Donald Trump's Warped Idea of 'Beauty'

In the wake of his widely-reviled AI-generated video of 'Trump Gaza', Bonnie Greer reflects on what 'beauty' really means to Donald Trump

The other week or so Donald Trump got rid of half the appointed trustees of the John F Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Most of the remaining Board members, the majority recently appointed, voted to make Trump the Chair. The Board also fired the President, Deborah F Rutter. She had planned to step down in seven months.

She.

This is the Center’s mission statement:

“As the nation’s cultural center, and a living memorial to President John F Kennedy, we are a leader for the arts across America and around the world, reaching and connecting with artists, inspiring and educating communities. We welcome all to create, experience, learn about and engage with the arts.”

The Board replaced her with a him. Richard Grennell, who served in the first Trump administration.

He.

This is the statement from the White House:

“The Kennedy Center learned the hard way that if you go woke, you will go broke. President Trump and the members of his newly-appointed board are devoted to rebuilding the Kennedy Center into a thriving and highly respected institution where all Americans, and visitors from around the world, can enjoy the arts with respect to America’s great history and traditions.”

Ticket sales have slumped since the announcement of the – call it what it is – purge.

The idea that Donald J. Trump is interested in politics is of course an idea put forward because he is in politics. But politics are really the means to an end.

The end: his idea of Beauty. Order. Taste.

This may on the surface seem trivial, even ludicrous. But listen to any speech that Trump gives when he is talking about what he is trying to achieve. Usually the word “beautiful” emerges, if not in the speech, in intention.

Changing the name, for example, of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America is not a political tactic in the mind of Donald Trump. It is an aesthetic one.

He sees the new name as a homage to his idea of beauty. That this body of water has been called the Gulf of Mexico for centuries is irrelevant.

The expulsion of the Associated Press – yes, I said the Associated Press – from the White House press room is not because of its covering of his Presidency. But because it refused to accept the new name of the Gulf.

This is a violation of Trump’s aesthetics and makes the Associated Press in his own mind ugly, and that means unclean.

A notorious germaphobe (I once watched a rally of his during his first Presidential campaign where he wiped his hands on his coat after shaking hands) he said once to a supporter that he could not accept a hat that the supporter had made “because I don’t know where it’s been”.

And “unclean”, too, belongs to those who Trump does not see as beautiful. Among that group: Black women. He’s just not that in to us. It must have made him physically ill to be up against a Black woman politically; in a pants suit, to boot.

We know him. From way back.

So forget politics as we have known it, and I’m speaking as one of the “pundits on the couch”, that posse of people who have become the mainstay of most news programmes.

Journalism is an addendum to Talk. Talk. Talk. And that’s what politics and journalism are becoming. For now.

Because politics, as we know it, is gone.

Legend has it that when Donald Trump was about to tear down the iconic Bonwit Teller building, whose street window Audrey Hepburn gazed into at the beginning of Breakfast At Tiffany’s, a curator from the Met ran up 5th Avenue – in heels – five days before she was to give birth.

She made this sprint in order to save some Art deco sculptures, the subject of negotiation, from being bulldozed by Trump.

Trump destroyed them anyway.

His drive for “beauty” is part and parcel of his need for humiliation and cruelty toward those who oppose him.

This makes it easy and somewhat justifiable to compare him to Hitler, whose pursuit of beauty, in the form of kitsch, was the foundation for his elimination of what and who he considered ugly; verminous; unclean.

The video Trump has recently posted – a provocation to those who helped put him in office by assuming that there was some alternative to the Democrats (I’m talking about you, “Muslims For Trump”, now “Muslims For Peace”) – makes it easy to conjure up Hitler.

Albert Speer, his architect and a guy who escaped the noose at the Nuremberg Trials, designed an office for him, even though Hitler seldom sat at a desk.

This office was in a building with long corridors so that people would have to walk a huge distance to see him and feel the power. Appreciate the arcs and the shining male brutality of it all.

The uniforms that Hugo Boss designed for the SS fitted Hitler’s aesthetic, too. As did the films that were made of the SS walking down grand staircases in unison.

This walk is called the “Busby Berkeley Step Down”, after the walk of the chorus girls in those musicals of the thirties. For now, Trump dances to the Village People’s parody of masculinity, “YMCA”, and plays operatic arias at his rallies, and sometimes when he just plain appears.

All of this ends – or at the very least undoes – doing conventional politics; asking conventional questions; being in the conventional pursuit of politics.

That Era is done.

Killed not only by Trump‘s drive for beauty but by his understanding that everybody wants to get in on the act. Everybody believes that they have something to say and so we say it.

After all Trump has demonstrated that it is possible to be POTUS fuelled by chat and commercials and thin air. This makes politics, as we understand it in the post World War II iteration, done.

The next time we see politics, as we want to understand it now, it may be in the hands of people who presently are about 10 years old. It is they who will move away from the ubiquity of technology as a means of deep human communication and its spawn, social media, and into another era.

It is essential that we work to keep these individuals alive. All over the world. Allow them to mature.

They carry a way out. Back to a kind of humanity.

Meanwhile: welcome to the Trump era. It is not a beginning.

But a result.