Editor's note
John Krull is director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
So much resentment, so little time to express it.
Another of President Donald Trump’s grudges revealed itself the other day. His executive order to make government more efficient prompted the temporary closing of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
The Kennedy Library appeared to be the only presidential library and museum affected by the order.
Its closing followed on the heels of Trump’s announcement that he was replacing the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and appointing himself as the new board chair.
Trump’s critics were quick to describe his moves against the library and the performing arts center as an act of retribution aimed at Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s only surviving child.
She wrote a public letter urging the U.S. Senate to reject Trump’s choice to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services, her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The portrait she painted of her cousin—entitled and cruel—easily could have been applied to Trump, too.
Doubtless, Caroline Kennedy’s missive did not endear her to the president, whose skin is as thin as cheap tissue paper.
One suspects, though, that Trump’s grievance against JFK, his line and his legacy goes deeper than that and began building long before Caroline Kennedy drafted her letter.
The two presidents share similarities but differ in key—even fundamental—ways.
Both were sons of privilege, but it was an odd sort of privilege. They were the children of driven men who made piles of money even as the doors to the upper reaches of society remained closed to them because of their immigrant status.
Frederick C. Trump and Joseph P. Kennedy both named their firstborn sons after themselves—and both of those sons died premature, self-destructive deaths trying to please their demanding fathers.
The fathers then transferred their own thwarted ambitions to their second-born sons. Both Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy ascended to heights denied their fathers.
Both the Donald and JFK were rich, capable of great charm and photogenic. Both quickly developed the skills necessary to survive in the sharp-elbowed political world. Both had an innate understanding of the power of celebrity.
Both men also were compulsive philanderers—JFK, whose health was always fragile, as a way of driving away the specter of death and Trump as a means of affirming his attractiveness and potency.
Both men also were indifferent students in school.
But it is here that their differences begin to reveal themselves.
John Kennedy cared little for the rigors of academia, but he was a serious lifelong reader and learner. Donald Trump always has manifested a spectacular lack of curiosity about the world and a contempt for knowledge itself.
This difference perhaps can be traced back to their upbringings.
Once he had made his fortune, Joe Kennedy Sr. turned his attention and his ambitions to enshrining his family in the American aristocracy. The elder Fred Trump never diverted his focus from making as much as he could—and he passed that unquenchable rapaciousness onto his second son.
Because John Kennedy was raised to care little about money and Donald Trump was raised to care about little but money, their approaches to both life and politics were different.
JFK fought determinedly to get out from under a desk job in Washington, D.C. and into combat in the Pacific in World War II, where he was decorated and lionized for heroism. Trump fought just as determinedly to avoid entering the military and fighting in the Vietnam War—and he has belittled America’s soldiers as suckers and losers ever since.
Kennedy saw entering politics as a way to serve and a path to the acceptance his father craved. Trump saw it as a way to rule and a means of dominating the people who scorned his father and him.
That would include the Kennedys, now firmly entrenched in the highest tiers of society.
Worse, from Trump’s perspective, John F. Kennedy’s presidency lingers in American memory—not entirely accurately—as a kind of golden era, Camelot reborn, a moment when America was great again.
While Trump’s presidency is viewed by at least half the country as a time when unwashed and uncivilized barbarians have gained the throne and now befoul democracy’s temple.
No wonder this president feels the need to act out.
So much resentment, so little time to express it.
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