The ego in chief steals the show, again
Among other things that he alone decides, President Trump this past week pondered who might be honored by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Kennedy Center Honors is an extravaganza of the first magnitude, in addition to being a sumptuous trove of television images and highlights. It’s an A-list celebration of other A-listers.
Past honorees have included the likes of Johnny Carson, Bette Davis, Willie Nelson, and Ella Fitzgerald. The selections, until now at least, were made collaboratively by the Kennedy Center board, not by the president of the United States.
All that has changed in the age of one-man government. Donald Trump is a host unto himself, which brings up the startling reveal that POTUS will actually host – as in emcee – the Kennedy Center affair when it airs on CBS in December.
What else does a commander in chief have to do?
After announcing that heavy metal band Kiss, disco-era singer Gloria Gaynor, Broadway actor Michael Crawford, and moviedom’s Sylvester Stallone were the 2025 selections for their contributions to the arts, Trump explained to the press, “They all went through me…. This is very different than it used to be.”
No kidding.
It’s getting to be ridiculous. Trump’s dizzying display of spotlight hogging is both unsettling and destabilizing. It’s not the way this country works or is supposed to work. Democracies are not solo acts.
President John F. Kennedy, for whom the Performing Arts Center is named, parsed the inter-woven branches of society and government Trump is undermining during a 1962 speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
He noted that “our system” pits “the legislative … against the executive, the State against the Federal government, the city against the countryside,” in addition to party against party and interest against interest, “all in competition or in contention one with the other.”
However frustrating and fitful, this is how the country more or less operated. By effectively sidelining competition on several of these fronts, Trump has ushered in a whole new way of doing things. Back in office, the president has systematically trampled over barriers past presidents routinely observed. Like taking the government into business.
At a White House meeting a week ago with artificial intelligence executive Jansen Huang of Nvidia, President Trump posited that in exchange for the export licenses the company needed to sell its product in China, the government wanted a cut of the action.
“I want 20%,” Trump told Huang.
Relating the story to reporters, Trump said Huang counter-offered 15%. The deal was likely unconstitutional and thus unlawful, though that’s not the point here.
“In just eight months,” according to New York Times’ reporter Tripp Mickle, “Mr. Trump has made himself the biggest decision maker for one of the world’s most economically and strategically important industries….”
Earlier this year, the president told Walmart and other retailers to sandbag plans for higher product prices in response to the tariffs.
Speaking of tariffs, they are like a faucet: Trump turns them on and off at his personal whim, and not always for economic reasons. Angry with the president of Brazil, Trump threatened that country with punishing import duties.
Days before Friday’s meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska about the war in Ukraine, President Trump spoke via satellite with European heads of government.
In a follow-up with reporters, Trump dismissed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as an ineffectual negotiator. Of the leaders of Europe, the president said “they very much rely on me. If it wasn’t for me, this [war] thing would never get solved.”
The “me” president told reporters at his Kennedy Center press conference that at one time he wanted to be an honoree.
On the chance that he wasn’t kidding (and he probably wasn’t), here are some of the people who were honored around the times Trump might have been considered: Tom Hanks, Carole King, Al Pacino, George Lucas, Cicely Tyson, Andrew Lloyd Webber.
It seems to me that it takes a really massive ego, or total delusion, on the president’s part to imagine that he, the former “The Apprentice” host, belongs in the company as these giants of entertainment.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.