Trump won’t hear the people sing.
At least 10 cast members from Les Misérables are planning to boycott President Donald Trump’s attendance at the Kennedy Center next month, CNN reported Wednesday.
Lead actors as well as ensemble members are among those refusing to perform for Trump on the night of June 11, when the president is set to headline a fundraiser for the center and attend a performance of the musical—one of his longtime favorites, according to The New York Times. The cast was reportedly given the option not to perform that night.
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Tensions at the center have simmered since Trump hijacked the historically bipartisan center in February, when he fired board members appointed by former President Joe Biden, placed partisan figures like Laura Ingraham on the board instead, named himself chair, and installed MAGA loyalist Richard Grenell as director.
“The Kennedy Center is in tremendous disrepair,” Trump said during his first visit to the center as chair in March. “We’re gonna make a lot of changes including the seats, the decor … pretty much everything,” he continued. “It needs a lot of work.”
The president proceeded to tout all the ways he hoped to remake the center in his own image, namely by staging “non-woke” musicals—like Les Misérables—and honoring more conservative stars.
A leaked recording of Trump’s meeting with the center’s board at the time revealed specifically the shows he deemed as “non-woke,” which mostly consist of Broadway staples like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.”
He also expressed his fondness for Broadway’s golden era during his first tour of the center, insisting that staging “Broadway hits” would be best for the center’s bottom line.
As a young man, Trump had fleeting aspirations of becoming a Broadway producer and noted in his 2004 book, Trump: Think Like a Billionaire: Everything You Need to Know About Success, Real Estate, and Life that Evita was his favorite Broadway show.
Beyond redecorating and listening to show-tunes, Trump also noted he would be revamping the Kennedy Center’s annual Honors gala and encouraging it to lean more to the right.
“We’re gonna have Honors. I think it’s going to be a much bigger show than it has been in the past,” Trump told reporters during his March visit. “It got tired, very tired, very boring, very radical-left. Unless you were a radical-left nobody was chosen.”
“I think it’s going to get great ratings actually,” he said of his MAGA-fied awards show.
In response to Trump’s hostile takeover, artists including Issa Rae, Shonda Rhimes and Ben Folds resigned from their leadership roles at the center, and Jeffrey Seller, producer of the hit musical Hamilton, canceled the show’s upcoming run.
Trump brushed off the snub, telling reporters, “I never liked Hamilton very much.”
But the Les Misérables cast’s boycott might cut a little deeper.
Trump has never hidden his fondness for the musical, which is based on Victor Hugo’s epic novel depicting the French Revolution. He even used its theme song at a campaign event in 2016.
That got him in trouble with the musical’s co-creators, who scolded him for using Do You Hear the People Sing? at the rally without their permission.
Trump again crossed paths with the song, which reflects themes of a downtrodden proletariat rising up against a tyrannical regime, in February, when the U.S. Army Chorus sang it at the White House Governors’ Ball amid Trump and his billionaire buddy Elon Musk’s ruthless campaign to shrink the federal government.
The choice of song, essentially a protest anthem featuring lyrics as “Will you join in our crusade? // Will you be strong and stand with me?” raised eyebrows online, with some suggesting the choir selected it as a subtle act of defiance.
