A January 2, 2026 PBS NewsHour interview with Richard Grenell, President Trump’s choice to lead the now renamed Trump-Kennedy Center was a classic lesson in evasiveness. 

According to The New Yorker, Kennedy Center staff and others often liken Grenell to Grendel, the “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” in Beowulf. In his PBS interview, he showed he has another talent.

Co-Anchor Amna Nawaz led off with a direct question, asking him to respond to a report that a number of artists had chosen to cancel or pull out of performances at the Center because of the president’s takeover of the Center’s board and the renaming of the Kennedy Center. 

“Chocolate milk,” Grenell replied. 

Well, not exactly. 

That’s how I characterize non-answers. 

Grenell might as well have said “chocolate milk” because his response completely ignored the question and immediately veered off into an allegation that NewsHour had consistently failed to cover the Center’s finances. 

“At the Trump-Kennedy Center, we have 19 unions. It’s incredibly expensive to go and put on performances,” he whined. “We cannot have unpopular programming that doesn’t pay the bills.”

“How about ticket sales at the Center.,” Nawas asked. ‘Are ticket sales down? Is that confirmed or not?”

Grenell’s response. “I find it to be outrageous that PBS is not reporting on the phenomenon that arts institutions have been having for decades. Since President Trump has arrived at the now Trump-Kennedy Center, we have raised more than $130 million, blowing away all other fund-raising, and that’s corporate donors who are coming back because they trust the programming.”

In other words, “Chocolate milk”.

And so it went, on and on.

Nawas said, “Viewership for the Kennedy Center Honors were down dramatically. Does that — as a steward of this institution, does all of this, the backlash, the headlines about artists pulling out, the fact that so few people paid attention to the Honors, does that worry you?”

Grenell: “If you go to CBS, they will tell you that the CBS Trump-Kennedy Center Honors this year tied for number one in its demographic.” In other words, it did well with a specific segment of the tv audience in that time period, not total viewers. 

In other words, “Chocolate milk”.

Politicians have long evaded media questions, but Trump and his minions have raised it to an art form, figuring there’s little or no downside these days to giving a word salad answer or sequeing to a completely unrelated topic.  

Donald Trump himself is the role model for his administration in this behavior.

His stream-of-consciousness speaking style, involving long seemingly unscripted statements that veer from topic to topic, is a practiced deceit allowing him to avoid directly answering questions. He has referred to his meandering speaking style as the purposeful “weave”. In his case, however, it could just as well be a rambling sign of muddled thinking and cognitive decline. 

 As Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!”