To her enormous frustration, psycho Trump sycophant Laura Loomer still hasn’t managed to land a White House job. But she’s proven adept during Trump 2.0 at costing other people theirs—whispering in Trump’s ear that this or that functionary is insufficiently loyal, with firings usually following at once.

This morning, though Politico has an interesting piece of palace intrigue about an unsuccessful Loomer hit: The influencer got vaccine regulator Vinay Prasad fired last month, but Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—successfully petitioned Trump last week to bring him back. Susie Wiles, what can’t she do? Happy Thursday.

Making ’80s Pop Great Again

by Andrew Egger

Washington, D.C., in Donald Trump’s telling, may be a festering hellhole worse than Baghdad and Bogotá—but damned if he’s not going to make it a hellhole with some culture. Back in February, Trump appointed himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, complaining that the institution was “in tremendous disrepair” but that “the king of ratings” was going to turn it around. His mind was already afizz with ideas: “The thing that does well is Broadway hits,” he explained.

Yesterday, Trump schlepped back to the Kennedy Center again to make a little news: He’d chosen the honorees for the center’s awards show this December. “They all went through me,” Trump said. He’d “turned down plenty,” he’d added, whom he’d deemed “wokesters.”

Who ultimately made it through Trump’s gauntlet of scrutiny? A battery of decades-past megastars of stage and screen: Sylvester Stallone, the rock band KISS, country legend George Strait, Broadway star Michael Crawford, and disco icon Gloria Gaynor.

“I will say, ‘I Will Survive’ is an unbelievable song,” Trump said.¹

I have to confess that I look forward to Trump’s regular jaunts to the Kennedy Center, even if only as a break from the regular parade of horribles. It’s a place where his detestable qualities and his merely odd ones merge and interplay in interesting ways. Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Shawn McCreesh suggested there’s “a kind of yearning for a simpler time” in Trump’s Kennedy Center cosplay—“when he was thought of as a tabloid rascal turned reality television maestro, a mostly in-on-the-joke figure who symbolized greed and commercialism and who appeared in everything from ‘Home Alone 2’ to ‘Sex and the City’ to a Pizza Hut commercial.” They don’t put Trump in Pizza Hut commercials anymore.² Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

There are other reasons to enjoy the spectacle. The right wing worships Trump as a manly man among men. But this image has always fit oddly on Trump, the complexly coiffed, makeup-slathered cosmopolitan creature with a soft spot for a showstopper.

The Kennedy Center gig brings these contradictions to the forefront. Sure, it’s terrible on the merits to have our nation’s official arts honorees openly screened for permissible opinions about the president—but it’s also funny to imagine that president poring over the lists and picking the nominees on a personal and deeply camp calculus of what’s big, brassy, and Broadway.

American arts culture, in Trump’s view, has gone down the tubes not just because most of Hollywood hates him personally, but because it’s become too disdainful of the classics—a touch too openly gay; not quite closeted enough. In Trump’s America, the Kennedy Center is going to play the hits, dammit, the bigger the better. Those who look down on Andrew Lloyd Webber will be given the option of a televised military tribunal.

Of course, he’ll be center stage the whole time. In his remarks yesterday, Trump let it be known that his aides had wept, pleaded, besought him to host the awards personally. Ultimately, our deeply reluctant president—no fan of the limelight, as we all know—was ground down.

“I’ve been asked to host—I said, ‘I’m the president of the United States! Are you folks asking me to do that?’” Trump said. “‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said, ‘I don’t care, I’m the president of the United States. I won’t do it.’ They said, ‘Please.’ And then Susie Wiles said, ‘Sir, I would like you to host,’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’”

“It’s been a long time,” Trump, who is indeed also serving as the president of the United States, went on. “I used to host The Apprentice finales, and we did rather well with that.”