{"id":160570,"date":"2025-08-13T21:58:59","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T21:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/and-here-is-your-host-trump-casts-himself-for-kennedy-center-honours-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T21:58:59","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T21:58:59","slug":"and-here-is-your-host-trump-casts-himself-for-kennedy-center-honours-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/and-here-is-your-host-trump-casts-himself-for-kennedy-center-honours-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"And here is your host \u2026 Trump casts himself for Kennedy Center honours – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

The president turns the annual DC arts celebration into another monument to himself, handpicking honourees and hogging the spotlight
\u201cT<\/span>here is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts,\u201d are among the words inscribed in marble at the John F Kennedy<\/a> Center for the Performing Arts<\/a> in Washington. The age of Elizabeth was the age of Shakespeare, it says.
The age of Donald Trump<\/a> is the age of Trump\u2019s ego. Trump the president, commander-in-chief and master builder. Trump the supremo of the upcoming Olympics<\/a>, football World Cup<\/a> and America\u2019s 250th birthday. Trump whose self-aggrandisement is the size of a planet: on Wednesday not even the Kennedy Center\u2019s cavernous Hall of Nations could contain it.
The president announced that he will host this year\u2019s Kennedy Center Honors<\/a> \u2013 after all, he used to be on The Apprentice, so how hard can it be? He unveiled this year\u2019s honourees \u2013 screened by him to veto \u201cwokesters\u201d \u2013 and grumbled that he had never been one. He reminded everyone that he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Nearby, the giant bust of Kennedy may have shed a tear or two as Trump, wearing dark suit, white shirt and red tie, strode into the marble-walled, red-carpeted Hall of Nations to continue his hostile takeover of the nation\u2019s capital<\/a> \u2013 and the country\u2019s cultural life<\/a>.
The 100ft-high arts complex on the banks of the Potomac River and its annual arts awards might seem trivial in the scheme of Trump\u2019s authoritarian<\/a> crusade. But there are few better measures of how his second term is proving more ambitious, intentional and effective than his first.
Trump 1.0 never set foot in the Kennedy Center. Each year the Honors took place without him<\/a>, with recipients including his critics such as as Cher, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sally Field. And there were diverse lineups: Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, Lionel Richie, Debbie Allen, Berry Gordy, Gladys Knight and Queen Latifah.
Trump 2.0 has been a very different proposition in his targeted approach to immigration and crime, his vendettas against political opponents and his bullying of law firms, media companies and universities. Suddenly the Kennedy Center, like the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s museums<\/a>, finds itself in the line of fire of Trump\u2019s war on woke.
Like Shakespeare\u2019s Richard III, who feigns reluctance to take the throne as a tactic to appear more virtuous, Trump claimed he didn\u2019t really want to take on hosting responsibilities when his staff asked.
\u201cI said: \u2018I\u2019m the president of the United States! Are you fools, asking me to do that?\u2019 \u2018Sir, you\u2019ll get much higher ratings.\u2019 I said: \u2018I don\u2019t care, I\u2019m president of the United States. I won\u2019t do it.\u2019\u201d
But then, in his telling, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, intervened. \u201cI said, OK, Susie, I\u2019ll do it. That\u2019s the power she\u2019s got. So I have agreed to \u2026 They\u2019re going to say: \u2018He insisted.\u2019 I did not insist but I think it will be quite successful actually. It\u2019s been a long time. I used to host The Apprentice finales and we did rather well with that.\u201d
The Kennedy Center Honors were established in 1978 and recipients have included George Balanchine, Warren Beatty, Aretha Franklin<\/a>, Tom Hanks, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim and Barbra Streisand. Trump remarked: \u201cI wanted one. I was never able to get one.\u201d
A group of Trump lackeys sitting stage left burst into laughter then realised he wasn\u2019t joking and fell silent. \u201cIt\u2019s true, actually. I would have taken it if they would have called me. I waited and waited and waited and I said: \u2018To hell with it, I\u2019ll become chairman and I\u2019ll give myself an honour. Maybe next year we\u2019ll honour Trump, OK?\u201d
All right, now that time he was joking. Wasn\u2019t he?
Trump announced a characteristically white male-heavy list for this year\u2019s honourees: actors Michael Crawford and Sylvester Stallone<\/a>, singers George Strait and Gloria Gaynor, and members of the rock band Kiss. As he spoke of each, a curtain was pulled back on their photo in very retro, low-tech style.
Crawford, he noted, was born in England in 1942 and made his Broadway debut in 1967. \u201cI was there. I shouldn\u2019t say that but I was there. It seems like a long time ago, and he became an international sensation in the 1980s for his original portrayal of the Phantom of the Opera \u2013 one of the greatest ever, ever, ever, ever.\u201d
It was hardly surprising from a man whose cultural tastes refuse to acknowledge the existence of the 21st century, though there was no mention of the 70s British sitcom Some Mothers Do \u2019Ave \u2019Em<\/a> in which Crawford played accident-prone Frank Spencer, known for the catchphrase \u201cOoh Betty!\u201d
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Stallone\u2019s characters Rambo<\/a> and Rocky<\/a> are more Trump\u2019s style: macho, muscular, primal, violent, taking no prisoners. The kind of great white hopes that he would now like to see policing the streets of Washington. The president mused: \u201cRocky, Rambo \u2013 if you did one, you\u2019re good. You do two?
\u201cI\u2019ll never forget I was a young guy and I went to see a thing called Rambo and it had just come out. I didn\u2019t know anything about it but I was in a movie theatre \u2013 like we used to go to movie theaters a lot \u2013 and I said: \u2018This movie is phenomenal! What the heck?\u2019 And that turned out to be a monster.\u201d
Trump described Stallone as one of the biggest names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but then remembered this is supposed to be all about him. \u201cIn fact, the only one that\u2019s a bigger name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they say, is a guy named Donald Trump. I\u2019m on the Hollywood Walk of Fame<\/a> too, if you can believe that one.\u201d
Strait, Gaynor and Kiss met with his approval too. Trump might have stopped five wars in the past six months, by his own estimate, but he still had time to handpick the Kennedy Center honourees and make sure no agitators, dissidents or subversives slipped through the net. The role of the artist is the worship of Trump.
\u201cI would say I was about 98% involved,\u201d he remarked. \u201cThey all went through me \u2026 I turned down plenty. It went too woke. I turned I had a couple of wokesters. Now, we have great people. This is very different than it used to be. Very different.\u201d
The Oscars, he said, now gets \u201clousy ratings\u201d because \u201cit\u2019s all woke\u201d and \u201call they do is talk about how much they hate Trump.\u201d
Just as he is vowing to make Washington DC beautiful again, Trump has big plans for the Kennedy Center, which at least one Republican in Congress has proposed renaming after him<\/a>. Trump promised to \u201cfully renovate\u201d the entire infrastructure, ripping out and replacing all the seats, and make it a \u201ccrown jewel\u201d of arts and culture in the US. \u201cThe bones are so good,\u201d he cooed.
But if his White House desecration<\/a> is anything to go by, expect the Kennedy Center to become a monument to dictator chic, dripping in rococo gold and festooned with garishness. Another Kennedy quotation inscribed on the exterior marble wall says: \u201cThis country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

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