What do Trump and Kanye have in common? Totalitarian aesthetics and disconnection from reality.

[DonViejo]

Donald’s Beautiful Dark Fascist Fantasy

What do Trump and Kanye have in common? Totalitarian aesthetics and disconnection from reality.

By Katy Waldman

On Tuesday morning, Kanye West became the latest eminence to cross the marble floors of the Trump Tower lobby. He wore a black sweatshirt and a slender gold chain, and arrived with a small entourage. “We’ve been friends for a long time,” Trump told reporters after their meeting while West stood silent and unsmiling at his side. “We discussed life,” he added. West, pressed to say something—anything—about his conversation with the world’s most powerful man, shook his head. “I just wanted to take a picture right now,” he mumbled.

Whatever else it was—E! News reports that West and Trump convened “to discuss a potential role for the rapper” in the administration; Trump communications director Jason Miller hedged that the PEOTUS simply hoped to “reach out to people from traditional and nontraditional political viewpoints”—the Donye caucus made for a strange tableau. True, Trump has recently been on a minitear of summoning black people to the palace; he also met with Jim Brown and Ray Lewis. But West is a hip-hop luminary, and a noted critic of presidents. Furthermore, though West’s subdued affect bore some resemblance to the scowling Kanye we’ve come to expect, it felt more hesitant than bratty, a timid garbling of his grandiose persona. There was Trump, glad-handing, vigorous, very much himself. And there was Kanye, looking lost, looking like someone else.

When two stars swing close together, it’s interesting to see whose light bends first. This meeting, taking place on Trump’s home turf, cast West as a character in someone else’s pageant. For the transition team, Kanye served as a useful provocation and a distraction from Trump’s Cabinet controversies, unkosher business dealings, and alarming links to Moscow. West is also a prominent black artist who supports the Republican president-elect. That makes him at once a prop and, because Trump’s political calculations can’t be unsnarled from the narcissistic Trump Show playing in his mind, a bauble for the kingpin to gloat over.

“You take care of yourself,” Trump said to West at the end of their photo shoot, as if he cared.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/when_donald_trump_met_kanye_west_one_ego_vanquished_another.html

[MiniMe]

1. I think it has to do with this:

Insiders: Trump team dangled ambassadorships to lure A-list inauguration singers

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/the-wrap/article/Insiders-Trump-Team-Dangled-Ambassadorships-to-10796165.php

Apparently tRump is having trouble finding A-list performers for his inaugeration

President-elect Donald Trump’s team is struggling so hard to book A-list performers for his inaugural festivities that it offered ambassadorships to at least two talent bookers if they could deliver marquee names, the bookers told TheWrap.
The bookers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were approached by members of Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee in recent weeks with offers of cash or even plush diplomatic posts in exchange for locking in singers.
The first insider said he was “shocked” at the proposal: “Never in a million years have I heard something so crazy,” he said. “That was the moment I almost dropped the phone.”
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