By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, February 03, 2026
Remember how, last December, Trump slapped his name onto the Kennedy Center, Washington’s most
prestigious concert and theatrical venue? It’s now “The Donald J. Trump and
the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center”: Ignore the ungrammatical extra “the” and
focus instead on the fact that Trump put his name on a “memorial center”
despite not being dead yet. It seemed at the time like an obviously
ill-starred act of hubris, designed to troll the world of the arts for its
wholesale rejection of him.
I have already written at length about Trump’s perverse desire to
physically remake the White House in his own image, but a specific impulse lay
behind his drive to place his name on this particular building. Trump’s desire
to see his name associated with Kennedy glamour and showbiz glitz is positively
palpable, an aspirational product of his own New York–centered childhood — and
in that sense is pathetically anachronistic. (Doesn’t he know that theater is
dead?)
But now I have little left to add, because it seems the
Kennedy Center itself is dead until Donald Trump leaves office! On Sunday
night, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was shuttering the
Kennedy Center completely, during America’s Semiquincentennial year of
celebration . . . for, uh, two years of retooling and refurbishing:
After a one year review of The
Trump Kennedy Center, that has taken place with Contractors, Musical Experts,
Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants, deciding between either
Construction with Closure and Re-Opening or, Partial Construction while
continuing Entertainment Operations through a much longer period of time,
working in and around the Performances, I have determined that The Trump
Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and
Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts
Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World. In other words, if we don’t close,
the quality of Construction will not be nearly as good, and the time to
completion, because of interruptions with Audiences from the many Events using
the Facility, will be much longer. The temporary closure will produce a much
faster and higher quality result!
Based on these findings, and
totally subject to Board approval, I have determined that the fastest way to
bring The Trump Kennedy Center to the highest level of Success, Beauty, and
Grandeur, is to cease Entertainment Operations for an approximately two year
period of time, with a scheduled Grand Reopening that will rival and surpass
anything that has taken place with respect to such a Facility before.
Therefore, The Trump Kennedy
Center will close on July 4th, 2026, in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our
Country, whereupon we will simultaneously begin Construction of the new and
spectacular Entertainment Complex. Financing is completed, and fully in place!
This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts,
will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad
condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a
World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has
ever been before. America will be very proud of its new and beautiful Landmark
for many generations to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
I quoted that post in full because I wanted to convey to
you just how sweaty-palmed Trump looks backing and filling in this case.
Everybody knows the real reason the Kennedy Center — after being renamed
after Donald Trump — is suddenly closing for the rest of Donald Trump’s
term in office: Artists simply will not play there anymore.
This is no secret. Hamilton already canceled its anticipated 2026 run at the Kennedy
Center in response to Trump’s 2025 purge of the Kennedy Center board. After the
name change in December, other cancellations followed — including from nonpolitical
artists who understood that playing in a building illegally renamed by a
sitting president after himself amounted to an endorsement of the act. But six
days ago — and far more devastatingly for the Kennedy Center’s social calendar
— composer Philip Glass withdrew his Lincoln symphony, written specifically
to premiere there in honor of America’s Semiquincentennial. “Symphony No. 15 is
a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are
in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony.”
I don’t blame Glass for the insult: Trump put his name on
the building precisely because he wanted to insult Glass and all others forced
to play there. I think President Trump is many things, but a fool is not one of
them; he knows exactly how much he is hated, and he is especially well-informed
about who specifically hates him. He renamed the Kennedy Center after
himself precisely because in his limited time left in office, he was amused by
the idea of watching luminaries from the hated artistic class forced to bow and
scrape and play in King Trump’s Beautiful Memorial Building. It really goes no
deeper than that. The original source of most of his impulses — and most of his
biggest errors — is vanity and ego gratification, after all.
So that’s it for the Kennedy Center for a while. I’m sure
that when Trump is through “revitalizing” it in late 2028, it’ll be 20 feet
taller and covered in fake-gold plating. Just in time for President Newsom’s
January 2029 Grand Reopening.
Nobody Is Illegal on Stolen Land — Unless It’s Billie
Eilish’s Land
The Grammys took place on Sunday night, and as a grumbly
old man, I’m proud to say I could not have cared less about any of the music
being celebrated this year. Then again, even back when popular music was still
nationally relevant — you know, back in the Late Neolithic — I couldn’t have
cared less about what a bunch of old men in the music business thought was
worth an award. (As far as I’m concerned, this is the same pool of voters who
gave the inaugural Grammy for “Best Metal Performance“ to Jethro Tull in the year
of Metallica’s . . . And Justice for All.)
Anyway, semi-relevant pop star Billie Eilish was given an
award on Sunday night — I don’t know what for, “Laziest Keyboard Groove” or
something like that — and when she took to the stage with her older brother,
she had a message for America: “F***
ICE.”
Isn’t it so daring? Such transgressive bravery,
and before such a hostile crowd, no less. “Nobody is illegal on stolen land. We
need to keep fighting and speaking up. Our voices do matter.” I commend the
clip to you, if for no other reason than that Eilish chose to dress in an
outfit that made her look like she was attending her high school graduation
(complete with a white sash) — the humorless valedictorian delivering a poorly
memorized speech.
But there’s really nothing else to do except chuckle a
bit at the manifest hypocrisy of it all. (Hey, at least she didn’t attend
wearing a dress held up by nipple piercings.) I’m quite certain that Billie
Eilish herself values her property and privacy, given that she has taken out restraining orders against several stalkers who kept
visiting her home. I also doubt that ICE will be showing up at her door for an
enforcement action anytime soon, so it’s a free play. I can only suggest that
if Eilish is consumed with guilt over what she stole from her predecessors, she
can always just give her Grammy to Lana del Rey.
The Most Inevitable Oscar Best Picture in Years Isn’t
All That Good
In yet more awards season news, the Academy Awards won’t
be handed out until next month, but I’ve finally caught up with enough of the
Best Picture nominees to have an idea of who will win the Oscar versus who should
win. And now you’re going to hear my opinion about it.
First of all, the best picture of the year was not even
nominated for the award — an increasingly common phenomenon in an age when
Hollywood is dwindling into cultural irrelevance. If you haven’t seen Ari
Aster’s Eddington yet — a deranged yet eerily well-pitched
chronicle of madness during the Covid era — watch it and prepare to be
intelligently provoked, no matter what your politics. Eddington pleased
nobody, neither the online right nor the bien-pensant left — and it also
features the undeniably overexposed Pedro Pascal, giving one of the better
acting turns of his alarmingly overproductive career — so it remains a
forgotten gem whose luster will only grow over the years.
Instead, we’re left debating slop like The Testament
of Ann Lee, a tribute to a self-extinguishing death cult. (Don’t worry, it’s a female-forward
death cult.) Or Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the “vampires versus
juke-jointers” film that somehow took an unbeatable premise — everybody
suspects Irish gingers of being day-walking vampires anyway; it just makes good
sense — and drowned it in an hour of entirely superfluous “world-building.”
Sinners’ great sin is boring its audience. When
the denizens of the undead finally start flashing their fangs, Sinners becomes
an entertaining enough (though uncreative) film. For its first hour of its run
time however, Coogler drags his heels interminably — perhaps he felt he was
building “character,” but these characters aren’t funny or complex enough to
justify the time spent on them. Robert Rodriguez’s From
Dusk till Dawn (which Sinners owes a clear debt to) worked in
large part because it knew exactly what sort of film it was: joyfully
exploitative trash. (Rodriguez and writer/co-star Quentin Tarantino would,
tellingly, later collaborate on the film Grindhouse.) Sinners wants
to take itself seriously, and that is its downfall. It still might win Best
Picture, though, because it checks all the right boxes.
But I just watched the most likely Best Picture winner
over the weekend, and I regret to tell you that it’s a surprising mess. One
Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s ode to violent
anti-deportation radicals, captures the leftist tenor of modern times and will
almost certainly match the urge of voters to “send a message” to Donald Trump
in the age of ICE. (Events in Minneapolis could not have been better timed to
give the film, which flopped at the box office, a boost with academy voters.)
I don’t know where to begin with One Battle; it is
a technically well-made film with flashes of genuine wit and human empathy, but
it ultimately drowns in the incoherence of its plotting and message. It might
be the best film among those on the list of 2025 nominees, but it can hardly be
called a good film. (This, of course, is its own comment on the state of
Hollywood moviemaking.)
An enormous part of the problem is its source material.
Most viewers of this film have not read Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 Vineland,
which it’s based on. Anderson is frankly starstruck by Pynchon — he has a
surprisingly winning adaptation of the author’s later Inherent Vice under
his belt — and chose for whatever reason to adapt his weakest work while trying
to update it for “relevance.”
In fact, perhaps this is why Anderson chose to
adapt it. Vineland was about Weather Underground–type radicals from the
’60s at the end of the Reagan ’80s. It’s a mess of a book (Pynchon might have
lived through the era, but he doesn’t understand it except on a superficial
anthropological level, the same way he “understands” V-2 rocketry), but it’s at
least period-appropriate and retains an ambivalence about its revolutionary
heroes.
One Battle After Another — by trying to update the
scene to the modern age, and change the cause from radical revolutionary
Marxism to radical open-borders terrorism — feels like a cargo-cult imitation
of it, and the attempt to update it to the modern era just points up what Anderson
fails to understand about the original text — and why it can’t really be
transposed to the modern era without coming across as entirely incoherent.
It will win anyway. But I don’t have a vote.
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