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Column: Vanguard, one of our top investment firms, shuns crypto 'like the plague.' That's good for its customers
After Jan. 10, when the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first bitcoin exchange-traded investment products, the biggest investment firms jumped into the pool with both feet, jostling one another to offer their clients, big or small, access to bitcoin funds.
All, that is, except the second-biggest private investment management fund on the planet, Vanguard Group.
The firm has made clear, most recently in a Jan. 24 message to its clients, that it has no plans to offer a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) or any other cryptocurrency-related products. Nor will it allow any such products from other firms to be offered via its brokerage arm.
While crypto has been classified as a commodity, it’s an immature asset class that has little history, no inherent economic value, no cash flow, and can create havoc within a portfolio.
— Janel Jackson, Vanguard
Vanguard spelled out precisely why it is shunning crypto despite the “headlines and buzz” the asset class generates. Put simply, it doesn’t think crypto belongs in retail investors’ portfolios.
That’s a smart and responsible policy that places the interests of Vanguard’s clientele ahead of those of the greedy promoters and scamsters infecting the entire cryptocurrency field.
Bitcoin and other crypto investments have typically spelled financial disaster for ordinary investors. Stories of life savings lost in supposedly safe crypto investments are distressingly common.
Vanguard’s executives know they’re swimming against a tide of pro-crypto propaganda from entertainment and sports stars as well as prominent authors. That doesn’t faze them.
“In Vanguard’s view, crypto is more of a speculation than an investment,” Janel Jackson, the firm’s global head of ETF capital markets, stated in the recent message, which was headlined “No bitcoin ETFs at Vanguard? Here’s why.”
Contrasting crypto with traditional asset classes, she wrote: “With equities, you own a share of a company that produces goods or services, and many also pay dividends. With bonds, you get a stream of interest payments. Commodities are real assets that meet consumption needs, [and] have inflation-hedging properties…. While crypto has been classified as a commodity, it’s an immature asset class that has little history, no inherent economic value, no cash flow, and can create havoc within a portfolio.”
These words are significant for several reasons. One is Vanguard’s size: With more than $7 trillion in assets under management as of 2023, the firm ranks as the second-largest American investment management firm, after BlackRock (more than $9 trillion). Also, more than many other such firms, Vanguard’s target market is retail investors pursuing a long-term buy-and-hold strategy.
Then there’s Vanguard’s history of viewing trendy flavor-of-the-month investment crazes skeptically and keeping them off its platform.
Before getting more deeply into Vanguard’s decision and history, a few words about the SEC’s decision to give bitcoin ETFs a green light.
Under its chairman, Gary Gensler, the agency has consistently resisted giving approval for crypto-based investing schemes. In a tweet as recently as Jan. 9, Gensler advised investors to “be cautious” about anything related to crypto assets. “There are serious risks involved,” he wrote.
The very next day, however, the SEC approved proposals from several investment firms for bitcoin ETFs after having rejected 20 applications dating back as far as 2018. What had changed, Gensler observed after the vote, was that the SEC’s hands were tied by a ruling from a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. The court found that the commission hadn’t made the legal case for turning down the latest application.
Gensler emphasized that the SEC’s vote didn’t mean that its general distaste for crypto investments had changed. The ETF it approved was limited to holding a single cryptocurrency, bitcoin, he warned, and shouldn’t be taken as a signal that the commission would look kindly on other crypto-based investment products.
Commissioner Caroline A. Crenshaw, like Gensler a member of the SEC’s Democratic Party majority, was even more blunt in dissenting from the approval. Are the crypto markets safe? she asked rhetorically. “Substantial evidence indicates that the answer is no.”
She added that the spot bitcoin trading underlying the new ETFs “is so susceptible to manipulation, so rife with fraud, so subject to volatility, and so limited in oversight that we cannot credibly say … that there are adequate investor protections in place.”
The SEC’s approval, which covered applications for 11 bitcoin ETFs developed by firms such as BlackRock, Fidelity and Invesco, inspired a rush of hyperventilating from crypto enthusiasts, who described it as a “game-changer” for the asset class. But it didn’t quell concerns from other investment watchdogs such as Dennis Kelleher, the co-founder and chief executive of Better Markets, who called it “a grievous, historic mistake” that will suck unwary investors into “a worthless product.”
Of the nation’s top investment management firms, almost all are offering clients opportunities to invest in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Some are marketing these assets more aggressively than others.
Fidelity, which ranks third in assets under management, behind BlackRock and Vanguard, started offering employers sponsoring 401(k) plans for their workers a bitcoin investment option in 2022, only a few months before Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto scam, FTX, cratered due to fraud. (A federal jury, it may be recalled, found Bankman-Fried guilty on seven fraud counts in November.)
Fidelity’s venture raised the hackles of Democratic Sens. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who urged the firm to back away from its 401(k) option. Fidelity plainly didn’t do so, since it still promotes bitcoin for 401(k) plans on its website.
That brings us back to Vanguard. (I’m an investor in some of its funds; since it’s a mutual — owned by its fund shareholders — technically I’m an owner of the firm, albeit a minuscule one.)
To be fair, Vanguard doesn’t promise that it will never offer bitcoin investments: “We continuously evaluate our brokerage offer and evaluate new product entries to the market,” Vanguard spokeswoman Karyn Baldwin told me by email.
But she made it plain that bitcoin ETFs will have a mountain to climb to show they belong with “asset classes such as equities, bonds, and cash, which Vanguard views as the building blocks of a well-balanced, long-term investment portfolio.”
All investment firms make a big deal about placing their clients’ interests front and center, but few were based on that principle to the extent of Vanguard.
The firm was founded in 1975 by the venerated John C. “Jack” Bogle. He built the firm around the concept of passive investing through index funds. Replicating the holdings of the major stock indexes, these funds trade relatively seldom because the components of the indexes rarely change.
That reduces commissions and other transaction costs such as taxes, which cut into clients’ returns. More important, such passive investments consistently do better than “active” fund managers, who trade frequently and pick their investment targets, hoping to capture a run-up in particular stocks or market categories.
Bogle was hostile to speculation, as opposed to investing, to the end of his life in 2019. In a 2012 book titled “The Clash of the Cultures,” he contrasted “the culture of long-term investing — the rock of the intellectual, the philosopher, and the historian — with the culture of short-term investing — the tool of the mathematician, the technician, and the alchemist.”
He lamented “the gradual but relentless rise” of the latter, “characterized by frenzied activity in our financial markets, complex and exotic financial instruments,” which came to dominate a financial system “peppered as it is with self-interest and greed.”
If you think that would make him extremely leery of bitcoin, no kidding. At an investment conference in 2017, answering a question about bitcoin, he responded: “Avoid it like the plague. Do I make myself clear?”
He explained, “Bitcoin has no underlying rate of return…. There is nothing to support bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to someone for more than you paid for it” — in other words, the “greater fool” theory.
It’s worth noting that such skepticism doesn’t always translate into a business decision to avoid the accursed investment. After all, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., expressed similar doubts about bitcoin around the same time, calling it a “fraud … worse than tulip bulbs.”
Unlike Vanguard, however, JPMorgan hasn’t followed the instincts of its leader: The firm has been giving clients access to crypto funds at least since 2021.
The roster of trendy investments that Vanguard has denied to its customers, almost invariably to their benefit, is a long one. A list compiled recently by Morningstar’s John Rekenthaler includes government-plus funds in the 1980s, internet funds in the late 1990s (“What artificial intelligence investing is today, internet funds were 25 years ago,” Rekenthaler wrote — fair warning) and “130/30 funds” of 2009 vintage, which held hedge fund-like portfolios mixing long and short positions, supposedly to goose returns without adding risk.
As Rekenthaler noted, all these ideas eventually “crashed and burned.” None was embraced by Vanguard, largely because every one ran counter to the interests of long-term investors.
Vanguard’s policy evidently has stuck in the craw of the crypto faithful. One claimed in a tweet that a Vanguard representative he reached “apologized profusely for management’s lack of vision, admitted they owned Bitcoin personally, and said that they’ve received literally thousands of calls from customers looking to move accounts.”
All we can say to that is: “Oh, sure.” Here’s a prediction, though: Vanguard, which has been around for nearly a half-century, will still be around long after crypto has been consigned to the investment craze graveyard, where it belongs.
The Na’vi won the battle of the box office this weekend, as “Avatar: Fire and Ash” hauled in a hefty $88 million in the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend.
The third installment of the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios’ “Avatar” franchise brought in an estimated total of $345 million globally, with about $257 million of that coming from international audiences. The movie reportedly has a budget of at least $350 million.
Box office analysts had expected a big international response to the most recent film, particularly since its predecessor “Avatar: The Way of Water” had strong showings in markets like Germany, France and China.
In China, the film opened to an estimated $57.6 million, marking the second highest 2025 opening for a U.S. film in the country since Disney’s “Zootopia 2” a few weeks ago. (That film went on to gross more than $271.7 million in China on its way to a global box office total of $1.1 billion.)
The strong response in China is another sign that certain movies can still do well in the country, which was once seen as a key force multiplier for big blockbusters and animated family films but has in recent years cooled to American movies due to geopolitics and the rise of its domestic film industry.
Angel Studio’s animated biblical tale “David” came in second at the box office this weekend, with an estimated domestic gross of $22 million. Lionsgate thriller “The Housemaid,” Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Movies’ “The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants” and “Zootopia 2” rounded out the top five.
The weekend’s haul likely comes as a relief to theater owners, who have weathered a roller coaster year.
After a difficult first three months, the spring brought hits like “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners” before the summer ended mostly flat. A sleepy fall brought panic to the exhibition business until closer to the Thanksgiving holiday, when “Wicked: For Good” and “Zootopia 2” drew in audiences.
Dear Liz: When I retired, I had a small 401(k) with about $12,000 in it. Instead of rolling that money into an IRA, I took a distribution and paid taxes on it. I had no immediate need for the remaining funds, so eventually I opened a new IRA account and deposited the money.
I now realize I should have put it in a Roth IRA so I wouldn’t face double taxation on the money. This is the stupidest thing I’ve done in recent memory. Is there any legal mechanism I can use to get that money out and into a Roth without paying taxes the second time?
Answer: You made a mistake, but probably not the one you think.
You can’t contribute to an IRA — or a Roth IRA, for that matter — if you don’t have earned income. So if you’ve fully retired, you should contact your IRA administrator and let them know you need to withdraw your “excess contribution” as well as any earnings the contribution has made.
If you contributed this year, you have until your tax filing deadline — typically April 15, 2026 — to remove the funds without penalty. If you contributed in a previous year, you’ll typically face a 6% excise tax for each year the money remained in your account.
Now, a warning about financial mistakes: They tend to become more common as we age. That can be incredibly unsettling, especially to do-it-yourselfers used to handling finances competently on their own. Retirement is a good time to start implementing some guardrails to protect ourselves and our money.
Hiring a tax pro would be a good first step. Anything to do with a retirement fund should be run past this pro first to make sure you’re following the tax rules.
Dear Liz: In response to a reader who asked about creating a will, you suggested options for low-cost online resources. That is great! But, I would encourage you to remind readers to designate beneficiaries on accounts and assets where that option is available.
While they should still have a will, many readers may not know that they can add beneficiaries to brokerage, checking, and savings accounts (in addition to IRA and retirement accounts) so that their assets will pass directly to the designated beneficiaries and not have to go through probate with the extra hassle, time and expense.
For those without a trust, designating beneficiaries may be the easiest way to pass on many of their assets. In California (and some other states), even houses may pass without probate with a transfer-on-death deed. Many readers may not know about the option to add beneficiaries, and you would do your readers a service by educating them about it.
Answer: Anyone adding beneficiaries to accounts needs to be aware of some major potential drawbacks.
A big one involves settling the estate. If all available funds are transferred directly to beneficiaries, the person settling the estate may not have enough cash to do their job.
Beneficiary designations can also result in unintentionally unequal distributions if there’s more than one heir, and complications if the beneficiaries die first or aren’t changed appropriately as life circumstances change.
That’s not to say that beneficiary designations are the wrong choice, but they’re certainly not a one-size-fits-all option.
Dear Liz: Your recent column about advanced directives said that people could get a free version at PrepareForYourCare.org. I found there is a charge. Is this for all online directives?
Answer: Prepare is a free site supported by donations, grants and licensing agreements. If you were asked to pay, you either clicked the donate button or weren’t on the correct site.
Liz Weston, Certified Financial Planner, is a personal finance columnist. Questions may be sent to her at 3940 Laurel Canyon, No. 238, Studio City, CA 91604, or by using the “Contact” form at asklizweston.com.
To understand how Mr. Trump has achieved this omnipresence, The New York Times reviewed the first 329 days of his second term, finding at least one instance each day when he attracted the public’s attention to himself and his actions.
The review encompassed more than 250 media appearances, more than 320 official appearances, and more than 5,000 Truth Social posts or reposts. The analysis shows that while Mr. Trump has lagged his predecessors in his number of official appearances, he has pursued a raft of innovative methods to force himself into the public consciousness on a daily, and sometimes even hourly, basis.
The battery of activity started from the moment he was inaugurated, when he traveled from the Capitol Building to the Capital One Arena to publicly sign a flurry of executive orders.
Since then, he has stayed in the public eye in part by doing things no president has ever done. High-stakes Oval Office meetings, like his negotiations with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are held on-camera and broadcast live on global news networks. His Q.-and-A. sessions with reporters frequently last an hour or more.
He regularly airs his opinions – on social media, in discursive asides at rallies – about idiosyncratic subjects that range widely across the zeitgeist, from Sydney Sweeney’s sexy denim ads to the redesigned logo of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain to the mysterious fate of the aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
And his engagement with the news media has soared well beyond the start of his first administration.
Through Dec. 14, Mr. Trump took reporters’ questions on 449 occasions, compared with 223 during the same period of his first term. On average, Mr. Trump has interacted with journalists roughly twice a day, doubling his rate from 2017, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University political scientist who tracks presidential press interactions. Mr. Trump limits which news outlets can ask questions at small events, but in sheer volume, he is the most media-accessible modern president, and far outpaces his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Reporters will be in my office asking me for the president’s reaction to a breaking news story,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in an interview. “And I’ll just say to them, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you ask him yourself in 30 minutes?’”
President Trump’s media appearances have soared this year, more than doubling both the Biden administration’s and those of his own first term.
Finding the Cameras
Many of his public moments go viral online, like his diatribe about restoring the name of the Washington Redskins, or the A.I.-generated video meme he posted of himself dribbling a soccer ball with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Oval Office. They take on a life of their own, rippling across social media and dissected and amplified by influencers and mass media platforms alike.
The result is a president whose not-so-inner monologue is injected into our daily lives in myriad ways, when we are watching TV on the weekends or idly scrolling the web – a Greek chorus for our national narrative.
“He’s the most ubiquitous president ever,” said Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian.
The media strategy aligns with his political strategy.
Dating back to his years as an outspoken real estate developer and reality TV star, Mr. Trump has relished being unavoidable for comment. But at age 79, he has been outdoing his younger self. And there is a logic to his logorrhea.
Mr. Trump’s allies often speak of the political benefits of flooding the zone: pursuing so many policies, ideas, and dramatic restructurings of the normal ways of governance as to overwhelm the system. “All pedal, no brake,” as Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s one-time adviser, has called it.
“We joke internally that he is our ultimate director of communications,” Ms. Leavitt said. “He has incredible media instincts, and he is the final decision maker on all policy, and he has been in a ‘flood the zone,’ ‘do as much as possible’ mindset since he walked into the Oval Office on Jan. 20.”
All presidents benefit from the awesome news-making powers of the office, with its agenda-setting influence over a dedicated global press corps. But Mr. Trump has outstripped his predecessors in whipsawing the public’s attention onto matters small and large – and limiting the level of scrutiny that any one shocking remark or policy proposal receives.
“People can really only focus on a handful of things a day,” said Bill Burton, a deputy White House press secretary under former President Barack Obama. “This attention flood is working for Trump because he is able to do an extraordinary amount of executive actions and very little of it can get attention.”
Or as Mr. Brinkley put it: “He plays to win the day, every day, around the clock.”
His commentary takes on a life of its own.
One of Mr. Trump’s political assets is his instinct for virality.
With a natural feel for the web, Mr. Trump has a knack for amplifying wacky memes and pop culture curios that can drive days of online discourse. Sometimes, coverage of his offhand remarks or late-night social media posts can crowd out the more significant, norm-shattering changes he is making to American governance.
Late one Friday night in May, the president posted an obviously A.I.-generated image of himself as the pope. It struck a nerve.
Mr. Trump had already courted controversy days earlier, after the death of Pope Francis on April 21.
“I’d like to be pope,” the president told reporters who asked about who should become the next pontiff. “That would be my number one choice.”
The comment disturbed some Catholics, who said the notion was crude and insensitive. That reaction seemed only to prompt Mr. Trump to double down, posting the A.I.-generated image to his Truth Social account days later. By the weekend it had become a cultural phenomenon, mocked on “Saturday Night Live” and called out by experts as an example of misleading A.I. content.
After Mr. Trump posts the A.I. image …
May 2
Trump posts A.I. image of himself as Pope
There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President. We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.
May 3
NYS Catholic Conference says “do not mock us”
May 3
“Saturday Night Live” covers fake image
May 3 Vatican asked about image, declines to comment
May 4
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of New Jersey criticizes image as “not good”
May 4
JD Vance defends Trump on X, calling it a joke … some Catholics were outraged, prompting a news cycle focused on the controversy …
5
Says “the Catholics loved it”
… before Mr. Trump suggested he had nothing to do with it.
Mr. Trump, who is not Catholic, had plenty of defenders, too. They said his commentary and the A.I. image were simply jokes, part of the president’s unique comedic style.
“As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen,” Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, wrote on X.
In his quest for attention, the president is often aided by a cottage industry of right-wing influencers and activists who are primed to syndicate, reinforce and defend whatever content he pushes out each day. For this conservative media ecosystem, Mr. Trump’s messaging and commentary are the raw fuel that drives clicks, shares and views.
On June 7, the president’s visit to a raucous U.F.C. fight – complete with a “Trump dance” entrance into the arena – generated an immediate spike in online interest, including about 50,000 posts on X. Five days later, when he promoted a “Trump gold card” visa, his announcement led to roughly 30,000 posts on X.
A barrage that distracts from bad news.
One pattern in Mr. Trump’s behavior: When his administration is faced with bad news, he launches a fusillade of distraction.
This can take the form of outlandish, out-of-left-field claims about political opponents. Or he might weigh in on a pop culture subject far afield from Washington politics – from the ratings of late-night hosts like Seth Meyers to the physical appearance of a megastar like Taylor Swift.
The events of July 2025 offer a case in point.
As the Jeffrey Epstein files returned to the news – along with speculation that Mr. Trump might appear in them – the president embarked on a breathtaking series of tangents. Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that former President Bill Clinton had bankrolled an effort by senior intelligence officials to frame him for a crime, mused about stripping the actress Rosie O’Donnell of her U.S. citizenship, and accused the singer Beyoncé of accepting millions of dollars to endorse his erstwhile rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
July 8
F.B.I. publishes memo about Epstein files On July 8, the F.B.I. said it would not declassify more Epstein files.
10
Claimed intelligence officials tried to frame him
10
Pushed to defund NPR and PBS
10 Directed ICE to arrest protesters
12
Threatened Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship
15
Claimed Adam Schiff engaged in mortgage fraud Over the following days, Mr. Trump seemed to lash out in every direction.
On July 18, the Justice Department filed a request to unseal grand jury testimony about Mr. Epstein, again raising questions about Mr. Trump’s involvement. The president promptly lobbed insults at late-night talk show hosts, dismissed the Epstein affair as “fake news” and shared fresh claims about a supposed Obama administration plot to undermine him after the 2016 election.
July 18
Request filed to unseal grand jury testimony
On July 18, the Department of Justice filed a request — later denied — to unseal grand jury testimony.
20
Criticized Washington Commanders name
21
Called the “Russia hoax” the “crime of the century”
22
Called Epstein controversy “fake news”
22
Criticized Kimmel and Fallon
24 Criticized Federal Reserve chairman
Over the following days, Mr. Trump bounced from topic to topic.
On July 25, The Wall Street Journal published a major scoop: The paper had unearthed a risqué birthday letter that Mr. Trump had apparently written to Mr. Epstein in 2003. Mr. Trump responded with his attack on Beyoncé and revived his threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks. Then he announced the imminent construction of an enormous gilded ballroom at the White House, at a cost of $200 million. (He has since revised the cost upward to $400 million.)
Asked if there was a deliberate strategy to distract from negative news, Ms. Leavitt noted that every administration seeks to minimize unhelpful headlines.
“Yes, there have been times in which we’ve tried to do that, but also often it just happens naturally, because the president is willing to weigh in on so many subjects,” she said. “Sometimes it’s really not deliberate. It’s just him speaking his mind on whatever news cycle or news story is brought to him in that moment.”
He has added tricks to his arsenal.
Mr. Trump’s devotion to Truth Social mirrors the hair-trigger Twitter habit of his first term; on one recent December evening, he posted 158 times between 9 p.m. and midnight. And he has continued to appear on Fox News with certain preferred hosts.
But this year, he has added to his media arsenal by appearing in many more public spaces that fall outside of a president’s typical itinerary.
Mr. Trump has stopped by a Washington Commanders N.F.L. game, popped up in the New York Yankees locker room, attended the Ryder Cup golf tournament and the men’s tennis final at the U.S. Open, sat ringside at numerous U.F.C. fights, and traveled to the Daytona 500. He is the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. When FIFA staged the Club World Cup final in New Jersey, Mr. Trump not only attended, but joined the winning team onstage for the trophy ceremony.
The net effect is a sense of inescapability, that no corner of American life remains Trump-free – which itself amounts to a potent expression of presidential authority and command. “His power, in part,” said Mr. Burton, the former Obama aide, “comes from the attention that people give him, or that he forces on them.”
Can it ever be too much?
In the fall of 2009, President Barack Obama appeared on David Letterman’s talk show, gave interviews to CNBC and Men’s Health magazine, and made the rounds of all five major network Sunday shows. Washington was abuzz about whether he was overexposed.
That debate sounds quaint today. But the question of whether a president can be too visible remains open.
“The public is being desensitized” to Mr. Trump’s omnipresence, argued Mr. Brinkley, the historian. “It starts becoming blather. The enemy for Trump isn’t Democrats; it’s the public being bored with the show.”
Ms. Leavitt said that if there was a risk to his ubiquity, “President Trump would not be president right now.” She added: “He is a businessman who speaks his mind and tells it like it is, and sometimes people don’t like that. But obviously the vast majority of our country does, or else he wouldn’t be in this office.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, the public eventually tired of his frenzied pace. And in some ways, Mr. Trump appears to be slowing down physically as he approaches his 80th birthday in June (which he will celebrate in part by staging a nationally broadcast U.F.C. fight on the White House lawn). He has appeared to doze at some Oval Office meetings, and he is holding fewer formal public events than he did at this point in 2017.
Still, Mr. Trump and his team have embraced the everywhere-all-at-once nature of modern media. Average Americans, busy with work and family, do not tune in for daytime news conferences or Cabinet meetings. And 6:30 p.m. newscasts and local newspapers are no longer the primary vessels by which Americans learn about their commander-in-chief.
Instead, politics now suffuses our lives as a kind of ambient noise – via TikTok videos, social media posts, YouTube talk shows and family Facebook messages – never fully separate from our leisure pursuits. “Right now the game is attention, in terms of what’s culturally breaking through,” Mr. Burton said. “The fact that so much message exists is the point.”
Mr. Trump has both propelled this merging of culture and politics, and continues to strategically exploit it. In December, he became the first president to personally host the Kennedy Center Honors, comparing himself onstage to Johnny Carson and musing that he would do a better job than Jimmy Kimmel.
“This is the greatest evening in the history of the Kennedy Center,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “Not even a contest. There has never been anything like it.”
His performance will air in prime time on CBS on Dec. 23.
Photo and video sources: Graham Dickie/The New York Times; Doug Mills/The New York Times; Roll Call Factba.se; PBS; Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Kenny Holston/The New York Times; The New York Times; Annabelle Gordon/Reuters; Eric Lee/The New York Times; Fox; Cheriss May for The New York Times; Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press; Margo Martin, via Storyful; Mark Abramson for The New York Times; Global News; Al Drago/Getty Images; Fox News; Dave Sanders for The New York Times; Pete Marovich for The New York Times; Ted Shaffrey/Associated Press … Show all
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