JFK famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.“ Trump has never considered what he can do for our country. His second term has largely been about himself. All the scorekeeping, retribution, insanity, and destruction that he’s dragging this country through is centered on his laser focus on his ego. To experience the trauma of living with a narcissist alongside millions of people is jarring, certainly, but it also affords us a good sense of who has been fostering our national abuse. While Trump has spent a lifetime avoiding taxes, he’ll still eventually meet the reaper. His handmaidens, like big tech and JD Vance, though, have decades left on this mortal coil, and we as a collective, the ones who have been harmed, need to take a long look at both their choices and the results for our nation. While their horrors are far larger than the Kennedy Center, the building helps us see what we have become as a society. From the history of the Kennedy Center to watching Trump threaten to knock it down, we get a look at our national descent into idiocy to feed the venal appetites of the godless and, worse, the purportedly God-fearing. Trump’s desire to level the building if he cannot reshape it in his own image is not just a move to destroy this building; he is attempting to eradicate some of the best of our country.
The murder of John F. Kennedy had international ramifications. Much of his platform focused on soft power and how the US could use diplomacy to ease global tensions. While, in retrospect, his innovations like the Peace Corps came with many colonial downsides, in the halcyon days of the 1960s, Kennedy was perceived as being globally minded.
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John F. Kennedy kicked off fundraising for the center after his inauguration in 1961. A performing arts center had been in the works for decades, as I discuss later, but many of the efforts stalled. Eisenhower raised only $13 million. John F. Kennedy launched a $30 million campaign with events that included “An American Pageant of the Arts” in November 1962. The event included Robert Frost, Yo-Yo Ma, Harry Belafonte, and remarks from the president. More than 5000 people attended the $ 100-per-plate dinner. You can still experience the festivities in archived footage.
