Trump Is Remaking Art in His Image

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.What’s a party without a little music? This year, the National Mall was meant to host a free summer concert series in celebration of the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. Now President Trump may be replacing it with a different kind of performance: a supersize MAGA rally, with “Only Great Patriots invited.”The concert series—which is still officially on, at the time of writing—had already been facing significant challenges before the president’s proposal on Saturday. First announced last Wednesday by a Trump-affiliated organization called Freedom 250, the event was set to feature nine musicians, at least six of whom have since dropped out. The rapper Young MC wrote that he was put off by the event’s “politically charged” nature; Celebrity Apprentice alumnus Bret Michaels called it “divisive”; and the country singer Martina McBride claimed that she’d been presented with a chance to celebrate America in a nonpartisan way, but “that turned out to be misleading.” (One wonders why these artists were so surprised: Freedom 250 does bill itself as nonpartisan, but it was created by Trump himself in an executive order.)The president’s enjoinder to “cancel” the event was clearly a desperate bid to reframe an unfolding PR disaster. But it also revealed something about how Trump sees himself, and how he understands the role of art in bolstering his political project. In one post, he called himself “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime.” Trump often talks about his own greatness, but here he’s nodding to his capacity for showmanship, positioning art and politics as interchangeable arenas for promoting the MAGA agenda.Take the Kennedy Center, which has been the primary site of Trump’s attacks on the art