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A few days ago, President Trump dismissed the entire Kennedy Center Board of Directors and replaced them with his own slate. This created great outrage, of course, but what's really fascinating is how it came about. I hope the WaPo article on it isn't blocked behind their paywall. If so, I'll provide the key details after the link.
How did Trump so easily take over the Kennedy Center? Ask Sean Spicer. - The Washington Post
In brief:
In 2019, Spicer was appointed by Trump to the Naval Academy's Board of Visitors. Trump's current OMB director Russell Vought was also made a member then.
In 2021, both were told by Biden's White House personnel office that they had the option of resigning their board positions or being fired. Spicer realized an opportunity in the making, so both of them refused to resign and they were fired. They filed suit, alleging an unjust firing. The lawsuit was denied and their dismissals were upheld (as he expected).
Spicer wrote an op-ed before Trump's recent inauguration, laying out the case for dismissing presidentially-appointed boards and mentioned a specific one: the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees. On February 7, Trump dismissed the entire Kennedy Center board and put in place a new one. One of the fired board members was Katherine Petrelius, who had sent Spicer and Vought the emails in 2021 telling them to resign or be fired.
Big smiles, indeed.
Discussion (24)
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Hilarious. Chickens, meet roost.
CONTRIBUTOR • CHARTER MEMBER
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When She says that, it is no mere idle metaphor!
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IMHO, the best of the old Mission Impossible episodes had great comeuppance scenes. You know the kind I mean: an eastern European propagandist invites the world press to see his unveiling of US combat film of a Vietnam atrocity. But when the curtain opens, they see a film of him faking the “news footage”. Or a gloating Gollum thinks he’s assassinated his boss, who is standing behind a false wall that’s rolled away.
So it delights me that the reason that Trump has legal precedent to fire the entire board of the Kennedy Center is, Biden did the same thing to his various honorary appointees four years ago, and the Center is now bound by those rulings. Thanks, Joe! Good job, man!
A bunch of my AFI friends are laughing our tuchuses off at the expense of the pompous KC board, the Blobbiest of the bureaucratic arts blob. To be fair, they aren’t the font of wokeness, but they were utterly spineless to resist it.
The Washington Post, to their credit, pointed out how the Democrats shot themselves in the foot. It wails, but what about the expected collapse of fundraising? They’re right; KC’s bourgeois to wealthy supporters will probably bail if, as they must, the Center changes its cultural direction.
But the numbers are not really large, especially once the cuts are made. Miriam Adelson could give away one twentieth of her fortune, and make up the deficit for the next ten years.
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There were a bunch of them. One of my favorites, which may have been used more than once, was when the bad guy(s) thought they had crossed a border to safety, only to find out the IMF had changed the signs.
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Meanwhile, thanks for the reminder that I need to get all the MI TV episodes. Original, and the 1988 version.
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