Blaming the president is a popular pastime these days, but one of America’s cultural leaders has come up with something really novel in the genre.
“Metropolitan Opera season attendance dropped slightly following the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that coincided with a decrease in tourists to New York.”
Who knew rounding up hardened illegal-immigrant criminals would hit the hallowed halls of the country’s most prestigious opera house hard?
President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump attend a performance at the newly de-woked Kennedy Center in DC. REUTERS
That line is the first sentence of a June 13 Associated Press news report that takes as fact Metropolitan Opera general director Peter Gelb’s explanation for a slump in sales.
With the Met’s season over, Gelb has been making the rounds, pushing this narrative repeatedly in interviews and podcasts.
He even ripped the American president last week from a Kyiv stage, telling