What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center

Les Misérables is that rarest of things: a global phenomenon that gets political. The show—not just a musical but a megamusical; not just a drama but a melodrama—is an impassioned argument in the guise of an epic story. Like the Victor Hugo novel that inspired it, the musical rails against autocrats and the systems that elevate them. It resents injustice, inequality, and inhumanity. It does so loudly and extravagantly, and has no use for subtlety. Its gaudiest villain is a greedy innkeeper. Its true villain is unchecked power. And its collective protagonists are protesters who flow into the streets, shouting that their lives matter. Ever popular and ever lucrative, Les Mis has little need for a rebrand, though if it did, it could very well go by: Woke Mob! The Musical.

But Hugo loved a good plot twist. And a performance last night at the Kennedy Center provided one: In the audience to celebrate a new staging of Les Mis was President Donald Trump, a man who treats woke as a slur, wealth as permission, and the American presidency as a kingdom in waiting. Trump appeared at the opening partly in a personal capacity (he is, famously, a fan of the show) but primarily in a professional one. This past winter, soon after his return to the White House, the president ousted the chair of the Kennedy Center’s board, installing himself in the role. He now runs, in addition to “the country and the world,” one of the nation’s most powerful arts institutions. And last night’s performance doubled as a fundraiser. In advance of it, according to reporting by The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, board members received a letter urging them to contribute $100,000; other donors were invited to contribute up to $2 million.

Trump’s attendance also came as real-world protests simmered on the other side of the country he leads. On Saturday, in response to demonstrations in Los Angeles against his administration’s treatment of immigrants, Trump made an announcement: He was ready to counter the protests with military force. By the time the president slipped into his VIP box at the Kennedy Center, 4,000 members of the National Guard and 700 Marines had been ordered to mobilize.

That sound you keep hearing might be Hugo not just rolling in his tomb but protesting from it. Hugo was suspicious of kings, and for good reason: He completed Les Mis in exile, having opposed the coup that installed Napoleon III to power. That Trump would be in the audience for the musical is irony enough; that he would be attending as a champion of the show is a mordant bit of revisionism. In the musical, the “master of the house” brings comic relief. In the bigger theater—of our nation, of geopolitics—he brings the stuff of Hugo’s nightmares.

Yet Trump’s love of Les Mis is not much of a surprise. Irony, for one thing, does not seem to preclude his aesthetic appreciation. (Trump has also said that Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s pitying satire of a wealthy mogul turned politician, is his favorite film.) The president often discusses his love of Broadway shows and of megamusicals in particular. He has, at various points, also claimed Evita, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera as favorites. Those musicals arose in the era that made Trump into a celebrity: the late 1970s and the ’80s. Trump himself has conducted an “off-and-on flirtation with the theater world,” The New York Times noted in 2016, a flirtation that has included a brief stint as a Broadway producer in the early ’70s, as well as repeated discussions about turning his life into a musical.

Until The Trump Follies makes its debut, though, the president has channeled himself through the political stylings of Les Mis. He has used one of the show’s signature songs, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” in rallies since the days of his 2016 campaign. He used it, in fact, when announcing that he would be running for the White House in the 2024 election. And out of context, the song works:

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!

These are unobjectionable lyrics. They are widely applicable lyrics. But their obviousness can abet misreadings, as well. Where the song refers to “the right to be free,” a person might fill in the words “from oppression,” “from hatred,” “from fear”—or “from the woke mob.” When it refers to “crusade” and a better world, audiences might apply those ideas to their own sense of how things are. Les Mis, Hugo wrote, is “a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life.” But evil and good have no fixed meaning. Les Misérables, as a title, is commonly translated as, among others, “The Miserable” or “The Wretched” or “The Poor.” Some translations, though, choose a different word: “The Victims.”

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Justice, in Hugo’s time as in ours, is a slippery aspiration. Woke can mean whatever people want it to mean. So can freedom. For many Americans, Trump included, the January 6 rioters are freedom fighters and political prisoners. For many of those same Americans, Trump is fighting tyranny rather than establishing it. “I don’t know whether it will be read by everyone,” Hugo wrote of Les Misérables, “but it is meant for everyone.” He most likely did not envision that people of the future would take him so literally. If you remove history from the equation, though—if you strip away reality as a context—Les Mis can say anything. The show’s red-white-and-blue color scheme (in context, a reference to the French flag) can seem to be American. Its climactic protests (in context, a recounting of the June Rebellion of 1832) might read like the siege of January 6.

So many things, these days, have Rorschachian edges, which is to say blurred ones. So many things can be shape-shifted into political convenience. Les Mis’s lyrics—“Who cares about your lonely soul / We strive toward a larger goal”—might refer to anyone’s cause. So might another line: “Our little lives don’t count at all.”

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Les Mis, published in 1862, emerged from a period of constant upheaval: revolutions, counterrevolutions, coups, widespread poverty, displacement. France was a monarchy and a republic and a monarchy again; along the way, chaos reigned. Hugo’s novel distills the human costs of that instability. It considers what happens when “rule” becomes hopelessly unruly.

As a morality play, Les Mis lives in the tension between the spirit of the law and the letter of it. The story radiates from a single, consequential moment: Its central figure, Jean Valjean, steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. He is arrested and imprisoned—the theft, in the eyes of the law, is a crime—and the event is so stark in its morals that it reads like an ethics case study. Who is more just, the man who tried to feed his family or the man who arrested him for it? Which is the true crime, one man’s taking of a bit of food or the circumstances that led to the theft?

The resonances to today’s world are striking. Early in Les Mis, Valjean is released from prison after a 19-year confinement. Announcing himself as “Jean Valjean,” he is sharply corrected by the story’s prime antagonist, Inspector Javert—to whom Valjean is, and always will be, Prisoner 24601. You might think, today, of the people who are defined not as people at all, but as “illegals,” or of the protesters dismissed as “looters” and “rioters” and “terrorists.” Javert and Valjean are doubles of each other: incarnations of Hugo’s interest in the connections between the just and the unjust, the dark and the light. Valjean, and nearly all of Les Mis’s other characters, are not served by the state’s sense of justice; they are oppressed by it. Javert, in enforcing the law, compounds injustice. His morals are so unfeeling that they lead him to immorality.

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Little wonder that “Do You Hear the People Sing?” has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. The crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story’s tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic.

Hugo-like protest, to some degree, was a theme at last night’s performance. Several Les Mis cast members, when Trump’s presence was confirmed, announced that they intended to boycott the show. Some audience members—including a group of drag queens seated in the orchestra section—attended as an act of protest as well. Trump himself came to the show with an entourage including first lady Melania Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, second lady Usha Vance, and several advisers. As they took their seats, clad in tuxes and gowns, many in the crowd booed. In response, Trump stood and grinned and waved, treating the greeting as an ovation. He then took his seat to enjoy a roughly three-hour indictment of autocracy.

Trump, in translating Les Mis for himself, erodes Hugo’s own claims to the story. The convictions that grounded Hugo’s own sense of freedom—his resentment of unaccountable power, his sense that all justice is social justice—recede, just a bit more, toward the backstage. But Hugo remains. So does Les Mis, the historical artifact. The Los Angeles protests have been spreading throughout the country. More protests are planned for this Saturday, to coincide with a military parade that Trump has arranged in the nation’s capital. The parade will coincide with his birthday. The protests against it have a nickname: “No Kings.”

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Hulton Archive / Getty; SSPL / Getty; The Ohio State University Library; Getty.