Joy, Sadism and the Missing Link

The once-exuberant White House has gone dark again. Let's defy this regime with song, celebration, love and wit.

President Kennedy and the First Lady hosting 49 Nobel Prize winners at the White House in 1962. (Photo from Bettmann via Getty Images)

When John F. Kennedy was president, he and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy famously hosted exuberant concerts and other memorable cultural events in the White House. In November 1961, the celebrated cellist Pablo Casals—one of the 20th Century’s greats—performed at a dinner for the governor of Puerto Rico at the request of the First Lady. Some months later, following the First Lady’s tour of Paris art museums, French Minister of Culture André Malraux was feted at a dinner that included entertainment from violinist Isaac Stern.

Admired by the Kennedys, Malraux—a novelist, art historian, Spanish Civil war fighter pilot, resistance fighter in WWII as well as advocate for the arts—promised to send France’s artistic treasure, the Mona Lisa, to be displayed at the National Gallery in Washington and later seen by over half a million Americans.

Surpassing that evening: A dinner in April 1962 honoring 49 living Nobel Prize winners. The president toasted that it was “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

The Obamas continued and modernized that joyful, celebratory tradition during their eight years in our White House. The parade of musicians was legendary: Stevie Wonder, Mick Jagger, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Burt Bacharach, Sheryl Crow, Justin Timberlake, Mavis Staples, Queen Latifah, Cyndi Lauper, Joan Baez, James Taylor, Allison Krauss, Kris Kristofferson, John Legend, Smokey Robinson, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Audra McDonald, Lin-Manuel Miranda (previewing Hamilton)—and, of course, Beyoncé.

The list goes on and on. The titles of the events make clear what the mood was during the Obama years: “Love and Happiness,” “In Performance at the White House: Red, White and Blues,” “A Celebration of American Creativity,” just to name a few. Introducing that musical evening of American creativity in 2015, President Obama discussed:

…that quintessentially American creative spirit—sowed in our own soil, defined by our own experience, flavored by each new wave of immigrants that reaches our shores. That may be our greatest export: the American soundtrack. To believe that, you've just got to watch the way that people around the world who weren't born in the U.S.A. fall in love with it. It gives you a sense of the chords we touch through our music, through our art, through our creativity.

And then comes Trump, defined by his dismal brutishness. Setting the joyless tone, there was not a single White House state dinner in his first year, a first in nearly a century. The White House had gone dark and humorless. Melania Trump’s destruction of the Rose Garden, famously enhanced by Jackie Kennedy with cherry trees and other foliage, was a sign of their uncaring attitude.

Now, of course, Trump has gone further, paving over the Rose Garden with white concrete—a particularly on-the-nose illustration of his grim and lifeless second term. And his plans to build a $200 million gilded ballroom, replacing the East Wing and dwarfing the White House itself, is a seriously bad joke since we can already guess what kind of dull affairs will happen there if Trump is still in office: Kowtowing billionaires bringing tributes, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent performing medleys, a medal of honor ceremonyfor former TV Superman Dean Cain who’s now joining ICE to support the immigrant crackdown, sycophantic cabinet members angling to top each other with Kim Jong-Un-style toasts to the Great Leader.

Instead of a presidency exuding joy, we get an authoritarian regime’s sadistic glee (appallingly exemplified by Kristi Noem’s proud photo-ops in front of kidnapped and caged migrants in El Salvador’s gulag). Instead of genuine celebration, we get Trump’s miserable military parade on his birthday. Instead of a real country defined by the Constitution and the rule of law, we get Trump adviser Stephen Miller demanding more arrests, never mind due process or actual crimes to justify them. Instead of a president and Congress focused on improving the economy and serving the will of the people, we get tariffs, trade wars, rising prices and tax cuts for billionaires and corporations by cutting health care and food assistance needed by millions of Americans.

Cast your mind back to August of 2024, when Trump promised this in an economic speech: “Everyone will prosper. Every family will thrive. And every day will be filled with opportunity and hope and joy.”

Instead of “hope and joy,” we get a concrete Rose Garden and a golden ballroom to satisfy the desires of a depraved despot whose best pal was a child rapist and sex trafficker of horrific proportion. It would be almost laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

There’s something terribly wrong when a great nation chooses to embrace a sociopath not once but twice. This is a man who utterly lacks compassion and decency, wakes every day focused on how to make life worse for people. This is a irredeemable human with a seriously missing link in the evolutionary chain.

And it was all terribly knowable. Yesterday I came across this post of mine on Twitter from 2019. It’s a stunning reminder of how clear Trump’s hostile agenda was then—a plan that he is advancing now with unleashed fervor.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not sharing all this to build your discouragement. Quite the contrary.

Let’s respond to the joylessness of this regime by making and playing music, throwing parties, writing beautiful stories, telling jokes, hanging out with friends, acting with kindness and defying the lawless Trump thugs who revel in cruelty.

We don’t have to wait until this regime is driven from power. We don’t have to sit back and passively suffer the ugliness of this Trump regime.

Yes, we need to confront Trump and his hateful henchman with all the energy, clarity and creativity that we can muster. But we can also prove that his joyless vision of the world is not our America—and we can start that now.

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