{"id":264933,"date":"2025-11-01T12:41:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T12:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/264933\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T12:41:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T12:41:16","slug":"the-silliest-trump-scandal-imaginable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/264933\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silliest Trump \u2018Scandal\u2019 Imaginable"},"content":{"rendered":"

The silliest Trump scandal imaginable is the forthcoming White House ballroom<\/a>, funded entirely by private donations. If everything is a scandal, is nothing a scandal? Anything that feeds President Donald Trump\u2019s ego must be denounced, no matter how much it serves a larger public purpose.<\/p>\n

Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott uncorked a typical piece of anti-Trump agita on Oct. 24, headlined: \u201cWhy the demolition of the East Wing is so shocking: The speed of destruction, and the projection of power, are part of the strongman playbook.\u201d<\/p>\n

Journalists find fascist parallels in seemingly everything Trump touches. Kennicott wrote that images of leaders looking over architectural plans is a trope of \u201cpolitical iconography\u201d by elected leaders. But he found an echo in an expert: \u201cColumbia University professor Barry Bergdoll pointed out in a speech at the National Building Museum on Wednesday, the public display of the architectural model has a darker history in fascist and totalitarian politics, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The funniest part was Kennicott insisting this needed an elaborate review process, \u201cbalancing opposing worldviews, forging compromise, incorporating a wide range of perspectives and insight.\u201d Most journalists at the Post would set their desks on fire if you proposed this balance of opposing views in their overwrought Trump critiques.<\/p>\n

Nobody should go to Kennicott for balance, or for reverence. Last year, he trashed the AP photograph that showed Trump after he was shot in the ear<\/a>, raising a defiant fist. He wrote: \u201cIt will encourage some of the darkest forces in American civic life. People who preach violence, who revel in its political potential, can now say that one of their own is a victim, and he was. From that, more cycles of violence are almost inevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Kennicott gushed in 2017 that the oddball official portraits selected by the Obamas\u2014where Barack Obama looked like he was emerging out of a bush, and Michelle Obama was colored gray, like a corpse\u2014were \u201cgreat,\u201d in part because that couple is awesome. \u201cNow that they have left office, now that their fundamental decency is in high relief by contrast with the new political order, memory is refreshed.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the same critic who wrote a piece for July 3, 2021, headlined \u201cMaybe it\u2019s time to admit that the Statue of Liberty has never quite measured up.\u201d The statue, he claimed, is \u201cambiguous and ambivalent. As familiar to some Americans as the flag, the statue is just as meaningless or foreign to others, a sign without significance, or worse, a symbol of hypocrisy or unfulfilled promises\u201d\u2014because Trump ruined America\u2019s promise, with the \u201cpast four years of strident and often violent anti-immigrant sentiment<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Oct. 26, Kennicott was back with an overly long attack on how \u201cTrump attempts to consolidate power over cultural infrastructure,\u201d a campaign against taxpayer-funded museums, \u201cto capture or coerce them into new narratives of patriotism and American exceptionalism.\u201d Unsurprisingly, he championed painter Amy Sherald\u2014of \u201cgray Michelle\u201d fame\u2014who pulled her work from the National Portrait Gallery over her painting \u201cTrans Forming Liberty,\u201d depicting the Statue of Liberty as a drag queen.<\/p>\n

This article\u2019s logic collapsed when Kennicott lamented that Trump and his backers \u201cgin up anger and online mobs.\u201d That\u2019s not healthy. Guess which angry mob is healthy? Leftists who vandalize art to protest Big Oil, because \u201cmuseums, at their best, are institutions that respond to public needs and concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kennicott railed against \u201cthe usual horsemen of the authoritarian apocalypse: suspicion, cynicism and apathy.\u201d But what the Left really can\u2019t stand is anyone challenging their ideological stranglehold, anyone making a \u201cculture war\u201d to erode their overweening cultural dominance.<\/p>\n

COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM<\/p>\n

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The silliest Trump scandal imaginable is the forthcoming White House ballroom, funded entirely by private donations. If everything…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,12,88,10815,31776,59065],"class_list":["post-264933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-donald-trump","tag-entertainment","tag-media","tag-media-bias","tag-morning-bell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}