Trump's "Freedom 250" concert implodes spectacularly
His quest to dominate culture the way he dominates politics keeps going badly.
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It was going to be so beautiful: A spectacular concert to celebrate 250 years of freedom and democracy, featuring some of the greatest musical acts this nation has produced.
Okay, maybe not the greatest, but they were definitely musical acts! Depending on whether you count Milli Vanilli, or more accurately, one of the two guys who pretended to sing in Milli Vanilli. Along with a guy who was in C+C Music Factory. And Bret Michaels of Poison. For anyone itching to stand outside in the baking Washington summer sun to hear some guys in their 60s wheeze their way through āGirl You Know Itās Trueā and āEvery Rose Has Its Thorn,ā the disappointment must be crushing.
It now appears that this concert, part of the Freedom 250 celebration and the most awe-inspiring assemblage of talent since your local middle schoolās last Battle of the Bands, will not be taking place after all. One after another, the 1990s-era performers pulled out, many saying that when they booked the event they didnāt know it was going to be political.
In other words, once they realized the event was all about Donald Trump, most of them wanted nothing to do with it.
Despite the fact that Vanilla Ice was still planning to perform, Trump announced on Saturday that he was pulling the plug, and would instead make the event just another Trump rally:
The president then had an epic crashout over the imploded concert, posting later Saturday that āwe should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it.ā (Why Trump would have wanted to book such āboringā musical acts in the first place remains unclear.)
So Trumpās long-held dream to take over American culture in the same way he took over American politics remains unfulfilled. For all the ways he has affected the country, he is not a tastemaker or an avatar of coolness; when the culture speaks of Trump, itās mostly to rail at him and reject him.
But this is not a fight he and his supporters will give up easily.
A multi-platform president, always in search of cultural cachet
It is to Trumpās credit as a self-promoter that he always thought expansively about how to achieve his goals. To get rich in the real estate business, heād have to create an image of wealth and success, and to do that he had to become a celebrity. Get in the gossip pages, opine on current events, do a movie cameo, buy a football team ā Trump became a presence that crossed cultural boundaries long before he ran for president.
Maybe it was smart business, or maybe he just yearned to be famous as so many others do, seeking the gaze of the crowd to fill some other void (perhaps the one left by a stern father who by all accounts was not exactly generous with affection). Whatever his motives, he got the renown he sought ā but there was always something missing.
Again and again, Trumpās success in pushing himself in front of Americaās eyeballs either flamed out in failure or was greeted with as much contempt as praise. His efforts to expand his business beyond real estate often crashed and burned ā the Trump Shuttle, the USFL football league, the casinos he bankrupted ā and even when he succeeded, the reviews were terrible.
āThe Apprenticeā made him millions, but it was also widely derided as trash, and he knew it. Everyone in New York knew him, but they knew him as a figure of comedy and scorn, the āshort-fingered vulgarianā (in Spy magazineās memorable phrase) yearning for a cultural acceptance he could never buy.
Itās not just that he has terrible taste, though of course he does. Itās unclear how many people are splashing their own homes in hideous gold-painted appliquĆ©s to mimic his Russian-gangster-meets-Saddam-Hussein aesthetic, but there canāt be all that many. Trumpās musical tastes run from show tunes to perfectly adequate pop numbers to one particular ā70s song about gay men cruising for sex ā but the last thing youād call him is cool.
This is the problem Trump faces: He wants validation and support from the culture in all its forms. He wants to be embraced by the lowbrow and the highbrow, rock stars and athletes, but also by elite cultural institutions ā and when he canāt get it, he lashes out.
Thatās why he slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, as though he could absorb its high-culture cachet; instead, the very fact that his name is now nailed to the buildingās facade has defiled it, and its reputation will take a long time to recover. And Trump finds that when he tries to lure artists to him using the capital and the White House as bait, more often than not they recoil in disgust.
Heāll always have Kid Rock, though. Thatās who will stay by his side: the third-rate, the washed-up, the one-hit-wonders and laughingstocks. And not even most of them.
The culture war goes on
Complaining about pop culture has been a conservative pastime pretty much forever; one of the things that defines one as a conservative is a distaste for how things are now and a desire to return things to how they used to be.
Music, TV, movies, video games, the internet ā itās all too liberal, too modern, too young, too diverse, too messily American for their taste. And they know that screeching about the latest āwokeā outrage, no matter how contrived, is good for ratings and good for their politics, which depend on keeping the base in a state of perpetual agitation.
But theyāre not wrong when they say the culture is dominated by liberals. Thatās just how artists are; right-wing art usually has to be imposed from above. But there is a market for right-wing culture. So in response to liberal dominance of Hollywood, conservatives have invested time and money in building their own alternative culture, with some success.
They have Angel Studios, a movie producer and streaming service that pumps out a huge volume of Christian and conservative content. You wouldnāt call it good art, but at least the production values are solid.
Thereās the Taylor Sheridan extended universe, with high-rated shows including āYellowstoneā and āLandman,ā the latter of which features Billy Bob Thornton delivering lie-filled rants against renewable energy that conservatives clip and retweet madly to own the libs. There are a hundred mediocre right-wing country singers putting out mediocre right-wing songs, always angry that so many of the genreās most talented artists lean left.
But whenever Trump or his supporters try to pull people into MAGA-land with some kind of ostensibly non-partisan cultural event, it inevitably falls flat.
When they got mad about Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl, Turning Point USA put on a dreadful alternate concert featuring Kid Rock lip-synching badly and the debut of āCountry Nowadays,ā in which C-lister Lee Brice bitches about how nobody will let him fish or drive his truck because āIt aināt easy beinā country in this country nowadays.ā When Trump wanted a military parade on his birthday, after the predictable backlash it was reconceived as a tribute to the Army ā and wound up being dull and poorly attended. There are already signs that his xenophobic policies are driving away fans from the upcoming World Cup, and who knows what damage heāll do to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Donald Trump may be a showman, but he doesnāt really know how to put on a show ā at least one that anyone but his most rabid supporters will want to attend (and even theyāre getting tired).
Donāt be surprised if whatever he has in mind to replace the Has-Been-Palooza for Freedom 250 winds up getting cancelled entirely, or at least scaled back to an embarrassing size, even if Trump imagines himself bigger than Elvis. Perhaps, as he did in one of the most surreal moments of the 2024 campaign, heāll go up on stage and sway awkwardly to his favorite songs for 39 minutes. It couldnāt be much worse than what they originally had planned.
Thatās it for today
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