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MOZART AND TRUMP—PRODIGIES WITH KEWL COIFS
ONE MIGHT THINK THE ARROGANCE OF EGO WOULD HAVE LED ME TO ASSOCIATE Trump and Beethoven. But no, prodigious musicality seals the deal: It’s Mozart and Trump—separated at birth by 190 years!
Above, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1756–1791, a detail of Johann Nepomuk della Croce’s Mozart family portrait via Wikipedia. Below, Donald J. Trump, Queens-born, 1946, official 2025 Inaugural Portrait by Daniel Torok.
No less than The New York Times, March 19, 2025, reports “Touring Kennedy Center, Trump Muses on His Childhood ‘Aptitude for Music.'”
Javier C. Hernández and Maggie Haberman describe, “During his first visit to the Kennedy Center since making himself the chairman of its board, President Trump had a lot to say about Broadway shows, dancers in silk tights, the Potomac River and Elvis Presley.”
“Mr. Trump,” the Times reporters noted, “moved to oust the Kennedy Center’s previous board chairman, the financier David M. Rubenstein, and all the board members appointed by the Biden administration last month. He had told allies for weeks that he wanted to lead the Kennedy Center, which he has occasionally incorrectly referred to as Lincoln Center, the premier arts venue in his hometown, New York City.”
Ah yes, the hometown in which he was found guilty of sexual abuse and 34 felonies.
Image from Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.
Trump the Prodigy. But also the Times report observes, “He told the assembled board members that in his youth he had shown special abilities in music after taking aptitude tests ordered by his parents, according to three participants in the meeting.”
Hernández and Haberman continue, “He could pick out notes on the piano, he told the board members, some of whom he’s known for years and others who are relatively new to him. But the president said that his father, Fred Trump, was not pleased by his musical abilities, according to the participants, and that he had never developed his talent. One person in the room said Mr. Trump appeared to be joking about his father.”
The Times reports, “ ‘I have a high aptitude for music,’ he said at one point, according to people at the meeting. ‘Can you believe that?’ ”
See “Trump, Putin, or Friedman—Whom to Believe?” and then decide.
Prodigy Status Confirmed by White House, Sorta. Hernández and Haberman recount, “Asked about the anecdote, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, did not directly address it but said that the president ‘is a virtuoso and his musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels.’ Mr. Cheung said that, given Mr. Trump’s roles as president and Kennedy Center chair, “there is nobody more uniquely qualified to bring this country, and its rich history of the arts, back to prominence.”
Yeah, I like the part about dancers in silk tights, particularly in ballet, not as backups to Elvis impersonators, though.
A detail of Louis Carrogis Carmontelle’s Mozart family watercolour via Wikipedia.
I predict an early Trump sonata being unearthed by no less than famed musicologist Professor George Santos. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025
Simanaitis Says 
Bratman’s musical love is as deep as his respect for the military he dodged, limited to parades at which disable veterans not allowed, pomp and circumstance Marie Antoinette would’ve shared. Not surprising in a 78-year-old bubble boy who wears more makeup that Dolly Parton.
Bratman has no empathy, depth, nor breadth of knowledge, no intellectual curiosity. Such a creature could not hear Ravel, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Vivaldi, nor Sid Bechet, or even the range of a pop anomaly like the Beatles.
Bratman, aka Orange Julius, lives entirely on the surface, all about image, desperately seeking the respect his father never gave him along with the over-leveraged real estate that allowed him to lose money every year of his life while playing businessman, a playboy leading to his only job, hosting a TV game show, in turn his path to the White House, appealing to the fearful and ignorant in order to garner support for his only raisons d’ etre et erst: reducing taxes on the billionaires whose friendship he sorely covets.
The idea of Bratman sitting quietly and listening to Mozart’s Requiem or Beethoven’s Pastoral is laughable.