A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, said Shakespeare, but the Orwellian name games played by our current president and his congressional lackeys truly stink. The latest: A Missouri congressman has filed legislation to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after Dear Leader, er, President Donald Trump.
The Kennedy Center, long a jewel of Washington, D.C., culture, has become an odd obsession of Trumps lately. After breaking with tradition by refusing during his first term to even attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors awards ceremony, Trump in this term has already staged a takeover, ousting its leaders and board members that were appointed under the Biden administration and making himself chairman.
Channeling his inner Mussolini, Trump has declared that the centers programming must adhere to his narrow version of pro-American entertainment, which has gone over with its patrons and performers about as well as youd expect. Ticket sales have plummeted. Performance boycotts have included a withdrawal by the acclaimed musical Hamilton. (The shows multicultural cast celebrates the Constitution, immigration and the struggle for equality, and ridicules monarchy and oppression so, obviously, Trump is on record as disliking it.)
In sycophantic fealty to Trumps new Kennedy Center obsession, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee recently advanced a measure to rename the Opera House within the center after First Lady Melania Trump. Rep. Chillie Pingree, D-Maine, noting President Trumps escalating obsession with the topic, mused to The New York Times: (D)oes the president plan to rename the whole Kennedy Center after himself?
It took exactly one day for Rep. Bob Onder to turn that facetious suggestion into putatively serious legislation.
As the Post-Dispatchs Joe Holleman reports, the Lake Saint Louis Republican filed what hes calling the Make Entertainment Great Again Act, renaming the entire center for Trump himself on the rationale that the former reality TV hack has long been a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape.
Why stop there, Rep. Onder? As long as youre in full lickspittle mode, why not just follow the lead of the late dictator of Turkmenistan and rename the days of the week after Trump and his family?
Why does any of this matter? As Shakespeare asked, Whats in a name?
Plenty. It matters because randomly renaming cultural institutions to promote a political movement thats opposed by half the country and, in particular, renaming things for the sitting leader of that movement is what dictatorships do.
Trump himself understands and embraces this. Its why hes currently pressing the NFLs Washington Commanders to revert to their controversial previous name, the Redskins. Its why he has ordered the military to restore previously scrubbed Confederate names to its installations, reembracing the bizarre tradition of formally honoring what were, quite literally, enemy combatants against the United States.
Its why Trump took it upon himself, without apparent authority, to declare that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. And its why he has barred The Associated Press from presidential coverage for refusing to recast its writing standards to that absurdity by which Trump demonstrates, not for the first time, that his deep contempt for the Constitution is more than just talk.
Leave a Reply