Trump Got What He Wanted From the Kennedy Center Honors
· The Atlantic
The Kennedy Center Honors was once one of the biggest nights in Washington, which may not be saying much in a city that’s more blue blazer than red carpet. Still, it was where D.C.’s buttoned-up power class got to mingle with Hollywood stars at an awards show that was broadcast to millions. Today the main building is closed and the organization has largely stopped presenting the arts. But once again this December, the Kennedy Center will put on a show.
Officials announced today that the 49th Kennedy Center Honors will take place December 7 at Capital One Arena, the downtown stadium where Washington’s NBA and NHL teams play. At that point, the Kennedy Center will likely still be mired in a dispute in which its self-appointed chairman—Donald Trump—has said it might be demolished unless his name is added to the facade. Because of that drama, the Honors are poised to serve as something of a barometer of the institution.
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Under Trump, donors, artists, and audiences have fled from the center. And the most prominent tenants are discovering that they may function better away from it. Unable to perform at the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony Orchestra opened its new season to a grateful crowd in the Maryland suburbs last weekend and will spend the season seeking new audiences at six venues in the region. The Washington National Opera reported record fundraising hauls after ending its affiliation with the Kennedy Center earlier this year. But the Honors may prove harder to disentangle, because the show’s identity is inseparable from the Kennedy Center—and the Kennedy Center, in turn, has become inseparable from Trump.
Trump’s issues with the ceremony go back to 2017, when several of the honorees spurned him. But last year, Trump made himself central to the event by selecting the awards recipients and becoming the first president to host the ceremony—at which he celebrated both the artists and himself. How involved he will be this time remains unclear; the White House did not respond to my questions about his plans. Also unclear is whether the Kennedy Center still has the cultural cachet to attract the level of talent it historically has drawn for the Honors. I posed that question to five people—former officials, staffers, and producers—who helped plan the Honors over the years, all of whom spoke with me on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional repercussions. No matter what, they told me, it’s Trump’s show now, for better or worse.
“It has gone from being the Kennedy Center to being about Donald Trump,” one person told me. “So in order to accept the Honor today, you have to be aligned with what he is doing.”
Ordinarily, most of the details for the Kennedy Center Honors would have been firmed up by now—especially the recipients. Past organizers told me the ceremony required preparation year-round, starting even before the current year’s event raised its curtains. The selection process would begin in winter, and honorees were announced by the summer. But as October begins, the Kennedy Center has only now disclosed where and when the ceremony will occur.
Last year, Trump said he handpicked the 2025 recipients: Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor, George Strait, Michael Crawford, and the rock band Kiss. Although the ceremony drew some Nashville heavyweights to honor Strait, the rest of the celebrity crowd was lighter on star power, and the biggest group of red-carpet walkers seemed to be Cabinet officials and their spouses. And this was before the biggest shock wave hit the institution: 12 days after the Honors, Trump’s name was installed on the building’s facade, which led to a new round of artists canceling appearances; later, Trump announced that he planned to close the institution for a renovation. A legal fight over the future of the center is still playing out in court.
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Speculating about who might be a realistic choice to accept a Kennedy Center Honor this year comes down to a relatively narrow set of criteria: someone accomplished, available, acceptable to Trump, and willing to receive the award from him. Maybe Jon Voight, whom the president honored with the National Medal of Arts in 2019 and recently named a “special ambassador” to Hollywood? Another such ambassador, and another plausible candidate, is Mel Gibson. Would the Honors turn to hip-hop stars such as Lil Wayne, whom Trump pardoned in 2021, or Nicki Minaj, who’s made a MAGA pivot in the past year? Either would be younger than the typical honoree, though their participation might boost ratings, which former producers tell me has always been a consideration in the selection process. Last year’s Honors, the first planned under Trump, saw ratings fall by about 25 percent from the previous year.
Trump’s celebrity orbit offers plenty more options for a shortlist (last year he said he made his final picks from a list of about 50 names): The tenor Andrea Bocelli, who met with Trump in the Oval Office last year, wouldn’t feel out of place on an Honors roster. Kid Rock might, but he’s a longtime friend and supporter of the president. (Ditto Vanilla Ice?) Or maybe the Village People, whose “YMCA” became such a standard of Trump rallies that the group performed at several events for the president’s second inauguration.
The Honors have also lost much of the infrastructure behind the event. CBS’s deal to broadcast the show expired after the 2025 ceremony, and the network did not respond to my request for comment about this year. A Kennedy Center spokesperson told me that it would announce its broadcast partner later. Still, producing the Honors requires more than what viewers eventually see on television. Former officials described it to me as an all-campus effort, relying on staffers across multiple departments, including fundraising and special events. Many of those employees have left or been laid off ahead of the closure.
“Uncertainty is the enemy of what’s going on here,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, told me during an unrelated event this week hosted by Americans for the Arts. The West Virginia Republican wants to see the Honors return to the Kennedy Center eventually, but suggested that temporarily moving the ceremony elsewhere doesn’t need to be fatal. “Take one year and do it off campus and come back,” she said.
At the same event, Kara Young, a two-time Tony Award–winning actress, told me the turmoil at the Kennedy Center has made celebrating art more necessary. “The truth is being silenced, and to me, art is truth,” she said. She added that if administration is “taking over places that are historically apolitical and historically for the arts, then people will find a way to seek what they need, which is the truth.”
The Honors have proved adaptable before. During the pandemic, producers abandoned the typically packed Opera House to film segments across the Kennedy Center campus. One former producer believes the show could still work if organizers found worthy honorees, great performances, and an event free of political influence. But moving it to a cavernous sports arena is a whole other proposition—suggesting that even if the organizers have a spectacle in mind, they risk replacing the Opera House’s refined setting of velvet seats and ornate chandeliers with something discordant.
[Alexandra Petri: Trump’s very weird night at the Kennedy Center Honors]
That change could also scramble the economics of an event that the institution regards as its biggest annual fundraising operation. It is unclear if the center will pay to rent the venue. One advantage, if the center can pull off a fundraising feat, is the arena’s 20,000 seats—compared with the Opera House’s roughly 2,300.
Last year, the center claimed that it raised $23 million from the Honors, doubling the previous year’s number under the pre-Trump leadership. Whatever happened, it wasn’t enough. By spring, donations to the center had plunged, and officials recently said the center was running out of money.
The Kennedy Center began hosting its annual lifetime-achievement ceremony in 1978. The evening lauds five figures, groups, or organizations that have made a significant contribution to American culture, spanning disciplines and tastes. In 2006, for example, the orchestra conductor Zubin Mehta was celebrated alongside Dolly Parton, Smokey Robinson, Steven Spielberg, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. A former producer described the event to me as something like an American Nobel Prize, but just for the arts: a rare recognition bestowed by not just an arts organization but, in a sense, the country itself.
The Honors certainly packed in lots of Washington pageantry. The weekend traditionally included a White House reception with the president and a medallion ceremony at the State Department before culminating on the first Sunday of December with an evening at the Kennedy Center, where honorees watched from the presidential box as some of the world’s biggest acts paid tribute to them. Every president since Jimmy Carter attended at least once during their term.
“I think it was a cool weekend, no matter who you are,” another former producer told me. “(A) to tell everyone you’re getting the Kennedy Center Honor, (b) to bring your family to the White House and take a picture with the president, and sit there up in the box and have everyone perform in your honor.”
Trump’s first year in office represented a rupture. In 2017, Kennedy Center officials hoped to have an Honors weekend much like any other. But following the violence at a white-supremicist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—and Trump’s infamous remark that there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the protest, despite his attempt to clarify that he “condemned totally” the white nationalists and Nazis who were involved—honorees drew a line. The dancer Carmen de Lavallade said she would skip the White House reception. “I was in Richmond setting a ballet, and that’s when all that stuff was going on in Charlottesville,” she told Essence. “I saw the burning cross and I said, ‘I’m not going.’” The television producer Norman Lear told The New York Times that he would skip the reception, and Lionel Richie soon expressed his own uncertainty, telling The Washington Post that he would “play it by ear.”
Eventually, the White House announced that Trump and the first lady would not participate in Honors activities so that they could proceed “without any political distraction.” The Kennedy Center publicly welcomed the decision. “In choosing not to participate in this year’s Honors activities, the Administration has graciously signaled its respect for the Kennedy Center and ensures the Honors gala remains a deservingly special moment for the Honorees,” then-Chairman David M. Rubenstein and President Deborah Rutter said in a statement at the time. “We are grateful for this gesture.”
Trump skipped every Honors ceremony during his first term—the only sitting president to do so. Removing himself showed that the Honors could do just fine without the president’s participation. But second-term Trump produced the opposite effect: Inserting himself seemed only to diminish the ceremony.
After remaking the Kennedy Center’s board and leadership when he returned to office last year, Trump became more involved in the Honors than any president before him—which is to say, no other president considered it part of his job to plan and host an awards show. Just as it’s become part of presidential lore that Trump may have run for president in 2016 because Barack Obama roasted him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, close observers of the Kennedy Center wonder if Trump’s spurning in 2017 helped inspire his takeover of the center. Now it’s his awards show, his arts complex, his renovation, and—if the center is never able to recover—his mess.