Everything Trump Touches Dies, Kennedy Center Edition
All the talent is heading for the exits.
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OK, let’s talk about the Kennedy Center and the piece of shit tyrant who’s trying to kill it.
This week, Ben Folds — one of my very favorite musical artists, I’ve been listening to him since high school and saw him from the front row for the umpteenth time in December — released this message:
Ben is leaving his role as artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. Opera singer Renée Fleming would soon do the same. Shonda Rhimes left her position as treasurer of the Kennedy Center. Deb Rutter, the president of the Kennedy Center, left because Donald Trump fired her and replaced her with his loyal gay quisling collaborator Ric Grenell, who before this had the distinction in the first Trump administration of being the ambassador most gutturally loathed by his host country (Germany). Issa Rae canceled an engagement there next month. So did Adam Weiner from the band Low Cut Connie. I am sure many more will come as they come.
All the talent, just running for the exits.
Because everything Donald Trump touches dies.
Last night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was talking about the Thursday Afternoon Massacre that happened at the Southern District of New York (SDNY) yesterday, and also at Main Justice, as fully six prosecutors resigned, refusing to obey ordered from Trump’s amoral fascist acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. And he said his wife — a constitutional law expert — had almost a “hygienic” reaction to the corruption surrounding that story. Just a guttural, involuntary disgust.
I knew what he was talking about because that’s how I’ve been feeling about what Donald Trump has done and is doing to the Kennedy Center. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a pianist — if you know me, you might know that my major in college was classical piano performance, and though I have strayed far from the path, I still consider that to be the real me and absolutely will figure out how to reintegrate it into my life in the next several years — but out of all the Trump atrocities, this one has just punched me differently. I think it’s because it just comes from a more personal direction, a punch I wasn’t steeled to expect coming.
Everything Trump touches dies.
If you haven’t kept up, the basic story is this: Trump has stolen something else that doesn’t belong to him, something he doesn’t deserve, something he isn’t good enough to have, and he will now destroy it so nobody else can have it either.
He declared what he was doing last Friday on Truth Social:
Positively Hitlerian, isn’t it? Of course, it’s Hitlerian in Trump’s unique, stupid, illiterate way. But yes, he was firing people who “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts an Culture.” (He capitalizes nouns like the Germans do.)
In his announcement, he bitched and whined that the Kennedy Center “featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth.” He was lying, of course. There were a couple drag brunches on the roof — so fun if you’ve never been to one — and there have been productions that involve drag, all aimed at adults. There was one special program that invited youth under 18 to learn the history of drag, apparently. A drop in the bucket compared to the 2,000 shows the Kennedy Center puts on each year. Had Trump gone to these events or any others? No, of course not.
Here are some Trump quotes about what he’s just done:
“So we took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday evening. “But we have, I guess, a whole new group of people going in. … I’m going to be chairman of it, and we’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke.”
The day before, he told reporters aboard Air Force One that “some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on.” He also said he has not visited the center but receives reports on it.
“I didn’t want to go,” he said. “There was nothing I wanted to see.”
I’m sure that diaper-wearing toddler is just great at sitting still for theatrical productions.
So he fired David Rubenstein, the chairman of the board, and named a new board, which immediately elected Dear Leader its new dictator. (He lied about it being a unanimous vote.) And what kind of talentless fucking losers are on the new board?
Some of the board’s new members include “God Bless the U.S.A.” singer and ardent Trump supporter Lee Greenwood, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, second lady Usha Vance and senior adviser Dan Scavino, among others.
And here comes that hygienic disgust again, from the pit of my stomach.
Everything Trump touches dies.
Back in 2017, when he was president the first time, Trump refused to go to the Kennedy Center Honors, because awards recipients criticized his thin skin. He didn’t attend for his entire first presidency. I won’t be shocked if whoever ends up on the roster for the next Kennedy Center Honors boycotts or criticizes him too, if the event even happens, and if Trump, Lee Greenwood and JD Vance’s dutiful wife don’t limit participation to Mennonite women’s choirs from eastern Ohio.
Will Trump even end up attending events at the Kennedy Center he just stole, only to drive it directly into the ground like he does with everything else?
‘We didn’t like what they were showing’
It’s worth taking a moment to note what absolutely dogshit musical taste Donald Trump has. You can hear a lot of his favorite songs in that campaign event he did with Kristi Noem, where his brain appeared to short out and he alternated between dementia-swaying along to Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman (here comes the hygienic disgust again!) and “Ave Maria” and “Memory” from Cats and, of course, Trump’s favorite gay bareback bathhouse sex anthem “Y.M.C.A.”
That’s the song he does his famous “Jerking Two Dicks At Once” dance to.
(There’s a whole Mar-a-Lago playlist. There are a few songs that, taken individually, are fine, but as a whole, good lord it is shit.)
It’s been noted before — I have noted it at Wonkette — that Trump is the oldest person who ever lived. He’s certainly the oldest 78-year-old. Just the way he phrased his whining about the Kennedy Center’s programming — “we didn’t like what they were showing” — reminds me of someone much older, someone who’s probably been dead for decades. He speaks and interacts with the world like somebody who doesn’t understand where he is, doesn’t understand all these modern things, doesn’t understand that it’s not the 1890s anymore and tariffs aren’t magic.
It’s all very, very, very Lawrence Welk.
I’m sure somebody like Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump could weigh in on this, both because she’s a psychologist and because she’s in the family and would have some insight, but here’s what I see: Trump reminds me of extremely, extremely old people who would sit by the piano when I would play for parties when I was in high school. They always wanted to hear the same five things, and yes, “Memory” was on the list. They were in their 80s and 90s then in the 1990s when I was doing that for money.
Trump, however, was born in 1946. Where did he get this? My amateur guess is that while his peers were out there having fun and enjoying life and changing the culture and rebelling and embracing rock ‘n’ roll music, Trump was dressed in a tuxedo, listening to “Ebb Tide” and craving true love from his weird gross father Fred, who was born in 1905. That is the age demographic Trump is appealing to here, and that is Trump’s true age. He is 120 years old, and all his friends are dead.
(By the way, regarding the whole staring at Daddy and hoping he’ll start loving him thing, I imagine Donald Trump Jr. has had some sort of similar experience, probably at Mar-a-Lago, probably with some kind of Sarah Brightman shit playing.)
Anyway, that’s my guess as to where this all came from.
Of course, when in the history of ever have white supremacist Nazi dictators been on the vanguard of good art? Will one of Trump’s Goebbels cosplayers be organizing a nationwide tour of “degenerate art” as well?
So yes, we have to endure the oldest 78-year-old man who ever lived trying to usher in some kind of Hitlerian “golden age” that strangely resembles the fucking garbage his ugly dad who didn’t love him most likely listened to.
Neat.
And a one-a and a two …
Why Is Trump Really Doing This?
You have to go back to Trump’s fantasies, his most humiliating rejections, his pathologies, his wounds that will never heal, the irreparable damage he non-consensually inflicts on the country every day, because that’s just the kind of guy he is.
Trump is desperate for a room full of (white) performers onstage to clap for him. He’s desperate for the kinds of people who go to the theater and the opera to want to be in the same room for him, to have tears in their eyes when they see him, to call him “sir.” He’s desperate for real elites to respect him.
Instead, those are the people who hate him and look down on him the most. Talented people, classy people, educated people, cultured people — they all agree on one thing, and it’s that Donald Trump is bottom-of-your-shoe fucking trash.
Yes, this is coming from a deep, deep place.
So either he’s going to force the Kennedy Center to clap for him, or he’s going to destroy the Kennedy Center and sit in it all by himself, audibly farting as he daydreams about the production he wishes was happening. If he can’t have it, nobody can have it. It’s just the kind of sick son of a bitch he is.
Maybe there will still be productions. Maybe somebody will sing him “Edelweiss.” If so, you can be sure the artists onstage will either find ways to openly humiliate him — which I recommend — or they’ll be talking shit about him backstage, about how they’d rather be doing anything else besides performing for his ass.
I do hope that when they do the Kennedy Center Honors, if they do the Honors — assuming the honorees aren’t all Kid Rock humping Lee Greenwood while they perform their new mashup “Proud To Be An American Cowboy, Bayybeeeeeee” — that the honorees say thanks but no thanks, this “honor” is now meaningless, there is no “honor” in it, just like there’s no “honor” any longer in being invited to the White House. Even within the extremely limited parameters of what Der Stupidführer considers art, it’s more likely than not that many if not most potential recipients hate his ass.
It’s incumbent upon them to make that known.
One More Thing.
It’s darkly funny that Trump is ruining the Kennedy Center the week after that Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl halftime show that set the world on fire. The two things seem related. The over-the-top, racist and enraged reactions from MAGA people were even more ridiculous than their normal reactions when they have to see Black people on TV enjoying themselves.
They elected Trump. They thought Black joy was illegal now!
Hip-hop doesn’t have to be your thing, but what that Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper did there was important and it was art. It was in-your-face, it was partially directed at Trump, but it was directed everywhere else too.
In the rageful reactions I saw from white supremacists and MAGA Nazis, I sensed that a big part of it was that they knew they were being made fun of, but they didn’t understand how. Trump himself left just after the halftime show. He was probably upset and appalled, but couldn’t verbalize why.
It’s like the rage conservative white people feel when they have to press “1” for English or when they think two ladies in the grocery store speaking Spanish are talking about them. It’s back to that old Main Character Syndrome thing.
They can’t stand when something is clearly not about them. People like Trump cannot stand when the Super Bowl halftime show isn’t for them, and they cannot stand when the shows at the Kennedy Center don’t feel like they’re for Trump and for other complete garbage humans like him. They can’t stand not having their (extremely basic, boring, undeveloped) taste catered to at every moment. So they lash out.
And one final thing: there is nobody in the United States of America who was hurt or offended by MAGA criticism of the Super Bowl. They don’t command the societal or cultural respect for that.
But they get upset when we make fun of their trash.
So when Trump fully ruins the Kennedy Center and it’s all Lawrence Welk all the time, when it’s 100 percent shit that makes Trump and his Nazis feel safe, full of musical numbers they can do to the Charleston to, we need to make fun of it loudly and often.
The Lincoln Center has an opportunity to do some absolutely epic trolling, by the way.
In closing, I’ve loved the Kennedy Center tribute to Barbara Cook ever since it happened. Watch it and then go spend some time at this page of YouTube search results of other performances from the Honors, for these are now historical artifacts, because everything Donald Trump touches dies.
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• stands on soapbox •
I have to push back on the Lawrence Welk mockery. Yeah, the champagne music is, was, even at the time, incredibly pale. (‘One Toke Over The Line’ notwithstanding.) But:
He played every shitbox ballroom in the Midwest for decades. His show was on for 50 years. He fought for black performers. He paid his people well.
I’m saying he paid his fucking dues. Now, imma not run out and buy his ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation, but I have nothing but respect for him.
• jumps off box, prepares to duck from rotten tomatoes •
I love the Kennedy Center. My daughter lives in DC and I live in NC, so I get us a season ticket package every year. Every other month or so, I take the train up to DC, we go see a fabulous musical, and then go out for an insanely expensive dinner and have a great time. Dumpy wants so badly to be part of the cool kids' group, and he knows they can't stand him becausr he's a boor and a parvenu, so this is his petty revenge.