The ‘Right’ View by Francis P. Sempa

 Trump-Kennedy Center Controversy Exposes TDS of the Left

The renaming of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to the Trump-Kennedy Center ignited a controversy when performers Chuck Redd, Kristy Lee, and the Broadway musical “Hamilton” cancelled scheduled performances to protest the name change. Redd said he was “saddened to see this name change.” Lee explained her decision this way: “I believe in the power of truth, and I believe in the power of the people.” Lee claimed that performing at the center with Trump’s name added would be “losing my integrity.” “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda called his decision to cancel a “moral” decision because the Trump administration “politicized” the center by adding Trump’s name. Following “Hamilton’s” cancellation, Issa Rae, the creator of “Insecure,” and Rhiannon Giddens, a folk musician, also canceled performances at the center. It is no surprise that Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS, flourishes among our cultural elite.

Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who sits on the center’s board, filed a lawsuit seeking to remove Trump’s name, arguing that such a name change requires an act of Congress. She also said that adding Trump’s name to the center is “reminiscent of authoritarian regimes.” “New Yorker” writer David Remnick accused Trump of dishonoring the Kennedy Center. Members of the Kennedy family have also chimed in to add their “principled” opposition to the name change.

The National Cultural Center, established by President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress in 1958, was renamed in honor of JFK by President Lyndon Johnson and an act of Congress in January 1964. Johnson, whom the Kennedys mocked and ridiculed while he was vice-president and whose every act as president was political, capitalized on the nation’s sympathy for the slain president in his march to a landslide election later that November. Make no mistake about it: Renaming the center in JFK’s honor was a partisan political act. For the cultural elite to denounce the addition of Trump’s name as a partisan act is either the result of ignorance or hypocrisy.  

It is a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome to believe that Donald Trump is unworthy of any honor, let alone one shared with the prince of Camelot. For Democrats and the cultural elite, the Kennedy’s Camelot was the one brief shining moment in U.S. history until Barack Obama came along. Both Obama and Kennedy are surrounded by myths. Obama, a product of the far left and corrupt Chicago politics, inhabits the mythical world of racial healing and political unity (his administration was the opposite of both), while Kennedy, a product of his father’s money and a likely stolen presidential election in 1960, inhabits the mythical world of intellectual brilliance and cultural superiority (JFK was neither). Obama and Kennedy were career politicians, while Donald Trump actually built real things and ran big businesses most of his adult life.

Those with TDS often point to Trump’s social media posts, attitude toward women and his supposed authoritarian tendencies as disqualifying traits for any honors. Yet, the left’s mythical hero John F. Kennedy pursued women like a lecher, used the IRS and his brother the attorney general to harass his political enemies, and shared a girlfriend with a mob boss, none of which our cultural elite view as disqualifying for any honor. As Bruce Bawer explained in “The American Spectator,” when Democrats, the left, and the cultural elite want to show Kennedy’s “greatness,” they don’t point to any real accomplishments as president, but instead quote from some of his speeches. Come to think of it, they do the same thing with Obama.

Bawer notes the irony that until Trump came along, the center’s finances, programming and infrastructure were a disaster for many years.

“Trump has fixed those problems,” Bawer writes, yet the cultural elite and the Democrats refuse to recognize that real accomplishment because their TDS makes that impossible.  

Francis P. Sempa is the author of the books “Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century” and “America’s Global Role,” He is a contributing editor to “The American Spectator” and writes a regular column for “Real Clear Defense.”