Kennedy Center teaches MAGA a tough lesson

The myth that Donald Trump has a strategic vision took another hilarious blow on Sunday when het threw a tantrum familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with a diagnosable narcissist. Without apparently telling anyone who actually has to deal with it, the 79-year-old toddler president declared on Truth Social that he was shutting down the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years following its Fourth of July celebrations. This “decision” comes a mere six weeks after Trump pretended to be “surprised” and “honored” when the center’s board, which he leads, voted illegally to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center, a name that no one seems interested in using, at least when out of Trump’s earshot.

The president claims the closure, which will likely last the rest of his term, is about “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.” Few believe this. Most accept that it is an obvious reaction to the fact that a growing list of artists have cancelled shows at the Kennedy Center to avoid the taint of performing at a place where the word “Trump” was forced onto the building’s signage. The list of cancellations is so long that it has its own Wikipedia page, which features luminaries like Philip Glass, Béla Fleck, the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Washington National Opera and the entire cast of “Hamilton.”

The situation is a great example of how narcissists defeat themselves. As he’s done his whole life, Trump stole a trophy he didn’t earn in the hope that he would impress people. Instead, his grotesque behavior backfired and has drawn even more insults and rejections. But what’s even more fascinating is what this whole debacle tells us about the MAGA movement as a whole, and how Trump is the perfect symbol for their failed culture war aspirations.

To people outside the MAGA bubble, Trump’s obsession with the Kennedy Center is just plain weird. Obviously, he feels intimidated by the looming cultural power of the 35th president and his wife, Jacqueline, and excluded from circles of people with good taste, even though he has no interest in actually learning to appreciate art or music beyond middle-of-the-road Broadway showtunes from the 1980s. He won’t grow up and, as normal people do, be happy not to be included in pastimes that bore him. This manifestation of his deep psychological issues reflects a major resentment that fuels the larger MAGA movement: anger at the larger culture for not dumbing itself down to placate their own pedestrian tastes and bigoted blind spots.

The most glaring recent example of the moment is the MAGA-wide tantrum over Bad Bunny headlining the Super Bowl’s halftime show. Due to a combination of incuriosity and racist hostility to the reggaeton star’s music, which he performs mostly in Spanish, most right-wingers don’t like Bad Bunny and have no interest in learning why others do. This would be fine — if they could have a healthy reaction to other people having different tastes, which is to shrug and say “not for me.” Instead, the right-wing propaganda machine whipped the MAGA coalition into an outrage, insisting that they are owed a pop culture that always favors their blinkered tastes, even though they’re often cringeworthy or, at best, decades out of date, as evidenced by the washed-up Kid Rock headlining Turning Point USA’s “alternative” halftime show.

MAGA’s backlash against Bad Bunny is just the most recent in an endless parade of right-wing freak-outs that stretch back over decades involving the perceived insult of most people having better, more modern or more interesting tastes. Nearly every time a non-white person headlines the Super Bowl halftime show, we get a version of this whining. We witnessed rage about Taylor Swift and the “Barbie” movie. On Sunday night, some MAGA influencers clearly watched the Grammys only so they could feel victimized by the proceedings. The anger is as boring and predictable as the music that evangelical Christian families offer their kids as weak substitutes for real pop tunes.

Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center symbolizes the end game of this endless, pointless grievance: A hope that MAGA can take by force the cultural popularity that will never be offered freely. After his election in 2024, there was a short period of elation on the right as initial reports suggested movie and TV studios would be shuttering projects with racially diverse casts and CBS announced that liberal comedian Stephen Colbert’s late-night show was being canceled. Promises of more conservative-friendly programming were made. We also saw this in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing, when MAGA tried to browbeat the public into pretending to like Kirk, with threats of doxxing and firing for people who refused to play along.

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But you cannot bully people into liking you. That was demonstrated after Jimmy Kimmel nearly got fired by ABC from his late-night show for a relatively mild joke about the right’s reaction to Kirk’s fatal shooting. Audience outrage led Disney to swiftly reinstate Kimmel, and it’s no wonder. Late-night ratings are already down as fewer people watch live TV. If ABC had tried to replace a genuinely funny comedian with a right-wing hack, no one would have watched at all. Turns out that forcing ordinary Americans to give up decent entertainment for some MAGA knock-off is much harder than most Trumpists thought.

Yet the faith that they can seize people’s hearts and minds through force has not abated in Trumpworld. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times recently wrote, “The only thing Trump and his allies know how to do is use the coercive force of the state.” It seems the president really did think he could just remake the Kennedy Center in his own trashy image, and that people would, like zombies, continue to book shows and buy tickets there. Instead, he got his stink all over the place, and now no one wants to be associated with it.

Now Trump done something even worse. He has shifted into the same logic as a jealous wife-beater, threatening to destroy the object of his obsession rather than allow her to leave. On Monday, the president said he’s not “ripping it down.” No one asked him a question that prompted such a response, so the only reasonable conclusion is that he, in fact, has every intention of bulldozing the Kennedy Center just to spite everyone who actually cares about the place. This was basically confirmed by the president’s other comments, about how the building will be “fully exposed” to its steel beams and worse, that he’ll be tearing out the marble and steel for his “renovations.” It’s worth remembering a similar promise he made recently — that the construction of his White House ballroom would do no damage to the existing building — came right before he demolished the entire East Wing without warning. 

That’s the end game of the right’s cultural resentment. They can’t create, so instead they destroy. The censorship spree under Trump encapsulates this. From trying to silence comedians to banning books to terrorizing drag shows, it’s just a bunch of people who can’t make good art, so they’re going to try to take it away from the rest of us.

But while they may win temporary battles, they can’t win the larger war. There’s just too much good creative work being done, and there are too many ways to access it. They can’t shut it all down. If anything, the harder they come after people’s entertainment, the bigger the backlash will become. Trump can tear down the Kennedy Center, but it will be a pyrrhic victory at best. Most of these artists will just play elsewhere and likely sell more tickets, as fans rally to their side and demonstrate that MAGA will not take away our culture.

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