Barring a last-minute surprise appearance by Donald Trump’s new pal Kanye West, the Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration, which kicked off the inaugural festivities, on Thursday night, was never likely to be much more than a repeat of the flimsy (yet, it seems, effective) stagecraft of this summer’s Republican National Convention. Trump was roundly mocked then for being unable to attract anyone of consequence to that party, and the same thing happened again this time in the lead-up to the two-hour concert, which was held in front of the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall. Kanye didn’t show, of course, and the whole thing turned out to be at once bland and ridiculous, much as Trump’s critics had predicted. But it was nonetheless fitting that an event celebrating the country’s first reality-television President would look like an amateur TV competition, with Trump playing the dual role of fake-smiling m.c. and stern-looking judge. It might have been more entertaining had it fully leaned into its true nature, and included jugglers, kid performers, and pet tricks. As it was, it had the weird vibe of other events tailored for powerful men with questionable taste, like the time Pope Benedict XVI was entertained by a group of shirtless acrobats, or when Vladimir Putin gets famous people together to listen to him sing.
After processional music by a military band, and a thudding interlude by DJ Ravidrums, an energetic drummer with a mohawk, the actor Jon Voight, appearing as if from an alternative universe, offered opening remarks. “We have all been witness to a very gruelling year and a half,” Voight began, pausing for a moment—and, indeed, who could argue with that? But then he kept going: “. . . for the President-elect. We have been witness to a barrage of propaganda that left us all breathless with anticipation, not knowing if God could reverse all the negative lies against Mr. Trump.” This is a very creative take on why 2016 was the worst year ever, and Voight, I’m afraid, made more sense back in 1969, in “Midnight Cowboy,” when, as the clueless gigolo Joe Buck, he said, “I only get carsick on boats.”
Voight then introduced Sam Moore, of the classic R. & B. duo Sam & Dave, who performed—with all due respect to Moore—what was essentially a knockoff version of Ray Charles’s rendition of “America the Beautiful.” After more military music, the producers piped in a recording of the Rolling Stones’ hit “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” which Trump had adopted, without the consent of Mick Jagger and the boys, as his campaign song during all those gruelling months. And then, another affront to lefty boomers and their pissed-off kids, when, at around the forty-minute mark of the show, Trump and First Lady-in-waiting Melania appeared for the first time, walking down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by a recording of the Stones’ 1965 song “Heart of Stone.” It must have been a troll job, or more Trumpian obliviousness, or else some typical mix of the two.
There was more: a country cover band; then Lee Greenwood, singing his hit “God Bless the U.S.A.,” from 1984; and the rock band Three Doors Down, the de-facto headliner of the show, who played for a long time.
The biggest crowd-pleaser of the evening was a group called the Piano Guys, well-groomed YouTube stars from Utah, who, among other things, all play a single piano at the same time. They ended their set with a song that featured a repeated chorus of, “It’s gonna be, gonna be, O.K.” Trump was shown swaying a bit, looking pleased. The song was catchy, even if the chorus sounded more like a deranged mantra than a cheerful message of hope.
After a detour of normality from the U.S. Army Band came the big closing act, the bona-fide-star country musician Toby Keith. Keith was the organizers’ best get; he’s a canny and funny songwriter and performer with dozens of big hits to his name. He’s also a bit of a political enigma—he has spoken publicly about supporting both Democrats and Republicans—and had made it clear that he was appearing at Trump’s event more as a civic duty than out of any particular love for the President-elect. “I don’t apologize for performing for our country or military,” he said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. On Thursday night, in a cowboy hat and long black duster, he seemed mostly like a mercenary, there for a gig. He breezed through some of his biggest hits, and though it might have been mere wishful thinking, he seemed to be up to a bit of impious mischief when he altered a line in his drinking song “Beer for My Horses,” singing, “And we’ll all get smashed at the inaugural celebration.” Then he held up a red Solo cup, and if you squinted, the toast looked almost wistful. Who doesn’t need a drink?
Keith, unsurprisingly, closed with his post-9/11 middle-finger anthem, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” but some of the old fire seemed to have gone out of him. Still, there he was at the feet of the great statue of Abraham Lincoln, a man who once said, “War, at the best, is terrible,” singing the line, “We’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American way.” It was Lincoln who also said, in what were other tough times for the Republic, “I laugh because I must not cry.” He never heard the Piano Guys.
Trump appeared onstage at the end to do what he normally does: praise the size of the crowd, marvel at how well he and his team had pulled the thing off, and brag about how unprecedented this more or less routine-seeming event had been. Was Trump truly pleased by this approximation of mostly white American pop culture? To his supporters, perhaps it held the same odd sort of logic that guides their faith in Donald Trump as President. Trump’s people may not have been able to arrange a better slate of performers, but the result was a bizarre kind of perfection. What better way to spurn America’s élite than to host a concert on the National Mall with a bunch of aggressively mediocre performers? Hillary Clinton had Beyoncé, Jay Z, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga out on the campaign trail. Trump had Lee Greenwood, and look who ended up as the President.
