President Donald Trump failed a basic Les Miserables knowledge test so badly that he even tried to throw his wife under the bus.
The president and first lady were walking into his new-look Kennedy Center Wednesday evening when a reporter asked Trump if he identifies “more with Jean Valjean or Javert.”
“That’s a tough one, I don’t know. That’s tough, you better answer that one honey,” he responded, turning to Melania. She remained silent.
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His lack of answer is surprising given the fact that he has seen the play “a number of times,” by his own admission. The Broadway aficionado even cites it among his best-loved productions, according to The New York Times.
“I love the songs, I love the play,” he told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
The commander-in-chief is also said to love Phantom of the Opera and, of course, Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s Cats.
“I walked in, I saw all these bodies, and then I noticed those bodies were gorgeous. They had silk tights on, and they were all ballerinas, and women from Broadway. And men,” he previously said of the latter.
He immediately clarified that he didn’t find the men’s bodies “as attractive to be honest.”
But it is another favorite, Les Mis, that has come into sharp focus. It was inspired by an 1832 street uprising by French republicans who’d had enough of a power-hungry monarch and decided to take on the newly crowned king in a bloody insurrection against authoritarian rule.
Trump’s flubbed answer comes as anti-authoritarian protests rage across the country in response to his administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
Jean Valjean is the story’s main protagonist. A scrappy revolutionary who, despite just being released from a 19-year stretch in jail, steals bread so his sister’s children don’t go hungry.
Inspector Javert, however, displays an unyielding belief in law and order above all else, even at the expense of justice or humanity.
“We’ve seen it a number of times, it’s fantastic. It was just about our first choice, that’s what we got,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.
The irony of Trump’s failure to choose between the selfless hero or the hardened martinet wasn’t lost on his new arch nemesis Gavin Newsom.
“Someone explain the plot to him,” the California Governor posted on X alongside a screenshot of a news report. The NBC News article stated that Trump was at the premiere even as protests persisted across the country.
This is not Trump’s first Les Misérables rodeo. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump played “Do You Hear the People Sing?” at rallies.
The song, a revolutionary anthem from the musical, is sung by students who rise up against oppression. Victor Hugo, the writer of the 19th-century book the play is based on, was a staunch opponent of authoritarianism.
Strange choice then for a president who has limited dissent against his regime by banning journalists from the White House and continues to gather up and deport society’s poorest and least fortunate.
“Trump has turned the Kennedy Center into an anti-woke arena. This musical is the most woke thing you could ever imagine. Totally woke,” Hugo scholar Kathryn Grossman, a professor of French at Penn State University, told Politico.
After Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016, Trump supporters rebranded themselves “Les Déplorables”—a pun that became rally branding. Trump embraced it fully, appearing at a Miami event the following week with the slogan projected behind him. “Welcome to all of you deplorables,” he told the crowd.
Trump also flirted with the idea of becoming a theater producer. At 23, he co-produced a Broadway run of Paris Is Out! by Richard Seff. He also toyed with the idea of turning his TV show The Apprentice into a musical.
“The president has an incredible aptitude for music and the arts,” Karoline Leavitt, his firebrand White House press secretary, said before the Wednesday night performance.
“That’s why he is so excited about the much-needed changes he is making to the Kennedy Center to restore it as an international icon for the arts.”
According to CNN, Les Mis cast members were given the option to sit out the show, and a dozen reportedly planned to do so. Asked about the boycott on the red carpet, Trump scoffed: “I couldn’t care less! Honestly, I couldn’t. All I do is run the country well,” before launching into a rambling list of his own accomplishments.
It comes after the president ousted much of the Kennedy Center board in February. He replaced them with loyalists and appointed himself chairman, vowing to eliminate programming he deemed too “woke.”
