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 Trump’s 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 Center’s programming must adhere to his narrow version of pro-American entertainment, which has gone over with its patrons and performers about as well as you’d expect. Ticket sales have plummeted. Performance boycotts have included a withdrawal by the acclaimed musical “.” (The show’s 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.)
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In sycophantic fealty to Trump’s new Kennedy Center obsession, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday advanced a measure to rename the Opera House within the Center after First Lady Melania Trump. Rep. Chillie Pingree, D-Maine, noting President Trump’s escalating obsession with the topic, mused to : “[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-Dispatch’s Joe Holleman reports, the Lake Saint Louis Republican on Wednesday filed what he’s 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 you’re 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, What’s in a name?
Plenty. It matters because randomly renaming cultural institutions to promote a political movement that’s 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. It’s why he’s currently pressing the NFL's Washington Commanders to revert to their controversial previous name, the Redskins. It’s 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.
It’s why Trump took it upon himself, without apparent authority, to declare that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. And it’s 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.
The Kennedy Center’s current name was bestowed at the start of its construction in 1964, in honor of a recently assassinated president for whom the nation was still grieving.
That anyone in his right mind, let alone a sitting congressman, would think to rename it for a current president who tens of millions of Americans view (with good reason) as an existential threat to democracy is, to put a name to it, grotesque.
