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Why West Hollywood Hates Trump’s Walk of Fame Star

Local city council voted Monday to call for the star’s removal

President Donald Trump walks from the West Wing to Marine One on his way to Joint Base Andrews Friday, July 20, 2018. (Sarah Silbiger/CQ Roll Call file photo)
President Donald Trump walks from the West Wing to Marine One on his way to Joint Base Andrews Friday, July 20, 2018. (Sarah Silbiger/CQ Roll Call file photo)

The West Hollywood city council stirred up renewed controversy Monday over President Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The star, installed nearly a decade before Trump’s presidential run, has become a target of animus against the president among his detractors in the famously liberal enclave. 

Now the city council of West Hollywood wants Trump’s star gone. They voted unanimously Monday to urge the removal of the star, one of about 2,500 on the public sidewalk, which is outside West Hollywood city limits.

The vote is nonbinding and largely symbolic: The council has no jurisdiction over the walk. Rather, the resolution calls on the City of Los Angeles and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to remove the star.

The council cited a range of motivations to get rid of the monument. A council staff report cited, among other grievances, the Trump administration policy that separated migrant children from their parents on the southern border, Trump’s denial of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, and his order reversing an Obama administration policy allowing transgender people to serve in the military.

John Duran, the mayor of West Hollywood, said the resolution has nothing to do with the Republican party, nor is it an attack on conservatives broadly.

Earning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is an honor,” Duran told CNN. “When one belittles and attacks minorities, immigrants, people with disabilities or women — the honor no longer exists.”

Trump’s star was installed in 2007, when he was best known as a New York real estate mogul and the host of the television show The Apprentice. Now well into its second decade aside one of southern California’s sunlit boulevards, for now the star is set to remain one of the more unusual fronts in the culture war over Trump’s presidency.

Like his grand hotel in Washington, D.C., and the golden letters on the famed Trump Tower in New York City, Trump’s Hollywood star has for years been a target of his political opponents’ rancor. Last month, a 23-year-old local resident destroyed the star with a pickax overnight.

Other incidents included a separate pickax attack in October 2016 and an artist’s construction of a tiny border wall around the star that summer.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce devised the now-famous walk, completed in 1961, as a marketing attraction. The chamber has been in charge of the attraction for more than 50 years, and inducts new celebrities about two dozen times a year, according to their website.

The chamber now plans to consider the West Hollywood council’s request at an upcoming meeting, the chamber’s president and CEO, Leron Gubler, said in a statement. But Gubler does not sound enthusiastic about the Hollywood neighbor’s proposal.

“As of now, there are no plans to remove any stars from the Hollywood Walk of Fame,” Gubler said. “The West Hollywood City Council does not have jurisdiction over the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”

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