President Donald Trump broke tradition yet again when he announced in August that he’d take on the role of host at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony. The usually star-studded event was taped earlier this month and will air Tuesday evening on CBS and Paramount+. Trump’s time as master of ceremonies, which he proudly said on Truth Social came at the request of the center’s board “and just about everybody else in America,” is the latest in an unprecedented attempt by the sitting president to fashion himself as not just a tastemaker but the overall arbiter of American culture.
It’s all also deeply fitting for a man who has always longed to be a member of the cultural elite that he so readily scorns. Trump was born and raised in Queens; an outer-borough kid, albeit one born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he longed to be a part of the Manhattan hoi polloi. As The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman wrote about his rise to prominence in the 1980s, “he was in a public dance over whether he wanted to be accepted by elites or throw stones at them.” She continued that “despite the claims that the city’s power brokers all sneered at him, Mr. Trump was humored, indulged and even accepted by some of them.”
It’s all also deeply fitting for a man who has always longed to be a member of the cultural elite that he so readily scorns.
He also wasn’t above leveraging his real estate portfolio to feed his need to be center stage. According to Leo Robson, writing in The New Statesman back in 2017, a fancy restaurant in the 1998 Woody Allen film “Celebrity” was “really Jean-Georges, which is based at the lobby level of the Trump International Hotel and Tower.” Robson added, “Trump often demanded an appearance in films that made use of his buildings.”
It’s a claim that Matt Damon repeated later in 2017 (recalling that Trump pulled a similar stunt in “Scent of a Woman”), as did Chris Columbus, director of “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” in a 2020 interview with Business Insider. The latter appearance earned Trump a membership in the Screen Actors Guild, which he resigned from in 2021 as members debated booting him; the guild barred him from readmission but he still drew a pension for years as of 2023. (Trump denied Columbus’ version of events specifically in a 2023 Truth Social post, but he hasn’t commented on the other anecdotes.)
Kennedy Center Honorees and members of the rock band KISS Gene Simmons, Peter Criss and Paul Stanley arrive for the 48th Kennedy Center Honors gala at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 7, 2025.Alex Wroblewski / Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
Trump’s fall from grace after a decade of overexposure and overspending never dimmed his desire to be in the spotlight, something the eventual remaking of himself into the character he played on “The Apprentice” proved. But the chip on his shoulder from the way he feels he was received by the elites in his business heyday was exacerbated once he ran for the White House.
His first term saw him being shunned by most A-list celebrities. As Vox’s Constance Grady wrote in March, the theater world was particularly quick to shun Trump and call out his authoritarian tendencies. Those few celebrities who gravitated toward him haven’t exactly found their cultural cachet increase even as they became recipients of Trump’s gratitude.
The Kennedy Center takeover can be seen, then, as another stop on Trump’s revenge tour.
The Kennedy Center takeover can be seen, then, as another stop on Trump’s revenge tour. It wasn’t enough that he booted the center’s board of trustees in February and installed his own lackeys, nor was it satisfactory to have them name him the institution’s chairman. Nor was it enough for him to handpick this year’s honorees, all of whom fit neatly within Trump’s 1980s-heavy cultural comfort zone, eschewing the classical, opera and jazz performers honored in years past. After the event was taped, the building itself was renamed last week to become, according to the signage swiftly installed, “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Trump’s pick to run the center’s daily operations justified the takeover at least in part by claiming that the former leaders had focused too much on “niche, fringe programming” rather than performances that sell tickets to the masses. The rebrand hasn’t exactly helped the Kennedy Center’s bottom line, though. As of October, “ticket sales for the Kennedy Center’s three largest performance venues are the worst they’ve been in years,” based on The Washington Post’s analysis of “ticketing data from dozens of recent shows as well as past seasons.”
A wonderfully penned opinion column from DC Theater Arts’ editor-in-chief, Nicole Hertvik, who attended the gala, at least lets us know the program set to air on Tuesday night “went off without a hitch, despite Trump’s insistence on hosting it himself, with long-winded monologues seemingly designed for shock value. The staging was lovely, the performers, many of them C-listers whom I had never heard of, were solid, and a few were shockingly good.”
But, as with all things Trump, the politics are as unavoidable as the president himself — which is precisely how he would prefer it. It only follows that a man who sees himself as the foremost expert on all things would believe himself to be the greatest judge of the arts. But the cultural flattening that Trump is hoping to oversee is less about raising up great art and more about bringing the rest of the country down to his taste levels.
