The president of the United States was talking about Gloria Gaynor, Rambo, Kiss, “The Phantom of the Opera” and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign.
It was not 1986 and the president was not Ronald Reagan. It was 2025 and it was Donald Trump.
He was standing on the plush, red-carpeted grand foyer of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, unveiling his own personal choices for the next class of Kennedy Center honorees. He also announced his plans to host the award ceremony himself, and then began to hold forth more generally about the nature of show business and his own tortured relationship with celebrity.
“I’m on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,” Mr. Trump said proudly at one point. “If you can believe that one.”
There is something about the Kennedy Center that seems to bring this out in him — a kind of yearning for a simpler time when he was thought of as a tabloid rascal turned reality television maestro, a mostly in-on-the-joke figure who symbolized greed and commercialism and who appeared in everything from “Home Alone 2” to “Sex and the City” to a Pizza Hut commercial.
Whatever else he is or has become, Donald J. Trump is at heart a pop culture obsessive. A fame junkie of the highest order. Us Weekly in human form.
That piece of him did not just fade away because he became the leader of a populist political movement and a two-time president. It’s all still wound up in there, as was evidenced by so much of what he said on Wednesday.
“Since 1978, the Kennedy Center honors have been among the most prestigious awards in the performing arts,” he said before a small group of top aides, Kennedy Center employees and a bank of television cameras. “I wanted one. I was never able to get one. It’s true, actually, I would have taken it if they would’ve called me. I waited and waited and waited, and I said to hell with it, I’ll become chairman, and I’ll give myself an honor. Next year we’ll honor Trump, OK?”
That last part was said like a joke, but really, who can be sure? Now that Mr. Trump is empowered as never before, he is scratching all sorts of long-held itches. He wants a military parade on his birthday? He throws one. He wants a Mar-a-Lago-style patio off the Oval Office? He paves over the Rose Garden and builds one. He’s sick and tired of being a pariah in the liberal showbusinessland whence he came? He takes over the Kennedy Center and decides to host an awards ceremony himself.
“Look at the Academy Awards,” he said at one point. “It gets lousy ratings now. It’s all woke. All they do is talk about how much they hate Trump, but nobody likes that. They don’t watch anymore.” He talked repeatedly about the ratings he got when he hosted “The Apprentice.”
“I shouldn’t make this political,” he said at another point, “because they made the Academy Awards political, and they went down the tubes.”
Behind him were a series of easel-like stands, covered in red fabric. Two women in very high heels traipsed from stand to stand, Vanna White style, yanking off the fabric to show the faces of celebrity honorees. Each was picked by the president. “I was about 98 percent involved,” Mr. Trump said. “They all went through me.”
He added that he “turned down plenty” because “they were too woke. I had a couple of wokesters.”
The faces of the sufficiently unwoke were revealed.
Among them were the men of Kiss, the glam rock metal band known for the way the members do their makeup. “They made a fortune, and they’re great people, and they deserve it,” Mr. Trump said.
There was also Gloria Gaynor, a disco queen who sang “I Will Survive,” widely considered to be one of the most popular gay anthems of all time. “I will say, ‘I Will Survive’ is an unbelievable song,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve heard it, you know, like everyone else here, thousands of times, and it’s one of those few that gets better every time you hear it.”
Sylvester Stallone’s mug was up there, too. Mr. Trump recalled the first time he saw the first “Rambo” movie, which came out in 1982. “I’ll never forget, I was a young guy, and I went to see a thing called ‘Rambo,’” he said. “It had just come out and I didn’t know anything about it. I was in a movie theater. We used to go to movie theaters a lot … .”
He referred to Mr. Stallone as “Sly” and called him a “legend of the silver screen.”
This was Mr. Trump’s third visit to the Kennedy Center since he took over in February. His second visit was in June, when he showed up to see a performance of one of his favorite plays, “Les Misérables.” He said he had a great time.
The first time he dropped by since taking over was in March, when he took a tour of the center and met with the new members of the board whom he had appointed. That day he told them that when he was a child he had shown a special aptitude for music. And he reminisced about going to see the premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” on Broadway in the early 1980s. “They were treating me good because I was a young star, for whatever reason,” he said then. “This is a crazy life I’ve had.”