It’s hard to believe it but, indirectly, it is claimed that cats were an important part of Donald Trump’s life during his bumpy presidency! You can’t see Donald Trump as being a cat person, can you? Not even an animal person. I certainly can’t but he needed to be calmed down during periods of rage according to a book by the former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham: I’ll Take Your Questions Now. To achieve this, an official called the “Music Man”, Max Miller, played the song ‘Memory’ composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber for his 1981 musical Cats. It is one of Trump’s favourite tunes and apparently it did the trick of calming him down. Grisham says that he has a terrifying temper so he needed calming down!
The book contains many accusations against the former president including abusing his staff and making sexual remarks. And apparently Trump was very keen to impress Vladimir Putin which smacks of a confidence problem in his relationship with Putin. I don’t think the story behind the song was important to Trump but it might have been. In the musical the song is led by Grizabella who ended up living in the gutter alone and who was eager to impress the other cats. At the end of the first act, she sings a prelude of the song in which she recalls her life before she was ostracized. And towards the end of the musical, in the song, she begs to be accepted.
It’s interesting that it’s about being an outsider and I wonder whether the words as well as the music impacted on Trump. It may provide us with some insights into his thinking. He behaves as an outsider. Trump denies the claims contained in the book. He has criticised the author in saying that Grisham didn’t have what it took to do the job and that this was obvious from the beginning. He said that she became “very angry and bitter” after ending a relationship. He also claimed that she had big problems and that she’s been paid by a “radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things”. The usual Trump guff.
As expected, there are some very amusing tweets, one of which is below by Jared Harris in which she says that playing ‘Memory’ from Cats saved the world from a nuclear war! We can laugh but there may just be a little bit of truth about that.
SOME MORE ON CATS THE MUSICAL:
