Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Kennedy Center Obsession Is Getting Embarrassing

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Andrew Egger and Sonny Bunch take on Trump’s latest attempt to get his name back on the Kennedy Center, his refusal to let go of fights he’s already lost, and what his obsession with credit, legacy, and scapegoats says about a president who increasingly seems stuck doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over...Ready to reach your goals? Visit https://hims.com/bulwarktakes to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you.

Hey, everybody, welcome to Bullwork Takes. I am Andrew Eger, joined by my Bullwark colleague, Sunny Bunch, to talk about Donald Trump's latest attempt. God, this guy just really, really wants his name on the Kennedy Center. Please, please let him put his name on that building. CNN reports today. President Donald Trump's handpicked board of the Kennedy Center has voted a second time to close the performing arts institution for renovations, according to two people who were briefed on the decision. The board also voted to add an inscription below the Kennedy Center's sign, saying the arts, complex was, quote, restored and renovated by President Donald J. Trump, the sources said. This is one of the weirder long-running stories. I don't think when any of us came into Trump 2.0, we thought we would be producing quite so much content about the various legal foibles surrounding

the decor on the outside of the Kennedy Center. Can you just kind of bring the people back up to speed on why we've been talking so much about this building, this institution in D.C. for a year and a half now? You know, he's an old showtune guy. He loves show tunes. He loves musical theater. He was a producer on Broadway, a failed producer on Broadway. So he has a lot of thoughts and insights here. He wanted to renovate the Kennedy Center. And as part of this renovation, he was going to shut it down for two years. And there's been so much back and forth about fundraising and blah, blah, blah. The culmination of this was the board decided to put his name on the building, the John F. K.K. Kennedy and Donald Trump Cultural Center, whatever it was. Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, which is what was so good about it, is the Donald, J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. They literally put his name on the building. Eventually, this goes up to the courts. Courts say, you can't do this. You can't call it. You can't change the name of the Kennedy Center.

That's by statute. It's called the Kennedy Center. So they found this very clever workaround, Andrew. I don't know if you really appreciate how clever this is. But instead, of the, you know, John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump Center. And I really feel like we need to read it again here because it is, it is something, it is something quite magnificent. The John F. Kennedy Center for the performing arts restored and renovated by President Donald J. Trump. But, you know, kind of hidden in this, this was not really discussed, is that they actually want to rename the plaza, the actual physical site where, where all of this is located, the President Donald J. Trump Plaza. Again, the reason we're talking about this is because it's one of these things where, like, in a reasonable working universe, Donald Trump gets handed this L over and over again. He loses in the courts. He is told he can't do this. The board eventually just stops trying to do it and gives up. But he's not doing that. He continues to go on. And this is really of a piece with a lot of things we've been seeing so far this summer from Donald J. Trump, right? Let me get to that in just a minute. I have one other thing to say

about the Kennedy Center, which is just that I'm kind of two minds about this specific one, because, like, I'm a D.C. resident. I like, you know, the cultural institution that is the Kennedy Center. I like to go there and see a show, see the orchestra, you know, see some stuff, take my kids to a kid's show. Like, all that stuff's great. And it has been sort of a bummer to see it sort of get chopped into pieces by the president over the past year and a half. It will be a bummer if he succeeds in getting it shut down for a couple of years. At the same time, it's totally fine with me if Donald Trump wants to spend more and more and more of his time, micromanaging the Kennedy Center, pick out new, new fabric swatches for the upholstery in the seats, looking at different chandeliers, like, all that stuff seems fine to me as a use of the president's time that is not, you know, more actively harming the country in one way or another. To get to the point, you were alluding to a minute

ago, a minute ago, this is something I wrote about just this morning in the Morning Shots newsletter, which is that we've been seeing a lot of this from the president, especially this summer. It seemed like last year, he would run into some kind of roadblock and he would pivot, right? he had like all these different wars who wanted to wage against the media and the liberals and his personal enemies and Democrats and whoever. More recently, it's been a lot of throwing good money after bad, a lot more trying to get, you know, new oil out of dry wells. It's, it's this Kennedy Center stuff, but it's also stuff like the reflecting pool prosecutions where they tried to indict a few of these people who were, you know, just kind of checking out the reflecting pool in order to blame them for their own embarrassing. mistake in resurfacing this pool and having it immediately fail on them, trying to reindite Lisa Cook or trying to put new restrictions on birthright citizenship immediately after the Supreme Court

said, sorry Donald Trump, you can't put new restrictions on birthright citizenship. It's like he's out of new ideas of new stuff to pivot to. The Kennedy Center one jumps out at us, I think, because it is the most blatant representation of a thing that he is very obsessed with, which is getting his name on stuff. He sees himself as this kind of world historical, Napoleonic or Caesar-like figure, right? Where he is the engine of change. He is the man who is doing these things. And how are those men recognized, right? They are recognized. You put their name on things. Now, this is not, you know, a thing that happens while they're in office a lot of the times, but it's neither here nor there.

The issue with the Kennedy Center and the naming and the issue with the reflecting pool and its restoration are very much of a piece in the sense that he sees as his legacy, his real legacy, is not immigration or Iran. It is building things. He sees himself as a builder. He sees himself as a man who erects skyscrapers and, you know, puts together these fabulous gold-plated rooms that are so lovely. That's how he wants to be remembered,

which is just the weirdest, most narcissistic aspect of this whole thing. I think it really does get to a certain core of his identity, like the kernel of Trumpism is Donald J. Trump believes that Donald J. Trump believes that Donald J. Trump should have Donald J. Trump's name on everything. And if it doesn't, then what's even the point? We can laugh about some of these things, right? Like, I know I kind of tend to agree with you that if he wants to spend his time focusing on the renovations at the Kennedy Center, it's not the most harmful thing.

But the reflecting pool thing actually does really bother me in the sense that, like, he is trying to use the awesome might of the federal government to crush a guy who happened to be arrested there because he thinks that the failure. of this thing makes him look bad. He can't accept his own failures. So he has to find a scapegoat. He managed to pick an Olympian, like an actual literal Olympian. It's like this is the guy who is to blame for all of this. This is the guy we got to get. The whole thing is on the one hand, baffling, but on the other really does make a certain kind of perfect sense if you understand his specific brand of narcissism. The tension between the desire to be known as a builder and the desire

to leave this sort of legacy, which for most builders, for most of these guys who are actually world historical figures who left this sort of indelible mark on the world, they saw themselves in terms of their later legacy, right? Which means by necessity they had to build the things. I mean, I feel like for Trump, he has had a reputation, an overstated reputation, by the way, from his private career as a builder. He was more of a brander even then. But that's the tension, is that really what he really cares about is not the building. It's the getting the credit for the building immediately right now, right? I mean, it's so well summed up in the fact that he is fighting so hard to put restored and renovated

by President Donald J. Trump on the Kennedy Center before any of that restoration and renovation has actually taken place, right? It's getting the credit for it that is so much more important to him than the actual labor, than the actual work. And it's sort of the same thing with the reflecting pool, right? I mean, when he resurfaced that pool, first of all, he rushed the job so that it could be done in time for July 4th. This is something his administration has now admitted. And for him, the problem is not, oh, no, it was a rush job and it failed.

And so now we need to take our time and get it right and do it better and actually have something that will last that they'll be talking about, you know, years and years from now. Instead, he has so hyper-fixated on the fight about it, on the embarrassing fact that that first renovation failed. and on trying to find scapegoats, trying to find some people to blame. It's that hyper immediate thinking about the way people are thinking about him and talking about him right this minute that just drives so much of his personality, so much of what he wakes up and goes out into the world to do every day. And just to take those two things, it really does, I think, kind of shine a light on how he fails as a builder on his own terms here.

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Wagovi is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wagovi clinical study information and restrictions, visit Hymns.com. The other aspect of all this is he cannot stand to be contradicted. He does have this kind of opposition defiance disorder, right? Like he cannot be told that he is wrong. And this is why when, for instance, Piro, you know, polls, asked for the case to be dismissed against this Olympian, David Hearn, who, you know, has been charged with a felony destruction of property at the reflecting pool. He calls her and Bergman is like, what are you doing?

Why are you contradicting me out there? This was clearly a case of vandalism. It couldn't possibly have been the no-bid contracts, you know. We had a great process here, and we did it. And it's been torn apart by the vandalism. with the box cutters. How can you say that that's not? I've been out there saying it.

Why would you contradict me? This is the thing that I think is most dangerous about Donald Trump, really, is that he does live in his own manufactured reality. And having somebody with their finger on the button who does not correspond to the actual world as it exists is not great. And look, you see part, you see this kind of with Iran, though, you know, who knows how much of his truth social posts about Iran or like, I think I'm negotiating with the Iranians through truth social.

So I'm going to put these things out there and how much of it he actually believes. I really wish I could have a little just a window into his mind to know how much of this he thinks is actually real and how much of it is just bluster. I feel like the answer would be terrifying, but maybe it would be terrifying. I have long had sort of a pet theory that his narcissism is at such a stage, has colonized so much of his brain and just his own amoral, truth. agnostic sort of salesmanship as his main way that he interacts with the world. He's gotten so used to that, that almost the walls between these two things that you describe have sort of collapsed. There's just

the spin and there's just the sale that he needs to make and there's just these narratives that he puts out into the world. Nobody ever catches Donald Trump in a lie, you know, because truth and lies are barely even like real categories, right, not to get incredibly a psychoanalytical about it. If you're interviewing him face to face and he says something and you're like, well, sir, you said exactly the opposite thing. Last week, I have it written down right here. He doesn't, like, phase him. He just operates on a completely different, much stranger and worse, uh, uh, plane of existence. Fake news.

And you're a very nasty person. Those are, those are his like kind of stock responses, right? If he's contradicted, like the, nope, fake news. That never happened. Or you're, you're being mean to me. Why are you being, why are you being so nasty and mean to me? He has the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, space of a 12-year-old.

Like, like, it is maybe even an eight-year-old. I don't know. I have, I have a, I have a, I have a, uh, two kids around that same age. he's much closer to the eight-year-old so many so much of the time. Coming back to this Kennedy Center thing, you should have heard the noise I made when I got the alert on my phone from the New York Times that we are back to doing Kennedy Center nonsense. Like this was settled. This was settled. He had even said on his truth social like, I'm giving up. The Congress can take this over. I'm washing my hands of it. I thought of your newsletter this morning because it is the perfect

encapsulation of a world in which we are reverting, we are reverting back to things that have already been settled because he can't he cannot let it go and if you haven't signed up for morning shot you got to do that because it's like this is like the first thing to read every morning you don't even have to be a bulwark plus member by the way to get morning shots because morning shots is free you could be a bulwark minus person you could sign up and pay us no money at all but don't come pay us money i take some i take some reassurance from it honestly like i think i think a year ago if if we could fast forward to now when it just seemed like he had so much momentum and like i said before even when he would have little setbacks, there was always some new, like, envelope to push, some new wall

to try to push down, some new norm to try to trample over. And he just seems so stuck now. There's a reason why he is continuing to throw good money after bad on so many of these stories where he's already lost, where he has no reason to think he's going to get a better, you know, treatment in court this time than it did last time, more favorable outcome in court. But he has to fight somewhere, and he doesn't see a more favorable opportunistic place to fight than this. I think it's great that he's stuck. I think it's great that he's mad. And I think we should all take a little bit of comfort in that. Andrew, you haven't really considered how this affects my personal mental well-being, because it's actually driving me crazy. It's probably better for

the country, but for me personally, we do carry around a great psychic load. And we appreciate the ability to at least share that psychic load with all of you people out there in TV land. So thanks for watching. We hope you will subscribe to the channel. It's right down there. Right down there under our faces. Right now is a little button. you can click helps us out a lot. Head over to The Bullwark. Get our newsletters. The Bullwork.com.

Lots of good stuff over there. Thanks, Sunny. And we'll see you all next time.