Hamilton Hypocrisy: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Trump Protest

Lin-Manuel Miranda has canceled the production Hamilton at the Kennedy Center. His reason? Donald Trump. The whole controversy feels a bit rich. Here is Miranda, protesting a president he views as an authoritarian figure, while his musical glorifies a man who actually wanted an elected monarch.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Broadway production and know it well. And because of this, I can say the irony runs deep. Miranda’s Hamilton is a scrappy immigrant who pulls himself up by his bootstraps, fights the system, and champions the common man. Come on! “Immigrant?” In reality, he just moved from one part of the British empire to another, in this case, the American colonies.

“I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy and hungry,” raps Miranda’s Hamilton. But the real Alexander Hamilton? Not so much.

Let’s talk about those bootstraps. The musical paints Hamilton as a self-made man who arrived in New York with nothing but determination and raw talent. Nice story. Wrong, though. The real Hamilton had connections. Good ones. He had wealthy sponsors in the Caribbean who paid for his education and set him up with introductions to New York’s elite. He wasn’t exactly starting from zero.

Then there’s the whole monarchy thing. The show conveniently glosses over Hamilton’s rather uncomfortable political views. While Miranda’s Hamilton fights against King George’s tyranny, the actual Hamilton proposed something that would make modern Americans choke on their tea – I mean coffee: he wanted presidents to serve for life. Not just that. He argued for senators to have life terms too. The man basically wanted an elected monarchy, complete with an aristocratic senate. So much for fighting the power.

And let’s not forget slavery. The musical portrays Hamilton as a passionate abolitionist, dropping anti-slavery lines throughout the show. Sure, Hamilton didn’t like slavery. But he wasn’t exactly leading the charge against it either. His anti-slavery stance was more of a footnote in his political career, not the driving force the musical suggests. He married into a slave-owning family and even handled slave transactions for them. It’s complicated, messy, and far from the clean narrative we have in Miranda’s “modern” progressive hero.

This brings us back to Trump. When Miranda and company previously boycotted Trump and Mike Pence, they positioned themselves as defenders of democracy against authoritarian tendencies. They compared Trump to King George III – the very symbol of monarchy their show rebels against. And they continue to do so in this boycott of the Kennedy Center. But their hero, the real Hamilton, would have probably been more comfortable with Trump’s political style than with the Hollywood left now boycotting him.

The whole situation drips with irony. Here’s a show that took an elitist who distrusted the masses and turned him into a populist hero, being used to protest a populist president who retains historic levels of approval in the first months of his presidency. It’s like a political pretzel, twisted up in its own contradictions.

Does this make the show bad? No way. Hamilton is brilliant theater. The music slaps you in the face to wake you up. The performances soar. The energy is electric. I’ve seen it several times and have many of the songs committed to memory and our family has enjoyed it together. But it’s worth noting how art can reshape history to fit current narratives, sometimes at the expense of truth.

Maybe that’s the real story here. Not the hypocrisy of the protest, but how we bend historical figures to serve our present needs. Miranda created a Hamilton for our time – diverse, immigrant-friendly, uncharacteristically progressive. He took an aristocratic banker and turned him into a revolutionary hero because that’s what New York’s theater-going crowd demanded. That’s what art does.

Still, when you use that art as a political weapon, you better be ready for someone to point out the rotten wood under stage center. The real Hamilton might have found Trump’s style familiar, even comfortable. He might have recognized in Trump’s presidency echoes of his own vision for executive power.

Funny how history works, isn’t it? Sometimes the revolutionaries of yesterday would be the conservatives of today. And sometimes, when people protest what we see as tyranny, they’re using the name of someone who might have been just fine with it.

Art, politics, history – they’re all messy. Just like Hamilton himself.