The Desecration of the Kennedy Center
Drummer and vibraphonist Chuck Redd, the longtime host of the Kennedy Center’s Christmas Eve Jazz Jam, made the only moral decision available when he canceled this year’s performance after the institution announced it was renaming itself in honor of Donald Trump. A sacred holiday tradition, gone, not because Redd is “intolerant,” but because he refused to become wallpaper for a regime that confuses vandalism with patriotism.
The response from Trump’s newly installed cultural commissars was immediate and obscene.
Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist, freshly appointed chairman after Trump purged the board and crowned himself king of the place, fired off a threat demanding $1 million in damages from Redd for what he called a “political stunt.”
The vice president of public relations piled on, accusing artists who refuse to perform under Trump’s banner of being “selfish” and failing their “basic duty” to perform for “all people.”
Read that again.
They renamed the Kennedy Center after themselves.
They erased the spirit of John F. Kennedy from his own memorial.
They hollowed out a cultural institution into a MAGA banquet hall.
And now they are threatening musicians for declining to participate.
This is not patriotism.
This is coercion.
This is authoritarianism wearing a flag pin.
And the people who call artists “un-American” for protesting this grotesque takeover are not defending the country, they are defending the demolition of its soul.
Donald Trump, a man who has never read a poem, sat through an overture, or understood a single note of jazz unless it came with a picture book and a teenage blonde on his lap, already hosted the Kennedy Center Honors, and the ceremony was broadcast on national television to embarrassingly low ratings.
The verdict was immediate.
The country did not show up.
The audience did not come.
The empire yawned.
Because fascism always begins by stealing the places where beauty lives, and it always ends by discovering that beauty cannot be coerced.
The Kennedy Center, that marble temple to imagination and the dangerous idea that the human spirit is bigger than a tax deduction, has now been reduced to a MAGA banquet room with flags, folding chairs, and a buffet of cold chicken and lukewarm grievance.
Trump calls this “revamping in his image.”
Which is to say: taking a cathedral of culture and repainting it with the aesthetic of a rundown Midwestern strip mall.
He purged the board.
He named himself chairman.
He crowned himself curator of taste.
Taste.
This is the man whose artistic legacy consists of The Apprentice, a golden toilet, and Kid Rock holding a beer in one hand and a rifle in the other.
Ticket sales are collapsing.
Donors are fleeing.
Artists are walking away.
Renée Fleming resigned.
Ben Folds stepped down.
Issa Rae pulled out.
More than twenty productions vanished.
Because the arts are sacred.
And Trump, by his very nature, is a desecration.
He is the anti-art.
The anti-aesthetic.
The vandal with a key to the museum.
The Kennedy Center is not just a venue, it is a signal to the world of who we are when we are at our best.
Trump hosting the Honors became the punchline to a joke told by a dying empire.
The man who thinks culture is something you put on a baseball hat decided who received cultural immortality, and the country turned the channel.
Everything he touches decays.
Everything he touches becomes cheap.
Every institution he enters loses its dignity.
Not because he hates art,
but because art requires a soul.
And he has never owned one.
So to my fellow musicians, composers, painters, writers, dancers, actors, this is your moment.
This is not about left or right.
This is about whether the inner creative life of this country will be governed by imagination or by intimidation.
When they attack the arts, they are attacking the one part of you they cannot own:
your inner creative self.
Do not give them that.
Do not decorate their decay.
Do not perform for your own erasure.
If the price of patriotism is silence in the face of vandalism, then it is not patriotism, it is surrender.
Art is resistance.
Beauty is resistance.
Refusal is resistance.
And history will remember who protected the stage when the tyrant tried to steal the spotlight.
– by Michael Jochum
Michael Jochum is a writer and musician reflecting on art, politics, and the human condition.
