Shamelessly Tacky
The President's Wife Gets an Opera House
“Not that it matters, because nothing matters, in our nat-pop age: but has Melania Trump ever seen an opera?” - Jay Nordlinger
“O mighty warrior of great fighting stock / Might I inquire to ask, ehh, what's up Doc?”
- Bugs Bunny, “What’s Opera, Doc?” (1957)
I have to make a health complaint. My eyes are sore from all of the rolling that they do, and my neck is to the point that shaking my head has become a repetitive motion injury. Pounding my head on the desk may become my last physical response to the era of President Donald Trump before my eye starts twitching like Chief Inspector Dreyfuss in the Pink Panther movies.
Congress is actually considering whether to name the opera house at the Kennedy Center after First Lady Melania Trump. It’s a plot twist straight out of The Gilded Age.
Thirty-three Republican members of the House of Representatives, apparently unable to imagine more ways to be obsequious to Trump, have decided to name the nation’s opera house after a former soft-porn model whose main accomplishment was reading her husband’s book so she knew what he was looking for in a potential (third) wife. Turns out it’s the kind of woman that turns a blind eye to her husband sexually assaulting women and paying off porn stars, but she gets an Amazon documentary deal when he becomes president a second time.
We now see the Kennedy Center as a battleground not just over culture, but class. Not in the Marxist, economic, sense, but in the sense of putting Porkys on the same level as A Room with a View.
When the Gannett newspapers tried to think of why Melania Trump should be so honored, even they struggled. They found one issue that the White House staff managed to credit to her and then listed a number of occasions when she accompanied her husband on trips.
Gannett could’ve added that Melania Trump added to reputations of the Empress Theodora and Anne Boleyn by comparison.
The Trumps are unhappy that fashionable society doesn’t celebrate the First Lady the way they hoped. Renaming the opera hall appears to be a consolation prize as Trump sticks it to all of those snobs that have mocked him over the years.
No taste? Trump will show everyone what having good taste really is, as he splashes gold leaf around the interior of the White House and makes the halls look like the nation’s First Hoarder is at work. Meanwhile, the Rose Garden is getting paved over and a boxing ring is being set up for an “Ultimate Fighting Championship” bout (is it the lowest of the lowbrow sports?) set for this country’s 250th birthday. Perhaps he’ll have the occasion commemorated in a black velvet painting.
What is almost as cool as a new Air Force One, a palace in the sky? Everyone the president knows loves Les Misérables. Even if Trump doesn’t see the irony, he was going to show it at his Kennedy center. And if polite society continues to snub his trophy wife and boo him at cultural events, he’ll put her name on the place so everyone in Washington D.C. will respect them. Just don’t expect him to attend an actual opera unless it’s in English.
If that doesn’t work to give Trump the respect he thinks he deserves - to have everyone kiss his ass, as he would say - he’ll probably have the whole place renamed as “Trump Theater.”
Too bad his friend Jeffrey Epstein isn’t alive to see this.
James Wigderson is a writer based in Waukesha, WI. He is the former editor of RightWisconsin and a former columnist for the Waukesha Freeman.
Here’s to our “Falstaff and Chief”
Bravo. This was *chef's kiss*