Boston glam v Queens glam

Jeffrey Blehar at the National Review skewers Trump v Kennedy Center nicely.

Trump has long betrayed a quietly deep obsession with the world of the theater arts — which he no doubt associates with the New York of his youth. He is, famously, equally as obsessed with Kennedy family glamour — why, he even found his own collectible Kennedy to add to the administration! — and desperately wants to associate his own (decidedly grubbier) name with a national martyr.

In a way that’s more appropriate than it sounds, because the putative Kennedy family glamour really isn’t all that glam. Joseph Kennedy was an awful shit – a crook and a bad human being. He got rich, so his many offspring were rich, and they were reasonably pleasant to look at, but then you could say the same of Trump.

Therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that he would take a heavy hand with the Kennedy Center — the federally owned and directed performing arts venue for the nation’s capital, named for the slain president in 1964, prior to opening. It was one of the shiniest baubles in (what he regards as) his personal presidential treasury to play with and admire.

Nobody expected him to try to slap his name on it, however. Nobody expected him to be that crude or lawless. The building is named by statute; renaming it anything else is not optional, unless approved by Congress. Trump doesn’t care: His openly stated philosophy is to put his own name (or Trump-like “stamp”) onto everything he possibly can while still president. “Nobody else will,” he says, correctly.

It’s pathetic that he’s too dim to realize how this makes him look. Donny Donny Donny – if you throw yourself across the dinner table to grab all the food and smash any you can’t pick up, you’re not going to leave your guests dumb with admiration. Now apply this aperçu to every single thing you do. You see what I mean? Everything you do is grab or smash. Everything.

His message is clear: The Kennedy Center might belong to the nation, but for now it belongs to me. And if I can’t put my name on it, I’ll simply tear it down . . . and you can’t stop me. (To emphasize the point, Trump was later photographed — quite intentionally, one imagines — on Air Force One, being presented with various plans for emergency demolition of the Kennedy Center.)

I don’t even really care about the Kennedy Center itself. JFK was his father’s kid, and not a fabulous president. The putative glamour was all about the money, just as Trump’s is – although JFK did get into Harvard, which Dumb Don certainly didn’t. I don’t really care about the Center and it’s only Trump’s vulgar determined vandalism that has nudged me into acting as if I do.

understand the repulsiveness (and quasi-blackmail) of Trump simply threatening to tear the entire building down if he can’t get his name onto it. Nobody likes the kid who cries and threatens to take his toys home if people don’t bow to his demands. But people really hate the kid who cries and threatens to take your toys home.

People sometimes ask me why, with all the potential distractions and scandals this administration regularly provides, I’ve spent so much time writing about Trump’s impossible desires to forever associate himself with the prestige of Washington, D.C. Most of all, I find this entire sordid affair to be a wonderfully emblematic miniature, summarizing Trump’s imperial arrogance in all its spectacular pettiness.

Yep that’s me. I don’t really care about the Center but by god I care about the filth that is Trump.