Donald Trump, accompanied by his wife Melania, attends a New Year's Eve event at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, December 31, 2024. REUTERS/Marco Bello
President Donald Trump is once again looping back to one of his earliest second-term "fixations," and according to his one-time biographer, it all comes down to his complete inability to shake an obsession once it takes root in his mind.
On Friday, the Kennedy Center board — which Trump previously restaffed with loyalists — voted once again to amend the institution's name, this time to add "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" to the end of it. The board also approved a motion to rename the site of the building to "The President Donald J. Trump Plaza."
This came after a judge shot down their previous attempt to rename it, "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts," citing the lack of approval from Congress. Trump's overall effort to impose his will on the center has resulted in a mass boycott by artists.
In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, longtime reporter and author Michael Wolff touched on this development and argued that it shows just how helpless Trump is to move on from something once he becomes fixated on it. Wolff has covered Trump's political career extensively in the past, including in a series of books about his chaotic first term.
"I was saying that, you know, he’s obsessed [with] the Kennedy Center because he wants the validation of the artistic community, something he’s avoided,” co-host Joanna Coles said. “And you immediately jumped in and just said, ‘No, no, he’s fixated about the Kennedy Center.’”
"It is literally that things just get into his head," Wolff responded. "He can’t get them out of his head and has to have them happen... He baldly tried to contradict this and put his name on the Kennedy Center. The court came along and said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ So there is no way for him to do that. But he can’t stop. He literally can’t stop himself,” Wolff said. “So now the proposal is that, in big letters, it will say ‘The Kennedy Center refurbished, rehabilitated,’ who knows what else. In very large letters, it will say this.”
He continued: “So this is an example of two things: that he has to get what he wants. That if he doesn’t get what he wants, he can’t move off. He can’t go forward. He’s stuck in place,” he added. “And then the second thing is that all of the people around him, what they have to do is figure out some way for him to get what he wants in some way that satisfies him. So I can see days and days and days of people sitting around talking. ‘How do we get his name on the building?’”
Wolff also noted that Trump has long held a particular fixation with comparing himself to former President John F. Kennedy. This is not just because of the obvious assassination comparisons, but also because of a desire to connect himself to the same of "glamour" and "adulation" that Kennedy experienced.