Donald and Melania are skipping the Kennedy Center Honors for the second year in a row.
It’s not a surprise. They are unwelcome although invited. He’d rather stay home and Tweet. She’s busy getting White House employees fired.
This year’s KC inductees don’t like Trump much. Cher spends part of every day Tweeting against him. I doubt Reba McEntire, Wayne Shorter, and Philip Glass have much use for him either.
Trump certainly doesn’t want to be faced with the cast of “Hamilton,” which openly mocked VP Mike Pence when he visited the show. They did it from the stage, and it made headlines. Anyway, Trump is pretty sure “Hamilton” is about Linda Hamilton, from his “Beauty and the Beast” TV show.
As for “Hamilton,” the Kennedy Center and CBS’s Jack Sussman changed the charter so they could have “Hamilton” on their air and maybe score ratings. It’s about 20 years too soon for Lin-Manuel Miranda to get a KC Honor. Dozens of older stars were spurned to movie LMM up a generation. But that’s life now– it’s a free-for-all. Rules, as Warren Beatty said, don’t apply. Tell that to Dick van Dyke, he’s only 92. He can wait another year. Or Jane Fonda. Or Denzel Washington. And so on.
Trump stays away because he doesn’t understand cultural celebrations. His Medal of Freedom winners are all dead. He has no appreciation for the arts. It’s one more thing that makes a first for his presidency.
