If Trump Can’t Have The Kennedy Center, No One Can
The abuser in the Oval has given the Kennedy Center a choice: I own you or you get annihilated
It’s all abuse, all the way down.
If, after eighteen months of the Trump regime pillaging the United States and selling it for parts, you still don’t see the regime’s officials as one, big, collective domestic abuser, perhaps a little analysis of the president’s yearlong tantrum over control of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will help you see what is not even hidden.
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The president at his core is an abuser. His defining political moment – admitting on camera that he forces himself on women because he’s rich and famous and women have no recourse against rich and famous men – led to one of the country’s two major political parties going all in on abuse as a governing principle, as the centerpiece of how they do business. And so today, in this sixth year of his presidency, the people of the United States are abused by the lawless president and his lawless sycophants, who view most Americans not as fellow citizens but as an enemy population in need of conquering and subjugating.
The same head of state who has urged his political and business allies to just go ahead and take other countries’ resources – namely the oceans of oil underneath Venezuela – has been clear about the fate of the Kennedy Center, which he wanted to use as his personal party venue, as the most powerful interior decorator and cocktail party host in world history.
Denny Carter
The president has said in both legal documents and public statements that if he can’t have the Kennedy Center, no one can. It is his or it dies. His approach to control of the Center is indistinguishable from a jealous, rage-filled husband who tells his fearful wife that she will cease to exist if she leaves him, that her choice is him or the void.
This is the president’s proposal to the Kennedy Center board. One day it will be his final proposal to the Republican Party.
There’s a load of bad faith in this whole Trump-Kennedy Center battle. The president and the stooges he appointed to run the Kennedy Center are feigning great concern about the condition of the place. They post pictures and videos purporting to show parts of the building faltering or falling off. They might even be running forklifts into the building to hurry its collapse. They say in one voice: We have no choice but to shut down the Center and maybe even tear it down completely because it’s in such shitty shape. What they don’t say is that the president has illegally withheld hundreds of millions in congressionally-approved Kennedy Center renovation spending – a small part of the Article I crisis in which we have lived for more than a year and a half.
Denny Carter
The president and his Kennedy Center board appointees, gleefully licking the tyrant's shit-covered boots, have told a judge (in bad faith) that it’s the deterioration of the Center that has forced their hand. That they’ve also said the Center would get the money to fix itself up if the president can slap his cursed name on the building seems to never enter the legal equation. The abuser in the Oval has given the Kennedy Center a choice: I own you or you get annihilated. There’s no third choice here. As always, it would be nice if a judge would call out the mountain of bad faith that has been weaponized by the regime against the Kennedy Center.
Probably you don’t need clinical research to confirm that this is, in fact, abusive behavior and mindset. But just in case: Researchers who have studied abusive men who see their partners and children as property rather than human beings with feelings and agency have written extensively on the entitlement that fuels the idea that no one can have you if I can’t have you. For men like this, a partner (wife, mostly) exists only to serve him, to cater to him, to make him feel good about himself and his life. Any failure in that area is perceived by the man as a threat, according to the research.
“A pathological sense of entitlement results from believing a partner should fulfill all one's needs and wishes (inflated) or that the expression of genuine needs is illegitimate (restricted),” researchers wrote in a 2021 paper, Refining the Assessment of Entitlement in Romantic Relationships.
Denny Carter
Another group of researchers in the early 2000s who sought to create a Relational Entitlement and Proprietariness Scale concluded that “relational proprietariness and entitlement have been related to partner violence following the threat of relationship dissolution,” adding that a threat from a “third party” was often enough to trigger the abusive behavior. We, the American public as represented by the precious few good-faith actors helping to run the Kennedy Center, are the third party in the president’s aggressive push to dominate or destroy the performing arts building.
Poisoned by his father with fear and hate, the president has spent his entire adult life making the world feel his pain, for pain that is not addressed and processed and transmuted is spread to others. For a long time the president’s pain distribution was isolated to those who stupidly did business with the conman and the women who came in and out of his orbit. There are publicly-available accounts of how he has abused women and girls as a show of domination, for no other reason beyond being able to hurt or humiliate another person because you can, because the law does not apply to you in a country where justice is always for sale, where rich men do not face consequences unless – and only unless – they have wronged other rich men.
Ten years ago he set out to distribute his pain to everyone, everywhere, all the time. No more individualized pain; it was time for everyone to get some. Many who supported him before he conquered the Republican Party recognized the pain within him, for they were in pain themselves, and now a celebrity – a famous man who pretends to be rich – was giving them full permission to make others feel their pain. He pledged, once in power, to begin a nationwide campaign of pain distribution – a little bit for everyone they hate: The immigrants, the queers, the Muslims and Jews, the women – especially the girlbosses – and the educated and the liberals and everyone else who thinks they’re better than me. All of these varied enemies would get a share of the rich man’s pain and know what it’s like to suffer.
He pitched himself as vengeance for those who have decided not to transmute their pain – not to deal with it in healthy ways – but to transmit it to a society they have decided to hate. It was the perfect sales pitch for a nation of bitter, aggrieved men filled with the pain of their fathers and grandfathers. This offer – for everyone to feel their pain – was as good as love.
Abuse as a core governing principle will continue until people – those with power and those without – say no, enough, this cannot continue. Cracks in the American fascist movement, which will surely become wider as the GOP's midterm armageddon nears, should finally offer some political and cultural cover for powerful institutions to stop the boot licking and to join those who have seen the regime's abusive approach to governing in saying no, enough, this cannot continue.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
