MAGA fails to conquer arts and music

Even by Donald Trump‘s erratic standards, his latest meltdown is bad — and deeply concerning.

It all began with two major insults to his fragile ego. On May 27, Freedom 250, the president’s initiative for celebrating the American semiquincentennial, announced the musical lineup for the Great American State Fair. But just hours later, most of the marquee artists — including country star Martina McBride and soul legends the Commodores — had dropped out, seemingly unaware of the event’s connection to Trump when their representatives booked the gig. Then two days later, on May 29, a federal judge ruled that the president cannot rename the Kennedy Center after himself or shut it down for renovations, a move that was announced — suspiciously — after a slew of artists canceled shows at the Washington, D.C., institution to avoid the taint of the Trump name.

Being rejected over and over by musicians, artists and celebrities sent the president into a social media posting frenzy. He spent 14 hours posting over 60 times on his Truth Social platform on Saturday, mixing lengthy tirades with artificial intelligence-generated images of himself as a basketball star, a Roman soldier and George Washington’s NASCAR buddy. Trump raved that only he could turn the Kennedy Center into a “Great and Prestigious WINNER,” a sad lie considering how he ran off the performers that created its international reputation, including the Washington National Opera. He whined that the singers who pulled out of the state fair are “Third Rate” and promised he would simply headline the event, swearing he is greater than Elvis, even “without a guitar.” After widespread mockery, Trump himself got “the yips,” which he accused the artists of having, and insisted the organizers nix the event altogether, “just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center.”

It’s unclear if Trump’s followers bought this “you can’t fire me, because I quit act,” as most of the replies to his posts were people — or quite likely bots — who ignored his message, choosing instead to share memes about how they love Immigration and Customs Enforcement and hate Democrats. But the president’s childish screeches nonetheless captured a growing frustration among the larger MAGA movement.

When Trump was elected to a second term in 2024, his coalition genuinely thought his return to office meant it was their turn to be the nation’s cool kids. That expectation is turning out to be false. Despite MAGA’s successful capture of the nation’s political system, they can’t get American culture to bend to their will. And like their leader, they are not handling it well.

On his Daily Wire show, Matt Walsh gave himself over to an extended whinging session about the Freedom 250 cancellations, while admitting that Trump’s efforts to organize a celebration “has fallen apart in spectacular fashion.” His elderly viewers took to the comment section to declare that American culture had peaked conveniently when they were young, and to sneer that these new-fangled artists who had been scheduled to perform at the event — most of whom haven’t charted since the ’80s or early ’90s — just show “our country has deteriorated so much in 50 years.”

The coping mechanisms from right-wingers on X were especially funny. “[Trump] should channel his Show Biz days and let new artists compete with patriotic songs,” one self-described “Conservative Christian blogger” wrote.

“Instead of turning it into a speech, why not invite smaller artists/bands who would be happy to celebrate America’s 250th?” someone else pleaded.

“The Left is losing the culture,” Danielle Gill, the wife of Texas GOP Rep. Brandon Gill, insisted. Her evidence? Rapper Flo Rida, whose last album came out 14 years ago, was still hanging in. She neglected to mention that literally everyone else except rapper Vanilla Ice had already quit. (By June 1, even Milli Vanilli’s Fab Morvan, who endured an infamous lip-syncing scandal in 1989, announced the group was pulling out.)

This grasping is especially delicious considering how, in early 2025, there was a brief panic in mainstream entertainment over the possibility that the right really was culturally ascendent. Trump won after being endorsed by Joe Rogan, whose tedious “comedy” podcast gets millions of weekly listeners. That audience is impressive — until one remembers that, in a country of nearly 350 million people, finding a few million incurious listeners who watch bad sitcoms and alien abduction “documentaries” because they are scared of more interesting entertainment has never been a huge lift.

The right has loudmouthed for decades about how they are going to take over the culture. They love to quote Andrew Breitbart, the deceased founder of Breitbart News Network, by saying “politics is downstream from culture,” and offering another pseudo-witticism — “Go woke, go broke” — that was ascendent a mere year ago. Corporations like Disney and Paramount caved to what they thought was a rising new tide of cultural fascism to replace what has been decades, if not centuries, of an unbroken line of cultural innovation mostly coming from people of color, queer people and effete urban creatives living presumably decadent lives.

With all this in mind, it’s been a real pleasure in our otherwise bleak political environment to witness the “fascists win the culture war” thesis fall apart completely over the past year. Trump failed to get Jimmy Kimmel fired, and managed to turn the late-night host into a free-speech hero instead. The Daily Wire, which was founded on the premise that Americans hated “woke” entertainment and craved right-wing alternatives, is now in financial free fall. Efforts to turn Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk into a pop culture icon after his killing last September have backfired spectacularly, with online parodists meme-ifying his image.

Perhaps the biggest humiliation — at least until the recent twin debacles of the Freedom 250 implosion and the Kennedy Center ruling — was the Super Bowl halftime show. After rapper Bad Bunny was announced as the headliner, TPUSA declared they would air an “alternative” that would allegedly blow the real deal out of the water. Instead, it was a sad affair, thrown together at the last minute and unable to book anyone more interesting than Kid Rock as a headliner.

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Despite insisting politics are downstream from culture, MAGA ended up flipping the equation. They clearly hoped culture could be downstream from politics. The bet was that Trump’s win would mean a takeover of pop culture, and a mass conversion to the MAGA gospel. But the coalition’s efforts at cultural conquest were always doomed for one reason: The right understands that the arts and music are powerful, but by and large, they don’t understand why. It’s telling that the only event from the Freedom 250 celebration that appears it might be successful is the UFC fight scheduled for June 14 on the White House lawn. Men beating each other to a pulp is something Trump and his followers understand.

YouTube essayist Henry Nackenson, who goes by “Big Joel,” had some great insights on this in his reaction to “Melania,” the recent documentary about the first lady, which is an expensive — $75 million in production and marketing! — bribe offered by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to the Trump family. Part of the reason for the cost, it turns out, is that the soundtrack is stuffed with pricey needle drops, like The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” 

But, as Nackenson explains, the song choices “lack motivation.” “Gimme Shelter” just underlays Melania Trump sitting on a plane, a boring scene that gains no urgency from the song. “Billie Jean” is also used randomly. Brett Ratner, the film’s director, doesn’t seem to understand that the music is supposed to add meaning and emotion to a scene, and the effect is “lazy and off-putting,” Nackenson argues.

But it does, though, make sense in the psychology of authoritarianism, which has a blinkered worldview that reduces all of humanity to the base impulses for status and power, and lacks room for the pleasures of art, love or anything outside the thrill of domination. The message of the film’s songs is clear: “Look what we can afford with Bezos money,” nothing else. There can’t be a deeper meaning for people like the Trumps, because there is nothing else there.

MAGA wants to control culture because they see that it’s powerful. But without that emotional connection to the art itself, it will always slip out of their grasp.