The Kennedy Center Honors Is Now Just Another Trump Show

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In his first turn as the chief of the Kennedy Center, President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced he would honor a disco queen, the King of Country Music, a glam-metal original, plus the original Phantom of the Opera and Rocky. The choices of Gloria Gaynor, George Strait, Kiss, Michael Crawford, and Sylvester Stallone for the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors signal yet the latest example of Trump putting his thumb on the scale of American culture and tossing it back to yesteryear.

It also illustrated just how much Trump’s culture-warrior ethos has bled into almost all corners of his reality as he looks to restore his heyday of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Trump visited the arts complex to announce his picks for a prize that’s typically seen as above politics but couldn’t escape the President’s reach after he annexed the arts center as part of his orbit. Trump instead declared the legacy organization would honor this cohort come December and he would host the star-studded evening that is the biggest single night for the center as a piece of his war on wokeness. In a twitch of bravado, he noted the reality show he last hosted a decade ago eclipsed the ratings of some award shows and that his hosting at the Kennedy Center might again draw eyeballs—the latest example of how Trump cannot even let lifetime achievement touchstones exist beyond his own aura.

“I shouldn’t make this political because they made the Academy Awards political and they went down the tubes. So they’ll say, ‘Trump made it political.’ But I think if we make it our kind of political, we’ll go up, OK? Let’s see if I’m right about that,” Trump said. 

It was a brutally honest disclosure about just how much Trump wants to put his stamp on the next stretch of the nation’s history, which will coincide with the United States’ 250th anniversary and the country playing a host role for both the Olympics and the World Cup next year. Grounded in grievance, Trump nakedly cast his picks—which he said he was deeply involved with—as the latest chapter in his score settling and restoring a bygone era of machismo, glitter, and excess.

“I turned down plenty. They were too woke. I had a couple of wokesters,” Trump said, once more injecting politics into what normally is an apolitical event. (Of course, Trump’s list doesn’t include those who he failed to land. The Washington Post, citing current and former Kennedy Center employees, reported Tom Cruise was offered the honors but declined due to “scheduling conflicts.”)

The sprawling session with reporters in the Kennedy Center’s Hall of Nations fell in line with history’s precedent, even as it veered far afield from the stated purpose of the midday event. Presidents have long reveled in associating themselves with the bold-faced names receiving such awards as the Kennedy Center Honors. Yet no President before Trump has framed the recipients as so completely tied to his personal preferences.

Read more: Why Trump’s Kennedy Center Takeover Will Reverberate in Hollywood and Beyond

Power often gives permission to those who have it to indulge in some occasional petty impulses, often reshaping cultural identities as second-order effects. Joseph Stalin saw himself as a state arbiter of Soviet taste, going so far as to pencil in edits to poetry translations, order rewrites of opera lyrics, and to reject musical works he could not whistle. Prime Minister Winston Churchill so disliked a portrait commissioned for his eightieth birthday that his secretary burned it. President George H.W. Bush harbored a childhood grudge against broccoli and banned from Air Force One, famously telling reporters that no one could make him eat it: “I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it, and I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.”

Then there’s Trump, who is showing more than a little bratty flare-up these days. Tying his stewardship of the Kennedy Center to his broader rewrite of Washington, Trump said it is all a piece of his reframing of the nation’s capital to put forward his vision of the United States—down to the smallest detail, whether it be the columns of the Kennedy Center or the landscape itself. “We’re going to redo the grass with the finest grasses,” said Trump, who earlier this year fired the Kennedy Center’s board and its chairman and forced out its day-to-day leader. 

In their place, Trump appointed loyalists, who in turn declared him the chair of the nation’s temple to the performing arts. And since then, performers and tours have canceled stops there in protest, and some marquee artistic partners have resigned their roles advising the center on programming choices. And other major D.C. events, including those around World Pride, saw the curtain coming down before opening night.

The result has been an overhaul of what for decades was seen as a living tribute to the slain 35th President worthy of bipartisan support. The Kennedy Center Honors have now become yet another flashpoint in Trump’s never-ending stream of culture-war spats, with the President going so far as to suggest the complex on the Potomac might be better called the “Kennedy/ Trump Center.” After all, before January, the Kennedy Center’s public spaces were adorned only by a bronze bust of JFK. Now, giant portraits of the President and Vice President J.D. Vance have joined along with those of their wives. House Republicans, meanwhile, have proposed renaming the giant Opera House for First Lady Melania Trump.

Trump’s cultural reach is spreading far beyond the Kennedy Center’s riverside campus. This week his White House sent a letter to the head of the Smithsonian ordering it to comport with Trump’s vision for “Americanism.” An exhibit briefly erased mentions of Trump’s two impeachments before restoring them with edits. And he has ordered the restoration of a Confederate statue about a mile east of the White House.

Trump, unbowed, seems unable to pump the brakes. Washington is left watching to see if there is even a limit to how fast Trump will accelerate his revenge tour of Washington.

It’s doubtful Trump is familiar with former New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1986 lecture at Harvard that included this observation: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Both, of course, can be true, as Trump’s actions of late have proven in ways that are as consequential as they are petty. He just happens to have Rambo as a sidekick.

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