Sunday, May 29, 2016

Trump: A star is scorned

POLITICO


In Hollywood, the billionaire’s spot on the Walk of Fame is regularly defaced — and is the target of a campaign to remove it.

By Henry C. Jackson


It started with dog feces. One day, someone took a service animal to the iconic Hollywood Walk of Fame and the dog did its business right on Donald Trump’s star. Then the picture went onto Twitter.
Since then, the affronts have only escalated: Micro protests, profane gestures, spit wads, human urine — with selfies to mark every gesture. Someone stenciled a mute signal onto the star. Someone spray painted a swastika onto it. Now Trump’s critics are going for the whole thing: an online petition demanding Trump’s star be struck has more than 40,000 signatories.
The star is, in its way, a microcosm of Trump’s campaign: Nestled at a nexus of celebrity and public outrage, polarizing and, once-seen, all-but impossible to ignore.
And, like the candidate, it’s not going away.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which operates the Walk of Fame and determines who gets a star, says the protests won’t change anything: there is no chance Trump’s star will be removed. In recent months, the chamber rebuffed calls to remove disgraced comedian Bill Cosby’s Star from the Walk of Fame, too.
The Walk is a registered landmark and, thus, Leron Gubler, the president and chief executive of the chamber has said, shouldn’t be changed.
“We have never removed a star,” he said. 


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