Former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday scolded President Donald Trump for battling to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after himself, urging the White House to focus instead on more pressing issues.
Clinton made the comments during a speech at the opening of the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York. The renaming saga has been going on for months, with Trump recently appearing to muse about demolishing the Kennedy Center altogether instead of spending congressional funds to renovate it, after several court decisions barred him from renaming the revered cultural institution in Washington, D.C.
“I personally think that the way we’ve argued about what’s going on at the Kennedy Center and all that kind of stuff — I think we’ve been majoring in the minors,” Clinton said.
“Over the course of a lifetime, there are only so many real opportunities to make decisions that we know will shape our personal history and the history of those we live with and care about for a long time to come. This is one of those moments,” he continued. “You really think 100 years from now anybody’s going to care very much about whose name’s on what building?… Isn’t it more important what happens in the building? And what happens outside the building?”
Clinton also mocked the president’s recent announcement that he is planning to turn the proposed triumphal arch in Washington into “a top-grade Military Complex.” The new monument is set to be built by the Lincoln Memorial, and will now be used to store weapons, with “the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage,” Trump revealed over the weekend.
Clinton said, “Some of this stuff, it’s hard to make up,” as he sardonically criticized the development.
“I suppose I could take my entire allotted time to discuss the self-evident wisdom of building an Arc de Triomphe in Washington to hold all our drones,” the former president said to laughs.
Clinton’s comments in New York come as Trump is also in the state.
The president on Tuesday morning gave a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, where he raised the option of “annihilating” Iran if it refused a peace deal, defended artificial intelligence against proposed global regulations, and condemned the body for “imposing the far-left agenda of globalist bureaucrats who nobody ever elected,” during his forceful address to world leaders.
“We inherited a dark age of America from the previous administration, and we turned it into the golden age of America. The entire world is being lifted by the wealth, strength, spirit, and momentum of a newly energized and a very powerful United States of America,” Trump said. “Just as we move quickly to address problems we inherited at home, we have acted with decisiveness and speed to reshape the world stage and solve problems that have plagued us for far too long.”