Trump’s 40-year love affair with “The Phantom of the Opera”
A vulgar spectacle uses gilt and grandeur to cover for a weak mind. There’s a bit of treacle for a devoted audience, all flash, no substance. Yet despite it all, it’s an undeniable force with a string of victories proving that Americans have horrible taste.
You could be forgiven for thinking, given the context of the last decade, that I’m talking about President Donald Trump. But those are the sentiments that greeted Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” when the musical crossed the pond from London’s West End in the late 1980s. Time reviewer William A. Henry III called it “muddled” and “slushily derivative.” Still, he couldn’t doubt that it bowled over a certain type of theatergoer.
“For those who seek an equivalent to a ride through the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World — seemingly a vast proportion of today’s Broadway audience — ‘Phantom’ is a brilliantly manipulated journey, scary yet ultimately unthreatening,” he wrote.
Trump was in that number, clapping along with the theme park-ride of a musical. The real estate scion had himself made a jump — across the East River — in the ‘80s. As the crow flies, his commute from Queens was shorter than Phantom’s, but it was about as far metaphorically. Trump’s Manhattan offensive took the family business of his slumlord father into the old-money center of the universe. His penchant for ostentatious displays of wealth and slapping his name up in massive gilded letters did little to win him friends among New York’s elite.
As he explained in his bestseller “The Art of the Deal,” Trump had always wanted to be in Manhattan. “I believed, perhaps to an irrational degree, that Manhattan was always going to be the best place to live — the center of the world,” he wrote. If he rubbed elbows with members of high society in Broadway box seats and swanky steakhouses, they inevitably came away feeling they were touched the wrong way. As the 1990s dawned, Trump would tell any reporter within earshot that New York society was “horses**t.”
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“I’ll never have the goodwill of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York,” he told Vanity Fair in 1990. “The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing.”
Trump has been open about his love of “Phantom” — though he admitted in his 2004 book “Think Like A Billionaire” to liking “Evita” best out of all Webber’s productions — and he’d shouted out the musical multiple times in interviews. In a 2023 chat with far-right podcaster Steve Bannon, Trump explained his reaction upon seeing the play for the first time: “This thing is unbelievable. It didn’t take long, because the music was incredible . . . The whole thing with the gondolas and the candles . . . it’s great, everybody loves it.”
Even if Trump hadn’t blasted “Music of the Night” from his newly installed speakers in the White House Rose Garden as pressure to release the Epstein files mounted, and even if he hadn’t used his Kennedy Center sway to honor Michael Crawford, who originated the musical’s title role, it’s hard not to imagine that the president sees a bit of himself in the titular Phantom.
Watching this outsider derail the lives of a stuffy opera society that would never accept him, you have to wonder what Trump was cheering for. Was it Webber’s melodramatic love story, which the show brings to life with all the subtlety of a chandelier crashing to the stage? Was it the cheesy stab of synthesizers and Meat Loaf-style vocals, a stick-in-the-eye for Broadway purists? Or was it the Phantom himself, a man so consumed with the need for recognition that he’d drag all of high society into hell if he couldn’t get it?
The Phantom is a disfigured man who lives beneath a Parisian opera house, furiously writing a discordant opera about the legendary lover Don Juan. He haunts the opera house, eventually fixating on a chorus girl named Christine. He convinces her that he is an “angel of music,” taking advantage of a childhood story told to her by her late father, and he blackmails the opera’s ownership into making Christine a star, while also pining for her. When he realizes Christine is engaged to an aristocrat, the enraged Phantom kills several of the opera company’s members. After forcing the opera house to stage his composition, he kidnaps Christine and tries to force her to marry him. Only after she convinces him that he’s worthy of love does he let Christine and her fiancé go.
The musical closed in April 2023 after an historic 35-year run, which means that the chandelier no longer falls inside a Broadway theater. But the Phantom of the Opera is still here — in Trump’s mind.
The musical closed in April 2023 after an historic 35-year run, which means that the chandelier no longer falls inside a Broadway theater. But the Phantom of the Opera is still here — in Trump’s mind. Despite winning two presidential elections, he has never received the adoration he feels is due. In public speeches, Trump moans about a press and a public that refuse to give him credit for all the good he’s done. He claims the media never gave him his flowers over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, that no one celebrates his donation of his presidential salary to federal agencies, that journalists focus too much on the wars he’s started and not the conflicts he’s avoided.
When the public had the chance to show him love in the 2020 presidential election, they soundly rejected him. It’s a slight he still hasn’t recovered from, and he’s used every opportunity in his second term to settle petty scores and destroy anything that scans like the tastes of elites. You can see Trump’s scorn for the snobs best in his assault on the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to the 35th president that hosted philharmonics and operas — until Trump got his lasso around its neck. Unable to extort the institution into something suitable for his tastes, he’s now shuttered the building and is reportedly weighing its demolition. In his destructive tirades and ongoing dismantlings, all payback for long-held petty grudges, you can almost see a younger Trump watching the heartbroken Phantom.
The masked outsider lurks on the rooftop, having discovered Christine is engaged. The lines of her duet with her fiancé still ring in his ears: “Love me. That’s all I ask of you.”
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from Alex Galbraith