At the Kennedy Center, Trump Puts His Pop Culture Obsession on Display
It was not 1986 and the president was not Ronald Reagan. It was 2025 and it was Donald Trump.
He was standing on the plush, red-carpeted grand foyer of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, unveiling his own personal choices for the next class of Kennedy Center honorees. He also announced his plans to host the award ceremony himself, and then began to hold forth more generally about the nature of show business and his own tortured relationship with celebrity.
'I'm on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,' Mr. Trump said proudly at one point. 'If you can believe that one.'
There is something about the Kennedy Center that seems to bring this out in him — a kind of yearning for a simpler time 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' to 'Sex and the City' to a Pizza Hut commercial.
Whatever else he is or has become, Donald J. Trump is at heart a pop culture obsessive. A fame junkie of the highest order. Us Weekly in human form.
That piece of him did not just fade away because he became the leader of a populist political movement and a two-time president. It's all still wound up in there, as was evidenced by so much of what he said on Wednesday.
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