host.. is so cloying. So much about a narcissist begging for attention.
In any other universe but the current one, Trump would be universally laughed at. But he is not.
I give up.
Trump's love affair with '80s Broadway spectacle never ceases to entertain me.
Its one of the few bright spots in our miserable times to remember that MAGA America's beloved orange avatar of traditional, red blooded, aggressively heteronormative all-American masculinity loves nothing more than watching a bunch of gay dudes prancing about in cat costumes.