OP-ED: Childlike, Trump demands his own way
At the height of mourning for President John F. Kennedy following his assassination, his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, felt herself under pressure to buckle to demands that the national performing arts center planned for Washington, D.C., be named after her husband.
She protested. “I don’t think he needs” any further memorials, she wrote to Roger Stevens, the chair of the board of what eventually become The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. “His grave” at Arlington National Cemetery lit by an eternal flame she herself flickered to life and his prospective presidential library in Boston “are that.”
She pointed out that the performing arts center was “a problem he inherited” from the preceding Eisenhower administration, which made all the difference in the world.
Mrs. Kennedy had the cool foresight to imagine that in years to come the theater complex on the banks of the Potomac River might become ensnared in political wrangling. If that were the case, JFK’s stellar legacy would be tarnished, she feared.
“All I care about now is sparing him controversy,” she told Stevens. “He has a right to peace now.”
That was in 1964. For decades, the Kennedy Center was spared the “controversy” Jackie Kennedy feared. Instead, it became a glittering tribute to her husband.
Then along came President Donald Trump, the embodiment of everything JFK was not: extreme, showy, incurious, boastful, careless, incompetent.
Trump eventually engineered a takeover of the Kennedy Center, naming 14 new board members, all Trump loyalists. The board now included himself as board chairman, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and second lady Usha Vance.
In the wake of this action, ticket sales collapsed as performers opted out of performing, despite efforts by center officials to keep up appearances. They said Trump had saved the center from financial ruin. Internal documents unearthed by the press strongly suggested otherwise.
The center was suddenly millions of dollars short of maintaining a healthy bottom line.
Adding insult to injury, Trump placed his name on the Kennedy Center web page and on the building’s facade. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts became The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
The center board, ordered by a federal judge to remove Trump’s name because it was not authorized by Congress, attempted a sneak-around by a public posting crediting the president for generosity for funding renovations to the center’s opera house, concert hall, and the Eisenhower Theater.
District Judge Christopher Cooper, again citing the need for congressional assent, ordered that naming change removed.
On Tuesday, things seemed to come to a head during a virtual meeting of the center board. The president and U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio, engaged in a shouting match. The president of the United States “threw a tantrum,” Beatty told reporters, who added that she didn’t back down.
A White House spokesperson, Davis Ingle, in effect confirmed the angry exchange, saying Trump “stood up” to Beatty. Democrats, he said, always and in all things “put America last.”
Then the president himself took to social media, criticizing Judge Cooper as “hostile and conflicted.”
Trump stated that renovations to the Kennedy Center would not start “until such time as [Cooper] rules on the Board’s approved name. If the ruling in a negative one … and is not overturned by the Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of the Kennedy Center will not take place.” He added a snarky, “Isn’t that too bad?”
Petulance they name is Trump. To say the least.
The man who hates the Kennedy Center so much he might destroy it also wants to place a 250-foot high arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, one result of which would be to obscure the Eternal Flame.
It doesn’t take much imagination to know that Jackie Kennedy would be appalled by Trump’s antics, not to mention his historically bad taste.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.