He just can’t help himself, even when his demanding, baby-bully impulses, like putting his name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, are clearly bad politics.
However unpopular and unseemly, these antics nevertheless put him once again and ever-more at the center of attention, which, in the new political math, or at least Trump political math, creates something like a zero-sum effect: people hate him more, and his polls suffer, but by his sheer omnipresence, and will to dominate, his core supporters don’t love him less. And since the Democrats are weak and disoriented, he can, by just continuing to be Donald Trump, often eke out a win.
Back to he just can’t help himself: Someone’s name—as it happens John F. Kennedy’s—was on the Kennedy Center which meant, ergo, it was a naming opportunity. With an acute, indeed obsessive, awareness of names on buildings, Trump couldn’t help himself from thinking having his name there too would be a personal achievement—one that, conveniently, he could order to happen.
Weeks into his second term, full of new determination to do everything he didn’t do in his first term, he made himself the chairman of the Center’s board and appointed Ric Grenell, one of his persistent henchmen, and an oft-lieutenant of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as the executive director. Grenell had no experience working with cultural institutions. He had, in fact, previously pitched himself as Secretary of State. But Grenell is gay, and that may have connected him in Trump’s mind with the performing arts.
But what was also in Trump’s mind was a sense that the Kennedy Center was a Democratic Party institution and a part of a permanent Washington averse to him. Its chair, during his first term, was the Democratic financier David Rubenstein, whom Trump was frequently grumpy about. When he’d had the opportunity, he’d appointed Jon Voight and Mike Huckabee as his MAGA representatives to the board. In the second term, he wasn’t taking half measures. He began to tell people, as shorthand for his intention to make it less highbrow and elite, “we’re going to make it the Trump Center.” Then that shorthand became a more specific plan. Why shouldn’t it be called the Trump Center?
Almost everyone in the immediate orbit resisted this idea—indeed, was appalled by it. Was he really being serious? How could he be?
But there isn’t the language to say to Donald Trump, this is way out of bounds, megalomaniacal, a really bad look, a turd of an idea, politically speaking. So the modestly better idea became suggesting, how about the Trump-Kennedy Center? which Trump, in a perfect example of the Trump set-up, absurdity modified to mere outrageousness, began to announce that many people were urging him to add his name to the Kennedy Center.
Who, beyond Donald J. Trump himself, thought this was a good idea? Not a single member of Congress. Not a single member of his White House. Not a single cabinet member. It was impossible to understand how it could have survived any sort of political scrutiny.
But on December 18, the Kennedy Center board voted to change the name to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, with signage already in place to go up the next day.
It was, of course, a terrible idea greeted with a level of mockery, derision, umbrage, including from the Kennedy family, that turned it in Trump’s mind into a political imperative (and into an awkward situation for his secretary for Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump has tried to recruit to come to his defense, which, so far, Kennedy has resisted, and who the media has tried to bait into dissing his boss—“I have bigger fish to fry,” said Kennedy, moving quickly off the thin ice).
The fallout was immediate. You could not perform at the Trump-Kennedy Center without your personal integrity and professional reputation taking a hit. Philip Glass, Hamilton, Renée Fleming, Béla Fleck, the Martha Graham Dance Company The Cookers, Shonda Rhimes, the Washington National Opera—all cancelling their performances.
You could not attend the Trump-Kennedy Center without being marked as a MAGA lackey, and ticket sales plummeted. Effectively, the Trump-Kennedy Center could not operate.
So, Trump, doubling down on the consequences of his perfectly terrible idea, has now announced the closing of the Trump-Kennedy Center. For two years, he says. For a refurbishment. Right.
Because he just can’t help himself, he has found himself in the middle of a totally avoidable embarrassment, which, in the zero-sum Trump politics of fire and fury, he will push to the most destructive and vengeful and—except for the sheer value of chaos and conflict and his never, but never, back down pride—politically disadvantageous conclusion.
This is why it is so hard to oppose him, because what he does makes no sense, except as a constant assertion of his determination to do what nobody with any sense would do—demonstrating nothing so much as his willingness and power to do something even self-destructive—to reconfirm his absolute singularity.
So…the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, the Edward Durell Stone modernist landmark on the banks of the Potomac, will be stripped down and rebuilt in an imperial neoclassical style, and be rededicated to arena-type entertainment as …well…the Donald J. Trump Center.
Because he just can’t help himself, the Kennedy Center will be gone, and, because this is part of the zero-sum calculus of Trump power, forgotten.
The post Opinion: The Kennedy Center Is Gone, Just Like Trump Wanted: Wolff appeared first on The Daily Beast.
