By admin 
The White House assistant press secretary, Davis Ingle, recently dismissed Senator Jon Ossoff as a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” The taunt was hardly novel. Theater kid has become a curious little term of abuse on the right. Another Trump White House spokesperson castigated Senator Alex Padilla for pulling an “immature, theater-kid stunt” after he was forcibly removed from a news conference last year for asking then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question. Spencer Pratt recently branded New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani a “theater-kid commie.” Conservative pundits have decried progressives for engineering a “theater-kid-occupied government.”
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The elastic insult is meant to belittle the target as inauthentic, attention-hungry, unserious, and unmanly. In adding feminine, Ingle handily made the subtext text.
There’s just one wrinkle. Donald Trump is an inveterate theater kid. This should be obvious, but in case doubts remain, I have unique firsthand confirmation. In 2004, after The Apprentice had burnished Trump’s stardom, I interviewed him about Broadway, and the man gushed.
Our phone interview became “Bullish Over Broadway,” a ghostwritten first-person account of his love of theater in the glossy magazine Show People. “I have attended Broadway shows for years,” he told me during our chat. “It’s one of the great things about New York.” He added that he preferred musicals because “I deal in a tough business by day, I like a little relief at night.”
This wasn’t a celebrity gamely trying to pander to Broadway fans. Trump wanted to talk specifics. He’d seen Evita at least six times. “I found it riveting,” he said. “I liked everything about it: the music, the story, the sets, the performances.” He observed that the show’s star, Patti LuPone, had given “one of the great stage performances of all time.” He’d also seen the Broadway revival of Chicago twice and admired The Phantom of the Opera, My Fair Lady,and Hello, Dolly!
His interest went beyond being a spectator. Trump was 23 when he earned an associate-producer credit for investing in Paris Is Out!, a 1970 comedy about a married couple planning a vacation. The show lasted 96 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Clive Barnes in The New York Times called it “almost totally pitiable,” “trivial and silly,” and “a bad play.” Broadway, like Atlantic City, can defy even the most confident investor.
“Making it on Broadway is no easy feat,” Trump told me. “I know what a difficult business it is and that the odds of success aren’t great, so I respect anyone who has managed to create a successful career there.” Then came an assessment unlikely to appear on a MAGA bumper sticker anytime soon: “Wall Street may be tough, but the theater business is tougher.”
Trump likened putting on a show to constructing a building—“a lot of details, a lot of foundation work”—with no guarantee that it will stay up. He told me he’d read about the long gestation of West Side Story. “These guys knew what they were doing,” he said, “yet it still took 10 years. I have to hand it to them for patience and persistence.”
More than a decade before he would launch his campaign for president, and two decades before “theater kid” would become an insult du jour among his followers, Trump marveled unself-consciously at the grit and tenacity of anyone who manages to make it on Broadway.
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Ingle’s barb about Ossoff is useful for the way it clarifies the sneer’s intent: to turn expressiveness into weakness, enthusiasm into neediness, performance into fraud. The implication is that stage types and progressive politicians are craven, submissive, and insincere. Yet the actual work of being a theater kid demands a toughness Trump plainly prized.
Then there is Trump himself. If theater kid means somebody with an instinct for showmanship, then he is an odd figure for the prosecution. Trump has a keen understanding of an entrance, a refrain, a music cue, and, perhaps above all, an audience. “You’re fired” was less a management philosophy than a line reading. Show tunes tend to be Trump’s music of choice at his Mar-a-Lago resort. As president, his compliment of choice is to praise people for looking their part, as if they came from “central casting.” Despite leading a movement that sneers at theater kids, Trump loves putting himself center stage.
Instead of spending the time to seriously consider intelligence briefings warning that Iran would likely seize the Strait of Hormuz in a war, Trump has preferred to concern himself with showbiz. Take the Kennedy Center—as he certainly did. After replacing trustees with allies, Trump inaugurated his first board meeting as chairman last year by reminiscing about the 1982 opening night of Cats and proposing bringing some of his favorites back to the center, including Hello, Dolly!, Phantom of the Opera, Camelot,and Fiddler on the Roof. Here, at last, was his chance to graduate from theater kid to impresario.
But, as he told me decades earlier, in the dramatic arts “the guarantee of success is not so solid.” Artists canceled their Kennedy Center appearances. Hamilton withdrew a planned engagement. By the fall of 2025, the organization was selling only 57 percent of its available tickets, down from 93 percent a year earlier.
Worse still, his revered Patti LuPone responded to this state of affairs by calling him a “buffoon.”
Trump has discovered that it’s easy enough to replace a board, choose the productions and honorees, and even put his name on the building. But appealing to artists and audiences is something else. Amid these failures, Trump has called for the Kennedy Center to shut down for an unplanned two-year renovation. What is plain is that Trump was right 22 years ago: The theater business is tough.
My conversation with Trump took place in a more innocent time. As was customary, I sent the finished story back to him for review before publication. He approved it, and sent me a signed headshot as a thank-you gift.
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