Tag: hamilton
Trump Loyalists Seething After 'Hamilton' Cancels Kennedy Center Run

Trump Loyalists Seething After 'Hamilton' Cancels Kennedy Center Run

The creators of Hamilton refuse to let their hit musical be performed next year at the Kennedy Center, where a now-canceled eight-week run was slated to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—and this snub has MAGA acolytes seeing red.

President Donald Trump purged the board of the performing arts center in February and has since been made chairman, which caused an exodus of board members and performers.

“This latest action by Trump means it’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it,” show creator Lin-Manuel Miranda said in a joint interview via The New York Times with lead producer Jeffrey Seller. “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center. We’re just not going to be part of it."

And while Seller pointed out in a separate statement that their decision had to do with the “partisan policies of the Kennedy Center” and not with the Trump administration itself, the president’s loyalists aren’t very happy.

"Let's be clear on the facts," Richard Grenell, a Trump administration diplomat, said in a post via X. "Seller and Lin Manuel first went to the New York Times before they came to the Kennedy Center with their announcement that they can’t be in the same room with Republicans. This is a publicity stunt that will backfire."

Grenell—who recently campaigned on behalf of accused sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate—then argued that arts are for both sides of the aisle and "not just for the people who Lin likes and agrees with."

"The American people need to know that Lin-Manuel is intolerant of people who don’t agree with him politically. It’s clear he and Sellers don’t want Republicans going to their shows," he added.

Grenell’s comments come at an interesting time, given that Miranda and Seller pulled the show partly because of Trump’s sudden ousting of Democrats from the previously bipartisan board at the Kennedy Center.

“Our cancellation is also a business decision," Seller wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. "'Hamilton' is a large and global production, and it would simply be financially and personally devastating to the hundreds of employees of 'Hamilton' if the new leadership of the Kennedy Center suddenly canceled or re-negotiated our engagement."

He added, "The actions of the new Chairman of the Board in recent weeks demonstrate that contracts and previous agreements simply cannot be trusted."

It’s likely Seller was referring to Trump’s firing of Deborah Rutter, the center’s longtime president. Trump also fired multiple board members, replacing them with his own supporters.

"At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN," Trump wrote via Truth Social in February.

"Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP. The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation,” Trump added, though he’s admitted to never having seen a Kennedy Center show.

As Trump has brought his loyalists, those on the other side of the aisle have made their exit.

Singer-songwriter Ben Folds resigned from his role as artistic advisor to the center’s National Symphony Orchestra, as did TV legend Shonda Rhimes as a board member.

Hamilton has a history of butting heads with the Trump administration, with cast members personally pleading to former Vice President Mike Pence onstage in mid-November 2016 to do right by the American people.

“We, sir—we—are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” actor Brandon Victor Dixon, playing Vice President Aaron Burr, said to Pence from the stage. “We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

While Hamilton won’t be gracing the stage and several other performers have canceled in protest, most of the Kennedy Center’s schedule appears to remain intact.

One other play, The Story of a Rose, however, relocated to Northern Virginia. The World War-I themed concert was said to have been moved due to seating capacity, per the New York Times.

However, one performer later told the outlet, “I’m glad at how it turned out. I wanted to do a show that everyone could attend—left, right, and center.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

One Last Time: Be Thankful For President Obama

One Last Time: Be Thankful For President Obama

On a holiday when many Americans may feel less thankful as they consider the nation’s future, it is worth recalling again how much we should appreciate the service of Barack Obama. The profound gratitude that we owe him is only underscored by the prospect of the next president, whose name I frankly hesitate to mention on this hallowed occasion. And as he looks forward to leaving the White House, Obama remains keenly focused on how best to serve his country in a moment of unexpected peril.

In Hamilton, the hit Broadway musical that recently delighted the incoming vice president, one of the show-stopping numbers is “One Last Time,” in which George Washington explains why he will step down from the presidency to teach the new America about orderly democratic succession. The spirit of that wonderful song, whose message is essential to our way of life, lives in Obama as he seeks to prepare his woefully unready successor for the rigors of the presidency.

Amazingly, the fact that this individual spent years abusing him with calumnies, lies, and disrespect, in an ugly racist style, has not discouraged Obama from showing him and his family every courtesy – or from attempting to educate him about the gigantic challenges that await him in the Oval Office. Obama’s painstaking efforts to provide a presidential education have been so tactful and so kind as to evoke expressions of astonished praise from the pupil — an uninformed egomaniac who apparently believed, until lately, that he knew everything.

Now that he knows Obama a little, perhaps he is learning a little more about how wrong his assumptions have been about many other matters, from the Affordable Care Act to the Iran nuclear agreement. For the moment, we can only hope.

The president is more popular today than he was at many times during his tenure, presumably because people better understand both his considerable achievements and his innate decency. As we contemplate the coming period of misrule, it is worth reflecting on how much worse our situation might be today if one of Obama’s partisan opponents had been in control of events since January 2009.

For much of that time, a mindlessly negative attitude colored assessments of him and his presidency. More flawed than his most zealous supporters would ever have admitted when he first ran for president, he left many of them disproportionately disappointed. From his first day in office, he never benefited from the “fair chance” or “national unity” that his partisan opponents now demand for his successor. Certainly he made regrettable mistakes in both policy and politics, and suffered declines in public confidence that injured his image and the fortunes of his party. But there will be many reasons to remember him with admiration, and they are sure to loom larger when he is judged against those who follow him.

The undeniable truth is that Obama righted the nation in a moment of deep crisis and set us on a better course, despite bitter obstruction by conservative extremists who were eager to sink us rather than see him succeed.

So we should be forever thankful that Obama was president at the nadir of the Great Recession, rather than a Republican who might have insisted on austerity and rejected the stimulus spending that saved us from economic catastrophe. While not large enough to prevent grave suffering, that spending was sufficient to bring recovery more rapidly than most countries have recovered after a major panic. The proof lies in a record of growth that outpaced every other industrialized country in the world – a record that seems even more impressive because the crash began here, as a consequence of irresponsibility and criminality in American financial markets.

We should also be thankful that Obama – a politician who respects science and knowledge — was president as we began to encounter the frightening reality of climate change. Under his guidance, the federal government has acted against excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, required automakers to double their fuel economy by 2025, ordered agencies to achieve sustainability in operations and purchases, and invested tens of billions in smart electric grids, conservation, and clean fuels. And he — along with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, among others — brought the United States into the Paris global climate agreement that, with luck, his successor will not attempt to unravel.

We should be thankful, too, that he pushed through the most extensive and generous reform in American health care since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act – which now protects millions of Americans. It is a mark of that legislation’s landmark success that the Republicans, now empowered to repeal it, are promising to preserve many of its important benefits. Whether they can fashion a viable alternative remains to be seen, but it will be instructive to watch them try. Meanwhile health care costs have slowed, Medicare’s solvency has improved, and millions more of the country’s poor and working families are covered by Medicaid, in spite of Republican legislators and governors who would, quite literally, let them and their children die.

Throughout his presidency, Obama has remained admirably cool in the face of vicious attacks that would madden most people — notably including the incoming president. This president has refused to imitate the mindless and often revolting conduct of his adversaries. Not for a moment has he abandoned American values of shared responsibility and prosperity, of cooperation and community, of malice toward none and charity for all.

Those ideals were epitomized by this national holiday’s presidential founders – George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. We will work toward the day when we have another leader who seeks to uphold that legacy.

Reality TV Emperor Or President Of A Constitutional Democracy?

Reality TV Emperor Or President Of A Constitutional Democracy?

The Emperor [of Lilliput] holds a stick in his hands,
both ends parallel to the horizon, while the candidates,
advancing one by one, sometimes leap over the stick,
sometimes creep under it backwards and forwards several times…
whoever performs his part with most agility, and holds
out longest in leaping and creeping, is rewarded with
the blue-colored silk…and you see very few persons
about this court who are not adorned with one of
these girdles.
–Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver’s Travels, 1726

Never mind that president-elect Trump and his keenest supporters have gone from boasting to whining in two short weeks. “Mommy, they’re making fun of me on TV. It’s not fair!” Nor that the world’s rudest man purports to give etiquette lessons to the cast of a Broadway play. Nor even that Trump appears on pace to set a new American record for the most campaign promises broken in the shortest time.

(Trump never settles lawsuits. Except when he does, paying $25 million in chump change to reimburse gullible students defrauded by “Trump University.” Given that he’s also the defendant in something like 75 additional lawsuits accusing him of everything from stiffing contractors to deceptive advertising, things could get expensive.)

Alas, Trump seems to confuse the presidency with being the emcee on a “reality TV” program. Or with being Emperor of Lilliput. It’s hard to say. It’s not merely the daily spectacle of veteran Republican hacks and flub-a-dubs like Chris Christie and Rick Perry being escorted into Trump’s garishly-appointed penthouse to perch upon his gilded chairs. The man clearly has no accurate idea of the powers of the presidency: what he can do and what he can’t as the elected leader of a constitutional democracy.

Consider the abandonment of his vow to prosecute “Crooked Hillary” Clinton for her imagined crimes. At campaign rallies, Trump led enthusiastic supporters chanting “Lock her up!” During their second televised debate, he promised Clinton to her face that “If I win I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception.”

Somewhat haughtily, Hillary missed an opportunity to inform Trump that the president of the United States has no such power. There are elaborate mechanisms in the law to prevent the president from meddling in criminal cases. And a good thing too. Do you really want to live in a country whose president can order his political opponents jailed? No, you don’t.

Probably Hillary assumed that anybody who would even consider voting for her already knew that. Indeed, thanks largely to the epic failure of Kenneth Starr’s efforts to prosecute both Clintons during the make-believe “Whitewater” scandal, the Independent Counsel Act was allowed to expire in 1999, and good riddance.

Might Republicans be tempted to bring it back, in the way they bring back massive budget deficits whenever they’re in power? Not to harass an already defeated Democrat, no.

For that matter, no president can order the Department of Justice to drop an investigation, either. Given the harm FBI Director Comey’s unethical meddling in the election campaign did to his own reputation, it’s easy to imagine him relishing an opportunity to tell Trump to stick it where the sun don’t shine.

Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Kellyanne Conway made it sound as if the great man was being magnanimous. “I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her honest or trustworthy,” Conway allowed, “but if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing.”

Actually, almost two million more Americans voted for Clinton than for Trump, although I doubt she finds the thought comforting.

People aren’t exactly enthralled with Trump’s honesty. In the last Fox News poll before the election, 60 percent of voters said Trump was neither honest nor trustworthy enough to be president. Judging by his performance to date, it’s hard to see those numbers improving.

Meanwhile, Trump invited news media bigshots in for a leaping and creeping session at Trump Tower. According to the New York Post, the president-elect mercilessly bullied the assembled TV executives and talking heads. “It was like a [bleeping] firing squad,” one source claimed.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful, dishonest media who got it all wrong…’ He called out [CNN president] Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the Post reported.

Talk about ingratitude! The cable news networks decision to treat Trump’s comings and goings as the #1 news story of 2016 is precisely what saddled the country with this big blowhard.

Kellyanne Conway, of course, described the proceedings as “very cordial, candid, and honest.”

The amazing thing is that nobody showed enough backbone to stand up and walk out.

IMAGE: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers a speech on his economic policy at the Alumisourse Building in Monessen, Pennsylvania, U.S., June 28, 2016. REUTERS/Louis Ruediger

#EndorseThis: Colbert Raps Trump’s Raging Retort To ‘Hamilton’ Cast

#EndorseThis: Colbert Raps Trump’s Raging Retort To ‘Hamilton’ Cast

For some reason, Stephen Colbert seems to think that the $25 million settlement of a fraud lawsuit by the president-elect of the United States is major news. After all, nobody preparing to assume the highest office in the land has done that before.

And to mark the occasion, The Late Show host delivers a special commencement speech to the thousands of ripped-off students of Trump U. (Football cheer: “Go Grifters!”)

But before the conclusion of this remarkable stand-up, he reviews the weekend’s really important story — that huge Pence-Trump-Hamilton Twitter feud — in a costumed rap performance, rhyming “aspersions” and “gay conversions.”

Not to be missed.

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