President Donald Trump spent the weekend crashing out on TruthSocial as artist after artist dropped out of the Freedom 250 festival, a White House concert series that will celebrate America’s 250th anniversary later this month. Trump ultimately declared he wanted to cancel the concert and replace it with a rally, featuring “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime” — himself.
Trump’s tantrum illuminates an element of his presidency that seems to both delight him and cause him great distress: 10 years into the MAGA movement, Trump remains the only true star MAGA has to offer. There is no one else willing to affiliate themselves with the movement who can pull in crowds the way Trump can, a fact that appears to be both flattering and humiliating to him.
Trump palpably loves his own fame and his ability to draw enormous crowds and light them up with violent, aggressive energy. He enjoys being the most powerful person in the room, able to extract shows of loyalty and submission from political allies and enemies alike. He has made the spectacle of these fawning displays a mainstay of his presidency, regularly broadcasting live Cabinet meetings in which each member of his staff jockeys to praise him more lavishly than the one before.
It is doubtless gratifying to Trump’s ego to know that even if he cannot get a proxy to deliver crowds on his behalf, he can still get his faithful to show up for him — and, by extension, that MAGA still relies on him to get the crowds going, even as the movement begins to look to a post-Trump future.
Yet Trump is also a classic climber, clearly aware that his own star rises when he can rub shoulders with A-listers. He has cultivated famous friendships since well before his transition to politics. In 2005, he invited Billy Joel to his wedding to Melania Trump, and while Joel did attend, the singer would later say he didn’t know why he was invited. “I don’t really know him that well,” Joel said in 2016. “I think I met him once or twice.” Trump claims to have been friends with legends like Muhammed Ali, and he complains about former celebrity associates who no longer speak to him. (On Whoopi Goldberg: “She said, ‘You’re so great. There’s nobody like you in the world!’” On Oprah: “Oprah used to really like me. She was here many times. She loved my key lime pie.”)
Trump has appeared to be disappointed by his transition from Manhattan’s gilded, glamorous social scene to Washington, where few of his associates could be truthfully described as “glamorous.” Perhaps that is why he has responded to his careful treatment at the hands of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani with magnanimous delight: At last, a fellow politico with star quality, willing to rub elbows with Trump.
Unfortunately for Trump, his racism and misogyny alienated liberal Hollywood before he even took office. In some ways, the Freedom 250 fiasco is a replay of his 2017 inauguration, when star after star declined invitations to appear at his events, including those who had performed for George W. Bush under his presidency.
Since then, MAGA has attracted a few reactionary and controversy-prone celebrities to its ranks. Most notably, that includes Nicki Minaj, who told Erika Kirk in December that she had “the utmost respect and admiration for our president,” and who remains the closest possibility the movement has for a legitimate mainstream celebrity. Yet whether at Minaj’s request or the White House’s, her name never appeared as a possibility for this summer’s festivities. She has yet to throw the full weight of her star power behind Trump — and given the lack of overlap between her audience and Trump’s, it’s not clear how much of that power she would retain should she commit to him fully.
By the end of the spree of Freedom 250 cancellations, the concert series lineup appeared to be down to Vanilla Ice and a couple of others, though it isn’t entirely clear who is still planning to perform, and it is not exactly a group of stars who can headline an arena tour. On TruthSocial, Trump lashed out bitterly. He called the lineup a group of “highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’” who he wouldn’t want to work with anyway, declaring that he only wanted to surround himself with “Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN.” He’s telling the truth. Trump clearly wants to surround himself with real stars, whom he considers life’s winners. The problem is, they don’t seem to want to be around him.
Of the entertainers willing to play to the MAGA crowd, Trump remains the only one who could fill Madison Square Garden. It’s the level of fame he’s always sought, and it’s made him deeply necessary to his allies, which can feel like a position of strength — but he’s also demonstrated that he hasn’t built a movement that can bring in a crowd without him. That’s a weak position for any president to be in.
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