President Donald Trump failed a basic Les Miserables knowledge test so badly that he even tried to throw his wife under the bus.
The president and first lady were walking the red carpet for a Wednesday night showing of the French epic in Trump’s new look Kennedy Center when he was asked if he identifies “more with Jean Valjean or Javert.”
“That’s a tough one, I don’t know. That’s tough, you better answer that one honey,” he said, turning to Melania. She remained silent.
Jean Valjean is the story’s main protagonist. A scrappy revolutionary who, despite just being released from a 19-year stretch in jail, steals bread so his sister’s children don’t go hungry.
Inspector Javert, however, displays an unyielding belief in law and order above all else, even at the expense of justice or humanity.
The first part of the reporter’s question related to whether the president had seen the play before. “We’ve seen it a number of times, it’s fantastic. It was just about our first choice, that’s what we got,” the new chairman of the cultural hub’s board said.
The irony of Trump’s failure to choose between the selfless hero or the hardened martinet wasn’t lost on his new arch nemesis Gavin Newsom.
“Someone explain the plot to him,” the California Governor posted on X alongside a screenshot of a news report.
The CBS News article stated that Trump was at the premiere of a new four-week run of the play, even as anti-authoritarian protests raged across the country in response to his administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
Someone explain the plot to him. pic.twitter.com/IZps0wHTPd
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 12, 2025
This is not Trump’s first Les Misérables rodeo. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump played “Do You Hear the People Sing?” at rallies.
The song, a revolutionary anthem from the musical, is sung by students who rise up against oppression. Victor Hugo, the writer of the 19th-century book the play is based on, was a staunch opponent of authoritarianism.
Strange choice then for a president who has limited dissent against his regime by banning journalists from the White House and continues to gather up and deport society’s poorest and least fortunate.
“Trump has turned the Kennedy Center into an anti-woke arena. This musical is the most woke thing you could ever imagine. Totally woke,” Hugo scholar Kathryn Grossman, a professor of French at Penn State University, told Politico.
After Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016, Trump supporters rebranded themselves “Les Déplorables”—a pun that became rally branding. Trump embraced it fully, appearing at a Miami event the following week with the slogan projected behind him. “Welcome to all of you deplorables,” he told the crowd.
Trump also flirted with the idea of becoming a theater producer. At 23, he co-produced a Broadway run of Paris Is Out! by Richard Seff. He also toyed with the idea of turning his TV show The Apprentice into a musical.
“The president has an incredible aptitude for music and the arts,” Karoline Leavitt, his firebrand White House press secretary, said before the Wednesday night performance.
“That’s why he is so excited about the much-needed changes he is making to the Kennedy Center to restore it as an international icon for the arts.”
According to CNN, Les Mis cast members were given the option to sit out the show, and a dozen reportedly planned to do so. Asked about the boycott on the red carpet, Trump scoffed: “I couldn’t care less! Honestly, I couldn’t. All I do is run the country well,” before launching into a rambling list of his own accomplishments.
It comes after the president ousted much of the Kennedy Center board in February. He replaced them with loyalists and appointed himself chairman, vowing to eliminate programming he deemed too “woke.”
The post Flummoxed Trump Fails Basic Test on ‘Les Miserables’ Plot appeared first on The Daily Beast.
