View in browser 

December 19, 2025

By Stephen Collinson

You can't make this stuff up 

It’s like every day is April Fools’ Day.

President Donald Trump keeps doing things that are so self-serving and bafflingly absurd that you have to check they are real.

Take Friday’s stunner. The White House announced that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the iconic showcase for opera, classical music and theater, will have a new name. Drum roll ... Welcome to the “Trump Kennedy Center."

Trump dropped hints for weeks that this was what he wanted. And it happened just in time for Christmas!  

Soon after taking office, the president fired the board of the iconic arts complex in Washington. He hosted the annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony himself. Then he accepted FIFA’s Peace Prize — which suddenly materialized out of nowhere, thanks to his pal world soccer chief Gianni Infantino on the Kennedy Center theater’s main stage. And what a shocker: Trump’s handpicked board voted on Friday to put his name up in lights alongside that of JFK.

“I was surprised by it,” Trump said Friday, with a typical lack of irony. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed Trump’s elevation was just reward for saving the center from falling down and financial ruin. And she bizarrely referred to the assassinated President Kennedy on X.

“Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur,” Leavitt wrote. It wouldn’t be surprising if the eternal flame on Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Ceremony is flickering tonight. 

Contrary to the propaganda, Trump’s takeover of one of America’s premier arts venues seems to be going about as well as his economic “golden age.” The Washington Post reported in October that ticket sales have plummeted under the new management. Some artists and foreign performers have canceled appearances. Empty seats wouldn’t be surprising, since many Kennedy Center patrons are from the DC area, where the president is deeply unpopular.

But the Kennedy Center’s renaming was not the most startling demonstration of Trump’s narcissism this week.

The horrific murders of Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, allegedly by their son, sparked a wave of grief and shock. But Trump posted such a despicable reaction on social media that it at first seemed like some kind of AI fake. He suggested that Reiner was killed because, as a critic of the president, he suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Even some of the president’s usual supporters regarded this as a vile response.

But there’s more.

Trump this week put the finishing touches on his “Presidential Walk of Fame” on the covered walkway between the main White House mansion and the West Wing. The exhibit consists of presidential portraits in garish golden frames above plaques describing each commander in chief. 

The potted biographies don’t correspond to any recognizable view of history. “Barack Hussein Obama” is described as “the first Black President, a community organizer, one term Senator from Illinois, and one of the most divisive political figures in American History.”

But the 44th president fares better than poor Joe Biden, who doesn’t get a portrait at all, but a picture of an autopen — the automatic device that Trump claims Biden used to sign bills because he wasn’t mentally up to the task. “Nicknamed both ‘Sleepy’ and ‘Crooked,’ Joe Biden was dominated by his Radical Left handlers,” reads the plaque.

A plaque honoring President Andrew Jackson states that he was “unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.” President Ronald Reagan is described as being a “fan” of the current president. Former President Bill Clinton is praised for his late 1990s economy. But the plaque also notes, “In 2016, President Clinton’s wife, Hillary, lost the Presidency to President Donald J. Trump!”

If the odd punctuation and stray capital letters seem familiar, there’s a good reason why. “As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself,” Leavitt said.

On one level, this is funny and rather ridiculous. But you do wonder how the president — with all his peacemaking and keeping the ship of state on its (rather erratic) course — has the time to worry about such trivia.

And this week’s bizarre twists and turns amplify a question that is increasingly being whispered in Washington. Is the president OK?

'I am fixing it!'

Trump is usually a master at setting the political narrative. Which is why his address to the nation on Wednesday night was so odd.

His mission was clear: to inject some political juice into his administration after a humiliating few weeks.

Trump’s authority has been tested by several Republican revolts in the House. GOP state lawmakers in Indiana refused his orders to redraw the state’s congressional districts to help him in the midterm elections. There are unprecedented signs of cracks in the MAGA coalition. 

Voters, meanwhile, are telling pollsters that they are feeling sour over the Trump economy and the continued high prices for groceries, housing and health care, which he had vowed to fix. 

So Trump’s political aides decided it was time for him to look the nation in the eye. 

Presidents often ask television networks for airtime for a prime-time address at epochal moments at times of tragedy or war. In January 1986, for instance, President Ronald Reagan sublimely mourned seven astronauts lost in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in saying they’d “slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.”

Trump’s Yuletide message lacked such poetry. Instead, he shouted out a seasonal dose of his most dystopian rhetoric. 

“I inherited a mess, and I am fixing it,” Trump bellowed. “Over the past 11 months, we have brought more positive change to Washington than any administration in American history. There has never been anything like it, and I think most would agree.”

Trump didn’t add the words “or else,” but you get the drift.

He did not look like a leader in control of either his own political fate or the nation’s destiny. And he exacerbated a fundamental political mistake also made by Biden: Trump tried to force Americans to reject the evidence of their own eyes as they struggle with economic insecurity.

The fates of Trump and of Republicans are not set in stone. An economic turnaround next year could change the political mood. The GOP will hope better-than-expected inflation data released Thursday is just the start. 

Other presidents were in trouble at this point and turned it around, including Reagan, Clinton and Obama. But each of them was in the first term at the time, and Trump is in his second — albeit nonconsecutive — White House spell. Once a president’s approval ratings dip below 40%, as Trump’s now have in CNN poll averages, it’s extraordinarily difficult to get them back up.

Sometimes, it’s hard to know that the power is draining from a presidency while it’s happening. One ominous parallel for the current president is the disastrous first year of George W. Bush’s second term, from which he never recovered.

Trump has always broken the mold and defied convention. And his diminished public support is unlikely to stop him grasping for vast, unaccountable power. 

But Wednesday night’s splenetic address suggested that he knows he’s in a deep political hole. And he hasn’t figured out how to dig himself out.