By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Fall nears. The trade wars continue to rage. The Iran war
drags ever onward. The midterms are coming. And what is Donald Trump
doing to drag the country out of the several, concentrically deepening holes he
has dug for America, the Republican Party, and himself?
The answer, of course, is: preparing to demolish the
Kennedy Center, rather than let anyone else have it.
I touched on this already in the Carnival of Fools this week. It ill behooves a man to rave
on at length with his bug-eyed Cassandra-like predictions, but I’ll call my
shot now: Washington’s official federal performing arts venue will not make it
to the end of Trump’s term. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s certainly what the
president wants everyone to think. He’s signaling his next move so openly at
this point that he might as well be using semaphore flags.
To recap: 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.
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.
So he installed his faithful myrmidons on the Kennedy
Center Board of Trustees, who “voted” to rename it after him. Bookings
immediately vanished — no artist in America with any profile would ever recover
from ratifying such an imperial ego-grab with their presence — and when the
courts ordered him to remove his name, he instead erected a scaffolding to
permanently prevent the world from seeing the title of the venue without his
name on it.
With money running low, he followed through on Tuesday
with his threat to shut the whole thing down. I approved, if for no other
reason than that sheer pragmatism dictated it: There was no point in keeping
the Kennedy Center open so long as he remains in office. But, of course, Trump
can’t be allowed to lose like that; even more to the point, the next president
(whoever he or she is) can’t be allowed to win by default. So now
he might demolish the building entirely. He’s refreshingly open about how
selfishly narcissistic his motives are, too. From a quote he gave directly to ABC
News:
I’m the one capable of fixing it,
and then have to subsidize it for years to come because you will lose with the
Kennedy Center — they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars sometimes,
hundreds of millions — this is before I got involved. So for the Trump
administration, for me, to get involved and to take that on long-term, and to
carry it, or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration
should certainly have recognition. Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s
going to close, it’ll end up being ripped down.
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.)
First, note the sheer proprietary spirit with which Trump
speaks of the Kennedy Center, as if it’s some property he developed. Listen to
how he lies so effortlessly, pretending that refurbishing it would be his long-term
commitment, something he would be footing the bill for out of his own
pocket. Trump wouldn’t be paying a dime, obviously. (At best, Trump
could elect to spend some of his donor money on it, but in any event the
federal government will ultimately pay for the upkeep of its own building, as
required by statute; it’s yet another repulsive bit of fraudulence that he
knows he will never be called on.) And he remains in denial as to why the
center has lost money (not “hundreds of millions,” which is absurd): because of
his own intervention.
But second, 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.
I predict that Trump goes through with the demolition —
probably after the midterms, when he truly has nothing left to play for — and
even if he doesn’t, the mere act of publicly threatening it says volumes
anyway. This miserable sideshow has become a powerful symbol of Trump on Tilt
during his second term, ready to destroy a building if the courts won’t bow to
him and fixated on the matter to the exclusion of vastly more important issues.
The extremes this man will go to not to admit there is something he just cannot
do have begun to surprise even me.
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