An 87-year-old tour guide shared the obvious truth about the Kennedy Center.Donald Trump responded by punishing everyone.
For the first time in 50 years, the John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has stopped its popular free tour program — and the timing clearly shows the reason.This happened right after Sandy Weiswasser, a long-time volunteer, gave an honest interview to the New York Times.In the article, she explained exactly what Trump’s control has done to America’s national theater.
According to the New York Times article she was quoted in, “Once she was among 140 volunteer guides who gave tours in 10 languages to up to 400,000 people a year.
Last week on her Monday shift, only five out of more than a dozen tour guides showed up, and only three people took a tour.”
“This place used to be really thriving and busy and crowded,” the 87-year-old Weiswasser told the Times.
“Now it’s a black hole.”
That’s all.
That’s the offense.An elderly volunteer, who has given decades of service, told a reporter the honest truth.Days later, the Kennedy Center’s volunteer program director quietly announced a “temporary pause” on tours — the exact result that three separate volunteers had worried about before the memo even came out, expecting retaliation.
Petty vindictiveness is who Trump is.
He wasn’t satisfied with taking over one of America’s most beloved cultural institutions, removing its board, and driving away artists who refused to perform under his control.Now he seems willing to punish the whole volunteer program, limiting public access to the building itself, because one honest 87-year-old described what everyone can already see.
Remember, this is the same Kennedy Center that Trump once tried to shut down for two years under the excuse of “renovations,” after his own name change plan drove away performers in protest.
His name was eventually removed from the building’s wall — and now the facade remains covered in a big tarp, a fittingly literal metaphor for an institution being suffocated from within.
America’s national theater used to belong to everyone.
Now it has become a monument to one man’s ego and his intolerance for even the gentlest criticism, even from an 87-year-old grandmother simply telling visitors what she’s seen with her own eyes.
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