A Scorned Trump Gathers Bulldozers for the Kennedy Center

F all 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.