Political leaders in Los Angeles don’t mince their phrases about Donald Trump – they’ve known as the previous president a madman, a fascist, and “a transparent and current hazard to the soundness of the nation”. But on the subject of taking the small, symbolic step of erasing Trump’s most seen presence within the Metropolis of Angels, his star on the celebrity-studded Hollywood Stroll of Fame, they’ve been unusually reluctant to show their phrases into concrete motion.
All indications are that the town management want to see Trump’s star gone – ideally earlier than subsequent yr’s presidential election. Political aides and others in and round metropolis authorities say as a lot in background briefings and off-the-record conversations.
However they discover it remarkably troublesome to speak about it overtly, a mirrored image of the dysfunction of LA metropolis politics. On the few events they do, it’s often to aim to elucidate their inaction.
“I’d vote to take away any city-owned public show of help for Mr Trump in a heartbeat,” metropolis council member Bob Blumenfield wrote to an activist in March 2022 in response to a years-long marketing campaign in opposition to the Trump star. “Nevertheless, I’ve too many different vital points on which I’m at present targeted.”
Requested in regards to the star this summer season, the California state assemblymember whose district consists of the Stroll of Fame, Rick Chavez Zbur, informed a gathering of Democratic celebration activists to “keep tuned”.
When the Guardian requested what he meant, nonetheless, Zbur’s workplace responded first that he was too busy to remark, then mentioned that his job was to work on state-level coverage and he “typically defer[red] to native leaders on points on the native stage”.
Different elected officers have been equally circumspect, tiptoeing across the needs of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which has administered the Stroll of Fame since its inception greater than 60 years in the past, and emphasizing the bureaucratic issues of eradicating a star the place no star, regardless of how controversial, has been eliminated earlier than.
Their hesitation can appear perplexing in a metropolis the place Trump barely cracked 25% of the vote within the 2020 presidential election, and the place, earlier than he entered politics, he was handled not as a revered entertainer however largely because the butt of jokes and gossip.
“They’re paralyzed about making a choice,” mentioned one outstanding enterprise chief in Hollywood, who like many others interviewed for this story requested to stay nameless for worry of offending colleagues or associates on a vexatious matter.
That paralysis astonishes activists like Andrew Rudick, a singularly decided campaigner who regularly confronts public officers in regards to the Trump star at dedication ceremonies for brand new honorees on the Stroll of Fame.
“It can’t be this tough,” Rudick mentioned. “This man tried a coup in opposition to the US and but we proceed to honor him … How are we the voters imagined to place confidence in the town council to cope with any actual stage of problem if they will’t get this finished?”
Trump’s star, which he earned after internet hosting a number of seasons of the TV actuality present The Apprentice, has been repeatedly defaced or destroyed within the eight years since he first ran for president. But on every event the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has resisted calls both to take away it or to depart the harm un-repaired.
The star has additionally proved to be a magnet for road artists, who’ve variously turned the marble and terrazzo plaque right into a mini-jail or adorned it with a toilet, tub and box files as a commentary on the categorized paperwork present in a toilet at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Florida.
Rudick thought the star ought to have been eliminated as early as 2015, when NBC fired Trump from The Apprentice for characterizing Mexicans as rapists bringing medicine and crime into the US. And it struck him as a no brainer after the tried riot on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, particularly for the reason that LA metropolis council unanimously handed a decision calling for Trump’s elimination from workplace as a result of he had instigated a “seditious, racist and violent” assault.
Nonetheless, the star stayed.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has been strikingly constant in saying that when a star is devoted on the Stroll of Fame, it’s there to remain. The Chamber’s chief government said so in 2015, after dozens of girls got here ahead to accuse Invoice Cosby of sexual abuse and his star turned controversial. Cosby was convicted on sexual assault fees in Pennsylvania in 2018. His conviction was later overturned on enchantment.
The chamber confirmed final week that its coverage had not modified. A lawyer near the chamber mentioned that repairing harm to the star from pickaxes, a sledgehammer and might upon can of spray paint – a tab operating into the tens of hundreds of {dollars} – was “not low-cost, however not so costly it’s prohibitive”.
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At times the chamber, and sympathetic city officials have asserted, without corroboration, that the Walk of Fame is a “California state landmark” and cannot be modified as a matter of law. “We have no jurisdiction there,” the then LA mayor, Eric Garcetti, said of the Trump star in 2018. “Like it or hate it, it’s there to stay.”
Yet the Walk of Fame is not included on an official list of California historic landmarks, and a spokeswoman for the state office of historic preservation said the city of Los Angeles possesses sole jurisdiction over “decisions regarding removal or modification” of any part of it.
Los Angeles itself lists the Walk of Fame as a “historic-cultural monument”, but according to the city’s planning department, the designation offers only limited protection against “substantial alteration” of the Walk of Fame as a whole – not changes to “one or a handful of stars out of over 2,700”.
What, then, is holding everyone back? People familiar with the Chamber of Commerce’s thinking – none of them willing to be named – say its leaders are afraid that by removing one star they would be inviting chaos, because interest groups of all kinds would surge forward and object to any number of other honorees, not just Trump or Cosby or others facing serious felony charges.
“It’s a slippery slope, and we don’t want to go down that slope,” a lawyer with connections to the chamber said. “We’re going to end up having nothing but controversy and protests.”
Plenty of people in Los Angeles, including political aides and Hollywood historians, would in fact welcome greater scrutiny of honorees. But the chamber has historically held considerable sway with the local councilmember, not least because the Walk of Fame is a major tourist draw that helps support businesses up and down Hollywood Boulevard. If other councilmembers have held back it is, their staff say, because they do not like to initiate action on issues originating in someone else’s district.
There are signs of things shifting, however, because a new councilmember took over in Hollywood last December, moving the district significantly to the left. Hugo Soto-Martinez is a former union organizer, with a history of standing up to business interests, and says he is willing to take on the troublesome patch of decorative concrete at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, because, in his words, “Donald Trump is a racist, fascist, and a threat to our democracy”.
The question, though, is when. “Since there’s no known precedent for removing a star from the Hollywood Walk of Fame,” Soto-Martinez said, “we’re looking into where the authority lies, what the legal issues may be, and what a process for it might look like.”
Rudick, for one, is not holding his breath. “They say they’re not sure how to do it, even though I’ve laid out everything for them they may need,” he said. “I don’t understand the reticence. I don’t.”
One clue to the possible complications ahead can be found in a letter that Trump’s future employers at NBC wrote back in 1958, when a Walk of Fame was first being mooted and a lawyer for the broadcaster worried about the consequences of honoring people while they were still living. “Suppose that a currently prominent actor whose name is inscribed in the sidewalk is convicted a year hence of an infamous crime,” the lawyer, John West, wrote to the city. “Should his name be removed? Who would have the power to order the removal? Would the actor have acquired the legal right to enjoin the removal …?”
These concerns quickly proved more than theoretical. One of the first honorees, a bandleader and western fiddler named Spade Cooley, had his star unveiled in 1960, and a year later he was convicted of beating, stomping and choking his estranged wife to death in the presence of their 14-year-old daughter.
He remains, to this day, the only convicted murderer on the Walk of Fame. But his star is still there, just as West feared or predicted – and more than likely going nowhere.
