The Musical That Makes MAGA's Rebel Hearts Sing
When the U.S. Army Chorus marched into the White House's State Dining Room in February, singing the rousing anthem 'Do You Hear the People Sing?' from Les Misérables to President Donald Trump and his guests at the annual Governors Ball, some on the left read it as a cry of resistance.
'Will you join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?' choral members sang as they flanked the black-tied attendees in the historic room. 'Do you hear the people sing? Say do you hear the distant drums? It is the future that we bring when tomorrow comes.'
The song has become the score for dozens of revolutionary movements since the musical, based on Victor Hugo's 1862 novel by the same name, debuted in the 1980s. In 2013, anti-government protesters in Ukraine sang it in Kyiv's central square as part of the Euromaidan demonstrations. In 2019, protesters in Hong Kong sang it in both English and Cantonese in defiance of the Chinese government. In 2024, South Korean protesters sang it outside the National Assembly after former President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law.
But what Democrats missed in their hopeful reading was how the song has in the last eight years become an unofficial anthem for the MAGA movement — with the Governors Ball only the latest example of how deep a root Les Mis has taken in Trump world. During the 2016 election, after Hillary Clinton made her infamous 'basket of deplorables' comment, Trump held a Les Mis-themed rally, entering to the song as the words 'Les Deplorables' were splashed on the screen — a tongue-in-cheek reclamation of Clinton's remarks that quickly became a rallying cry for his base. Trump's own lawyers have even invoked the musical's imagery of law and justice in court filings.
That is the backdrop against which Trump set foot in the president's box at the Kennedy Center Wednesday night, for the opening night of a four-week run of Les Mis.
For Trump world, the president's appearance marks a radical, almost subversive, triumph over the Kennedy Center — an institution that, in the eyes of the right, has become an effigy of the progressive cultural elite that has long excluded them. After largely ignoring the Kennedy Center his first term, never attending a performance, Trump in February purged 18 members from its board, replaced them with a slate of allies and selected longtime ally Richard Grenell to run it. Wednesday night was an operatic finale to those efforts.
As he stepped into view in the Opera House just moments before curtain, Trump received a warm round of applause from the crowd, followed by a hearty chorus of 'U-S-A,' underscored by a smaller chorus of boos. While intermission was bookended by one shout of 'Viva Los Angeles' from the crowd and another 'fuck Trump,' Trump received an otherwise positive reception, especially compared to the one Vice President JD Vance received in March while attending a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra.
Trump was joined on the box level by a host of other notables including Grenell, Vance, Second Lady Usha Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Pam Bondi, among others. It was a striking visual underscoring that the Kennedy Center's MAGA takeover is complete.
'The first term, we largely ceded a lot of things,' said Sean Spicer, who served as press secretary during Trump's first administration. 'This time, it's like, 'Why would I do that?''
Set against a backdrop of political tumult in 19th-century France, Les Misérables tells the story of a ragtag group of impoverished Parisians — from the protagonist Jean Valjean, who was imprisoned 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children, to the band of student revolutionaries who make a heroic stand during the anti-monarchist June Rebellion of 1832. Hugo, a staunch opponent of authoritarianism who lived most of his life in exile for his political views, saw his book as a call to action in the face of injustice. Its many winding plots offer a sweeping meditation on the human condition — on grace, justice, liberty, freedom and, above all, redemption.
The musical, adapted more than a century later, preserved much of that spirit but with Broadway flair. It is dramatic and bombastic, its over-the-top style emblematic of other musicals from the era, like Phantom of the Opera and Cats. Critics have alternatively praised and pilloried it for its overt sentimentality.
That Trump is a musical theater fan — and has a particular soft spot for 1980s mega-musicals — is no secret. Songs from Phantom, Cats and Les Mis have long peppered his rally playlists. In his 2004 book, Think Like a Billionaire, Trump declared Evita, the musical about Argentine political icon Eva Perón, was his favorite show, saying he had seen the original Broadway run six times.
But Les Mis has a special place in his heart, too. Before the show, Trump told reporters that he has seen Les Mis 'a number of times' and called it 'fantastic.' He even suggested in a recent Fox interview the Kennedy Center might extend Les Mis's run.
'I thought it was just about our first choice. That's what we got,' Trump said, about the show coming to the Kennedy Center. 'And we have others coming, other great ones are coming.' (Trump added that the first theater production he ever saw was Cats, while First Lady Melania Trump said hers was Phantom.)
In fact, Trump once aspired to be a Broadway producer. At 23, he co-produced a short-lived play with theater veteran David Black. In 2005, he flirted with turning his hit show The Apprentice into a musical.
'The president has an incredible aptitude for music and the arts,' said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, before the Wednesday night performance. 'That's why he is so excited about the much needed changes he is making to the Kennedy Center to restore it as an international icon for the arts.'
During his first visit to the Kennedy Center in March, following its MAGA takeover, Trump told a gathering of board members that he had shown a special aptitude for music in his childhood, according to a New York Times report on the meeting. The president said that he could pick out notes on the piano, but that he had never developed his musical talent as his father, Fred Trump, did not approve.
'I have a high aptitude for music,' he said, in the Times' retelling. 'Can you believe that?'
'That's why I love music,' he added.
Les Mis has occupied a persistent, if subtle, role in Trump's political career. Trump world sees itself in the musical's hardscrabble revolutionaries, and Trump in its unjustly persecuted protagonist, Valjean; their political opponents are the villainous Inspector Javert, who is so rigid in his worldview that he fails time and time again to offer compassion to the musical's broad cast of characters. It was Javert to whom one of Trump's lawyers compared the court-appointed monitor of the Trump Organization after Trump lost his business fraud trial last year. (Trump, asked before the show which character in Les Mis he identifies with — Jean Valjean or Javert — said that was 'a tough one.')
The impulse to see oneself as Valjean and opponents as Javert is centuries old, Hugo scholars say. Civil War soldiers on both sides read Les Misérables, then newly translated, around the campfire. Confederate troops even referred to themselves as 'Lee's Miserables,' in tribute to their leader Gen. Robert E. Lee.
'As a kind of a cultural resource, Les Misérables obviously gets simplified. It gets appropriated. You might say that's the destiny of any successful work — is to get transformed and changed and reused,' said David Bellos, a professor of French and Italian comparative literature at Princeton University. 'And Les Misérables is so rich that you can read a great number of different things into it.'
As such, Trump critics have offered alternative readings. Some see him and his administration as the merciless Javert using the power of law to tyrannize the American people — and themselves as the persecuted revolutionaries fighting back. Others see him as Thénardier, the dealmaking innkeeper who serves as the musical's comic relief. Like Thénardier, Trump is always onstage, always selling — and no matter how many times he's knocked down, he's always left standing.
And there are challenges with MAGA's reading of itself as the victorious French revolutionaries.
For one, the revolutionaries don't win. The musical's favorite rebels, Enjolras, Gavroche and Éponine among them, are all killed by French soldiers during the climactic battle at the barricade; Valjean himself later dies sequestered in a convent, having spent his life hiding from the law. (And the book ends, literally, with Valjean going unremembered, his tombstone blank.)
And while Les Mis is indeed populist, MAGA's affinity for it would seem to sit uncomfortably with the liberal causes that the protagonists champion. One of the themes more explicitly outlined in Hugo's book than the musical calls for universal property rights and the redistribution of wealth. (Hugo might have raised an eyebrow at the fact that some theatergoers Wednesday night paid $2 million to sit in a performance box and attend a VIP reception with Trump before the show, though the proceeds do go to support the Kennedy Center.) It's an apparent contradiction some in the movement hold in one hand with their love for the musical in the other.
'It's very populist. It appeals to our sensibilities in that regard,' said one Trump ally who is a musical theater fan, reflecting on that tension.
'But,' the person acknowledged, 'also it's crazy radical lefties — or at least that's implied in the musical — so that's not us.'
Hugo scholar Kathryn Grossman, a professor of French at Penn State University, described the tension bluntly: 'Trump has turned the Kennedy Center into an anti-woke arena. This musical is the most woke thing you could ever imagine. Totally woke.'
And as much as Wednesday night was a victory for Trump world, it was not an unmitigated one. A handful of cast members boycotted the show. And some critics pointed out the uncomfortable parallels from the day's headlines — armed troops squaring off against protesters in Los Angeles while on a Washington stage actors playing French soldiers assaulted the revolutionaries' barricades.
The creators of Les Mis have themselves shied away from taking political stances vis-à-vis Trump. Cameron Mackintosh — who in addition to Les Mis produced Cats and Phantom — was asked by Washingtonian before the play opened at the Kennedy Center during Trump's first term whether the musical had a particular resonance in Washington at that moment.
'You mean because of the political situation? Well, only that it's all about passionate beliefs, which certainly on both sides of the divide is what's happening in your country and indeed in ours,' Mackintosh said. 'People — particularly younger people — are feeling stronger about the way the world is governed than ever, and that is one of the themes that run through it.'
Milling in the halls of the Kennedy Center before the show, one Les Mis attendee, who voted for Trump, acknowledged the musical's political undertones, and its resonance for the MAGA movement.
'Look, I understand that there are some songs from Les Mis that are meaningful to him, that draw correlations. But isn't that what the arts are about?' said the attendee, who asked to remain anonymous. 'Like, it can mean something for one person and then mean another thing for another. That is what art is. Why do we have to look at it like, 'Oh, it's now all of a sudden evil, because this one person sees it in one way.' This is art.'
As for what he likes about Les Mis, his answer was simple: 'I just love a crescendo.'
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