Fresh from his blitzkrieg of directives, President Donald J. Trump took a break to attend Super Bowl LIX, leaving the rest of us to consider what the past three weeks have meant.
So many disheartening things have happened. But let me focus on two that capture the letter and the spirit of what has transpired. The potential loss of USAID — temporarily stayed by the courts, which increasingly are all that stand between ourselves and disaster — is heartbreaking, for the employees who are losing jobs, for the underserved deprived of food and medicine, for the farmers who grow that food and the manufacturers of that medicine, and for our country, which is in danger of losing its status as leader of the free world.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Trump thought some of the money was misdirected and, at any rate, that the budget needed to be cut. Why not set up an audit with one of the many inspectors general who are now gone as well?
USAID’s budget is less than `1% of the U.S. budget. It supplies 40% of global aid. That’s a lot of bang for the buck. You would think businessmen like Trump and Co-President Elon Musk would approve of such a return on our investment. Instead we get Musk’s glib, gloating tweets, so cavalierly cruel to people whose lives are being destroyed at home and abroad. And for what? Forget compassion. Where’s the common sense? Is this what people voted for, to make others miserable as a way of feeling better about themselves? It’s devastating.
Crushing in a somewhat different way is Trump’s announcement that he will be the new chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to bring it in line with his new “golden age.” As this is actually in my wheelhouse, I have a lot to say about something I find infuriating but also somewhat amusing.
It was, you’ll remember, after the 2017 racist, antisemitic event in Charlottesville and Trump saying there was “good and bad on both sides” that the president’s arts and humanities committee resigned en masse, and really it was all downhill after that. Trump and wife Melania never attended “The Kennedy Center Honors,” saying they wanted to let the artists celebrate without the distraction of their august personnages.
But there’s more here than meets the eye. The president’s and first lady’s presences put an imprimatur on the honors. Every president is a distraction by dint of being the president. And everyone honored has coped with that thus far.
I think there’s a part of Trump, in line with the Republicans, that doesn’t understand the arts and finds them decadent. But the real reason he wants to be chairman is because it enables him to co-opt part of the Kennedy legacy — he’s already got Bobby Jr. — and let’s him feel like an artiste, the true calling of all strongmen, who also like to use the arts as a distraction from more repressive measures. (Nero as performance artist, Saddam Hussein’s romance novels, Hitler’s paintings, which always remind me of that great line from “The Producers”: “Hitler: There was a great painter. He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon — two coats.”)
Remember: It’s hard for a narcissist, who is all about “notice me,:” to notice others, particularly when those others are displaying actual talent for hours on end and you wouldn’t know “Don Giovanni” from “Don Carlo.” No, the only solution is to interject yourself and rush in where angels fear to tread.
Thinking of Trump’s new career in the arts reminds me of what conductor-arranger-pianist Andre Previn told me about why he named his memoir “No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood” (Doubleday, 1991). It’s the dictate that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin handed composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Stalin — a man who brutalized his people — didn’t want to hear any melancholy sounds in music, such as those produced when you flat the third of a chord. So, no minor chords, Shostakovich. Only happy sounds for happy people.
I think Stalin would’ve approved of Trump’s Kennedy Center gambit perfectly.