Trump's shutting of the Kennedy Center has nothing to do with the Kennedy Center

If the game's not going your way, kick over the table.

That's seems the message from Donald Trump's untimely announcement shutting the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years of construction suddenly needed to turn a "tired, broken, and dilapidated Center," into "the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind."

Once again, tone-deaf Trump doesn't understand that the arts are what happens inside the building, not the building itself. Obviously strung by the succession of performers, artists and groups that are abandoning the center because of Trump's egotistical nonsense of renaming everything for himself and for policies that the artists detest, Trump would rather shut the place than hear the criticism.

He's upsetting the apple cart. Maybe some renovations were needed, but not shutdown. Apart from all else, it is interfering with long-laid plans by performing companies now forced into hurried new arrangements.

If he could have done so, he would likely have shut down the Grammys telecast, which provided a platform for some of popular music's biggest names to lambaste Trump's deportation policies. As it was, he threatened to sue emcee Trevor Noah over a single joke. Punitive lawsuits are his familiar alternative to shutdowns.

Trump has disdain for artists and performers who don't put admiration of him at the forefront of their work. To avoid public criticism by Superbowl halftime performer Bad Bunny, Trump is skipping a trip to the game, another example of kicking over the table.

Putting his name on the building no more has made him a champion of the arts than beheading Venezuela's leadership makes him a promoter of would-be democracy in South America. Closing the hall and building new marble statuary will not promote the arts in America any more than pimping the propagandistic ego-film honoring First Lady Melania will leave the documentary film world richer for anything but putting billionaire bribery on display.

Some Cultural Trend-Setter

Trump fashions himself a cultural trend-setter as well as master strategic thinker and, strangely, a brilliant military leader who can simply point at a map and cause bombs to fall without sending in a soldier to follow up.

His overly egoistic plans for an ever-growing gilded ballroom and now a massively oversized Arch of Triumph ripoff that will dwarf the Lincoln Memorial belie a tastelessness that smacks as much of inappropriateness as it does of artistic merit. Trump's gaudy makeover of the Oval Office is a match with the creation of a presidential walkway that mocks his political opponents in the name of rewriting history as Trump-centric.

It would be one thing, of course, if the inappropriateness is only about seeing Sylvester Stallone as a fine actor and Kid Rock and Nicki Minaj as the nation's top musical talents. Only Trump thinks his jerkiness on stage passes as dance.

But for Trump, the arts are only a tool for political and business promotion, a potential shield against criticism. Ridding the center of any audience interested in hearing themes reflecting diversity has gone right along with cutting federal supports for public broadcasting or for limiting the national endowments for arts and humanities to themes that Make Trump's America Great.

Trump can't hear criticism, whether from artists and performers or from huge gatherings in sub-zero Minneapolis demanding that he rethink random deportations and deployment of anonymized, camo-clad personal armies as a national, daily obsession.

On our city streets, in our courtrooms and in the hapless Congress, Trump is kicking over the tables of law, precedent, and history. If the 2020 election did not turn out his way, there must have been no 2020 election. If Jan. 6, 2021, ended poorly, Trump was simply going to remake it, eradicating it as he did with the East Wing of the White House or the Rose Garden.

Shutting the Kennedy Center – the Trump Kennedy Center – is merely the latest table overturned. Tariffs, deportations, international affairs are all the same in this Trump White House: If you have the power and the money, do want you makes you feel good, not what creates good.

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