The myth that Donald Trump has a strategic vision took another hilarious blow on Sunday when he threw a tantrum familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with a diagnosable narcissist. Without apparently telling anyone who actually has to deal with it, the 79-year-old toddler president declared on Truth Social that he was shutting down the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years following its Fourth of July celebrations. This “decision” comes a mere six weeks after Trump pretended to be “surprised” and “honored” when the center’s board, which he leads, voted illegally to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center, a name that no one seems interested in using, at least when out of Trump’s earshot.

The president claims the closure, which will likely last the rest of his term, is about “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.” Few believe this. Most accept that it is an obvious reaction to the fact that a growing list of artists have cancelled shows at the Kennedy Center to avoid the taint of performing at a place where the word “Trump” was forced onto the building’s signage. The list of cancellations is so long that it has its own Wikipedia page, which features luminaries like Philip Glass, Béla Fleck, the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Washington National Opera and the entire cast of “Hamilton.”

The situation is a great example of how narcissists defeat themselves. As he’s done his whole life, Trump stole a trophy he didn’t earn in the hope that he would impress people. Instead, his grotesque behavior backfired and has drawn even more insults and rejections. But what’s even more fascinating is what this whole debacle tells us about the MAGA movement as a whole, and how Trump is the perfect symbol for their failed culture war aspirations.

To people outside the MAGA bubble, Trump’s obsession with the Kennedy Center is just plain weird. Obviously, he feels intimidated by the looming cultural power of the 35th president and his wife, Jacqueline, and excluded from circles of people with good taste, even though he has no interest in actually learning to appreciate art or music beyond middle-of-the-road Broadway showtunes from the 1980s. He won’t grow up and, as normal people do, be happy not to be included in pastimes that bore him. This manifestation of his deep psychological issues reflects a major resentment that fuels the larger MAGA movement: anger at the larger culture for not dumbing itself down to placate their own pedestrian tastes and bigoted blind spots.