And here is your host … Trump casts himself for Kennedy Center honours

The president turns the annual DC arts celebration into another monument to himself, handpicking honourees and hogging the spotlight

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts," are among the words inscribed in marble at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The age of Elizabeth was the age of Shakespeare, it says.

The age of Donald Trump is the age of Trump's ego. Trump the president, commander-in-chief and master builder. Trump the supremo of the upcoming Olympics, football World Cup and America's 250th birthday. Trump whose self-aggrandisement is the size of a planet: on Wednesday not even the Kennedy Center's cavernous Hall of Nations could contain it.