Chairman Trump samples the arts

Schedules change, but the new Chairman of the Board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was scheduled to make an appearance at that venue June 11 for a production of “Les Misérables.”

Yes, President Donald Trump – who could certainly benefit from a theatrical makeup artist – was to be in attendance along with Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha – whose marriage qualifies her for a position on the Kennedy Center board.

Trump’s own wife Melania was in the lineup of attendees though her agenda has been so separate from the president’s that many think the former scantily-clad (jewelry?) model who uglied up the White House Rose Garden is estranged from the former unreality TV personality.

The Vances were likely hoping for a better reception than their March 13 outing when they arrived late and were roundly booed by audience members who were subjected to security screenings before the show could start.

If Trump was able to keep his waffling mind focused, the president-who-would-be-king would have seen Parisian students’ stirring defiance of tyranny at the barricades of the June Uprising of 1832. These are students, much like those he vilifies for daring to oppose his complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza and his own administration’s xenophobic attacks on immigrants here, including refugees from political violence in their homelands and others who once helped American troops in combat situations.

Yep, if Trump could pay attention long enough – as those who try to prepare daily security briefings for him seem to doubt – he was surely rooting for the troops to crush the protesters.

Trump’s dedication to authoritarianism surfaced again last week when he tried to tell German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that the impending D-Day observance represented “not a pleasant day for you….This was not a great day.”

Merz, the latest foreign leader subjected to Trumpian inanities in public meetings following private talks, gently reminded the man whose first wife (of three, so far) said he kept a copy of “Mein Kampf” on his bedside table, “Well, in the long run, Mr. President, “this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship.”

(A group of Oklahoma veterans met June 6 in Lawton to mark the 81st anniversary of that Normandy invasion. Veterans Against Fascism organized to “peacefully protest in the defense of democracy and to resist rising fascism in the United States,” according to KSWO-TV.)

And, if Trump was not looking at his phone and posting attacks against that stinking Elon Musk, one scene late in the play should have cemented Trump’s cheering for the autocracy against the students.

Poignant, heartbreaking. The love-doomed Éponine dresses as boy, joins the man she loves (who loves someone else) at the barricade in time to intercept the fatal bullet meant for him.

Yeah, “Les Miz” features cross-dressing, the current cultural crisis obsession in the Republican playbook of divisiveness.

Trump railed against drag shows when he ousted the entire Kennedy Center board, “the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP.”

Yes, it is illogical to apply logic to Trump, but if men dressing as women is “targeting” impressionable young minds, women dressing as men must be as deleterious. Trump needs to put “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night” on the index of banned performances – after closing down “Les Miz.”

(Technically, all Elizabethan plays featured drag performances. Young boys played the women’s parts until after the Restoration. So, in “As You Like It,” we have a male actor playing Rosalind who then disguises herself as Ganymede. Somewhat of the reverse of what happens in “Victor/Victoria.”)

One Saturday morning this spring, Foghorn Leghorn put on a tight corset, fancy dress and bright red lipstick to beguile a threatening hawk – not the little guy he battled often. Later that same day, in “Self-Made Maids,” the Three Stooges, as artists, fall in love with their models, Moella, Larraine and Shempetta. Yep, the Stooges in drag. And this was a night when one of Tyler Perry’s Madea movies was screened on the Bounce channel.

Yet, because fascists must have “others” to demonize, Trumpistas have declared war on a comedy staple.

Thus we have ridiculous campaigns against the cross-dressing drag shows that have amused audiences from the English music halls through Monty Python to “Tootsie” to “Mrs. Doubtfire” to “The Birdcage.”

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and State Supt. Ryan Walters are so obsessed with the evils of cross-dressing that we must wonder what hangs in the back of their closets.

When he announced his take-over of the Kennedy Center, Trump’s anti-social media website declared that he would take personal charge of the programing.

Well, we know one of his favorite performers is Stormy Daniels.