More Kennedy Center Performers Cancel After Trump Renaming

Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Center — Source: Anadolu / Getty

It’s crazy how President Donald Trump’s ego has led to him inexplicably winning a second term while also seeing him catch so many avoidable L’s. His pathological need to be in the spotlight manifested once more this month, when the board he handpicked voted to place his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, after he had consistently pressured them to do so. As a result of this decision, several musicians have pulled out from performing at the Kennedy Center.

According to NBC News, the first musician to pull out of a Kennedy Center performance over the name change was jazz musician Chuck Redd, who called off the Center’s annual Christmas Eve jazz concert. Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell took the cancellation with grace, decorum, and…who am I kidding, you know ol’ boy was anything but normal about it.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” Grenell wrote. “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”

Since Redd’s cancellation, several artists have done the same.

Jazz band The Cookers were scheduled to play a New Year’s Eve show, but released a statement announcing the cancellation. While they didn’t explicitly say it was due to the name change, the statement strongly implied it was.

“Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice. Some of us have been making this music for many decades, and that history still shapes us,” the statement read. “Our hope is that this moment will leave space for reflection, not resentment.”

Singer Kristy Lee similarly canceled a performance set for January, writing in a statement that the cancellation hurts “but losing my integrity would cost me more than any paycheck.”

“When American history starts getting treated like something you can ban, erase, rename, or rebrand for somebody else’s ego, I can’t stand on that stage and sleep right at night,” said Lee, who described herself as “just a folk singer from Alabama.”

Obviously, the folks in charge of the Kennedy Center aren’t taking the cancellations kindly. “Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn’t courageous or principled—they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people,” Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said in a statement.

You know, once the president starts governing for all people instead of withholding federal funding from schools and states that don’t align with his views, or using Border Patrol, ICE, and the National Guard to terrorize Democrat-led cities, maybe we can have an honest conversation about “performing for all people.”

On top of being grossly partisan, these people are just so insufferable. Why would anyone want to perform for any organization that would put these weirdos in charge? In addition to facing pushback from artists, Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, filed a lawsuit arguing that renaming the Kennedy Center must be done through Congress.

“Federal law established the Center as a memorial to President Kennedy and prohibits changing its name without Congressional action,” six Democratic lawmakers who are ex officio board members at the Kennedy Center, including Beatty and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, said in a joint statement.

Trump has a rather weird obsession with the Kennedy Center. The Kennedy Center board has traditionally been bipartisan, but that changed this year when Trump fired all the Democrats and installed a group of loyalists instead. He changed the programming, which led to Pride events being removed, and Trump even hosted the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors earlier this month, which drew the show’s lowest ratings ever.

It’s almost like taking a hyper-partisan approach to the arts inevitably alienates the entire audience who didn’t vote for any of this nonsense. Who knew?

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