President Donald Trump spent the weekend clashing with TruthSocial as artist after artist pulled out of Freedom 250, the White House concert series that will celebrate America’s 250th birthday later this month. Trump finally announced him he wanted to cancel the concert and have a public meeting insteadfeaturing “The Number One Attraction on Earth, the man who gets bigger audiences than Elvis in his prime” – himself.
Trump’s charade highlights an aspect of his presidency that seems to both delight him and cause him great distress: 10 years into the MAGA movement, Trump remains the only real superstar MAGA has to offer. No one else willing to engage with the movement can draw a crowd the way Trump can, which seems both flattering and humiliating to him.
Trump loves his own popularity and his ability to draw large crowds and illuminate them with the power of violence and chaos. He enjoys being the most powerful person in the room, able to extract displays of loyalty and submission from political allies and enemies alike. He has made the spectacle of these fake shows the centerpiece of his presidency, broadcast directly the meetings of the Council of Ministers in which each of his employees makes the jockey praise him more than the previous one.
It’s no doubt pleasing to Trump’s ego to know that even if he can’t get an agent to deliver the crowd on his behalf, he can still get his loyalists to show up for him — and, by extension, that MAGA is still counting on him to get the crowd going, even if the movement is starting to look up. the post-Trump future.
Yet Trump is also a high-flyer, clearly aware that his own star rises when he can rub shoulders with A-listers. famous friendship long before entering politics. In 2005, he invited Billy Joel to his wedding with Melania Trump, and while Joel attended, the singer later said he had no idea why he was invited. “I don’t know him that well,” Joel said in 2016. “I think I met him once or twice.” Trump claims to be a friend of legends like Muhammad Aliand complains former partners who no longer speak to him. (On Whoopi Goldberg: “She said, ‘You’re so beautiful. There’s nobody like you in the world!’” On Oprah: “Oprah was very fond of me. She was here a lot. She loved my key lime pie.”)
Trump has appeared frustrated by his transition from Manhattan’s polished and glamorous social scene to Washington, where few of his allies could be described as “nice.” Maybe that’s why he has responded so carefully to his treatment at your hands New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to great delight: Finally, a fellow politician of star quality, willing to rub elbows with Trump.
Unfortunately for Trump, his racism and misogyny alienated liberal Hollywood before he even took office. In a way, the Freedom 250 fiasco is its repetition 2017 launchwhen star after star turned down invitations to appear at his events, including those who performed for George W. Bush during his presidency.
Since then, MAGA is interesting A few famous people with answers and controversies for his columns. More specifically, that includes Nicki Minaj, who told Erika Kirk in December that he had “great respect and admiration for our president,” and who remains the movement’s closest possibility to a regular celebrity. However, whether at the request of Minaj or the White House, her name did not appear as a possibility for this summer’s festivities. He hasn’t yet put the full weight of his star power behind Trump — and given the lack of interaction between his audience and Trump’s, it’s unclear how much of that power he’d retain if he committed himself fully to it.
By the end of the series of cancellations of the Freedom 250, the festival series it seemed to be down to Vanilla Ice and several othersthough it’s not entirely clear who plans to perform yet, and it’s not exactly a star-studded lineup that could headline the arena tour. On TruthSocial, Trump lashed out bitterly. He called the squad “highly paid, Third-rate Artists” who he wouldn’t want to work with anyway, declaring that he just wanted to be surrounded by “Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People who know how to WIN.” He is telling the truth. Trump clearly wants to surround himself with real stars, whom he sees as winners of life. The problem is that they don’t seem to want to be around him.
Of the entertainers ready to play to the MAGA crowd, Trump is the only one who can fill Madison Square Garden. It’s a level of popularity that he’s always been looking for, and it’s made him very important to his partners, which can feel like a position of power – but he’s also shown that he hasn’t created a movement that can bring in a crowd without him. That is a weak position for any president to be in.
