A couple of folks have sent me a link to an essay by Adam Gopnick about the beautiful music of America…beautiful music that the Trumps of the world cannot hear.
Mr. Gopnick suggests (somewhat) that the reason Trump can't get any great musicians to play at his Inaugural Gala has something to do with him lacking a certain music in his soul. There might be something to that.
Others are suggesting it's because entertainers are mostly Liberal and even the ones who are Conservative are afraid of being blacklisted or shunned within their industry. There might be a little more to that but I would suggest that there are more Conservative folks in The Industry than may seem apparent. Seems to me they aren't more vocal because they just plain don't want to have the conversations.
I have a few friends who still believe that Trump will be far better for America than Hillary would have been. They just don't want to have to defend the "grab them by the pussy" video (and others) and the lies and insults and all the flip-flops on promises and the increasing likelihood that Trump is going to leave the presidency many billions richer for having exploited it.
It's awkward to argue that someone will be a great leader while at the same time having to admit that in some areas, he's a pretty slimy, rude S.O.B. One of those friends used to insist that Obama had to release his birth certificate, college records and every other document he had…and if he didn't, that was a prima facie admission that that was something incriminating in those papers. Okay, so how does one now explain why it's fine and dandy for Trump — a man with a history of crooked business dealings and mounting evidence of Russian money — to withhold the tax records that are commonly made public?
Which brings me to what I think is the main reason they can't get entertainers to appear at his gala. I think people — and this includes many who are really, really glad he got elected — are afraid to gamble on being linked with Trump unless they see a good possibility of a really, really big payoff.
Remember the aforementioned "pussy" tape? There are rumors of other tapes around that are as bad or much worse. And that Russian dossier may be partly or wholly phony but given Trump's reckless "I can do anything and get away with it" attitude, how confident can anyone be that it's not real or that there won't be a similarly-bad real one released next Tuesday?
One of the things that brought Nixon down was when it became known that (a) there were tape recordings of hundreds of hours of private White House conversations and (b) that they'd probably be made public. At that point, lots of prominent Republicans who might have continued as Nixon defenders dove under their desks and stopped backing the man. They all thought, What if I throw all my integrity and effort behind this guy on Tuesday and then on Wednesday, a tape is released showing he ordered the Kennedy assassination? Or even the Watergate break-in or anything clearly illegal?
Some might even have worried the tapes would yield proof that Nixon had interfered with the peace talks to end the Vietnam War in order to boost his election chances. That sure seems to be confirmed now but it was rumored then. Would you put your reputation on the line for that guy?
You might gamble it on Trump if you thought he could make you zillions of dollars, as many do. I don't think you'd risk it to sell a few thousand more CDs. Imagine if you agreed today to appear and then next Monday, someone released one of those rumored tapes from the set of Celebrity Apprentice with Trump using racist epithets. Imagine reporters pounding on your door to ask if you're going to take a stand against that by canceling your appearance. There's a no-win situation.
I'm not saying such tapes actually exist but there have been so many embarrassing revelations about Trump that you can't be all that sure. It's not a gamble most people would take with so little possible upside.
In the early eighties, I got to spend an hour or two with Sammy Davis Jr. Someone else in the room asked him about the famous photos of him hugging Richard Nixon and he said with a note of real shame, "I'll never live that down." A lot of entertainers are refusing to perform at Trump's coronation because, like most people in this country, they didn't want him as president. But some of them are thrilled he won and they're saying no because they don't want to be linked with a guy who has a 37% approval rating…with a great many easy-to-imagine scenarios out there that could drive it even lower.
And by the way: I really am trying to think less about this stuff, which will lead to writing less about it. But I'm not doing very well at that, am I?