Ticket sales at the Kennedy Center cratered after Trump’s hand-picked board elected him Chairman of the august institution. Now that he has besmirched the institution by adding his name, the host of the annual Christmas Eve jazz fest canceled the 2025 show. Chuck Redd, the impresario who has hosted the “Jazz Jams” show since 2006, said he decided to call off the concert last Friday after the administration announced the addition of Trump’s name to an institution honoring a historical, well-regarded, and respected President.
As Redd explained in a Wednesday email to the AP:
“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert.”
Good for him. Some people might claim that Redd is being disrespectful, that whatever his personal views on Trump, the man is President of the United States, and he is entitled to call the Kennedy Center anything he wants. They would be wrong. Congress alone has the power to change the name. And no one person should have, or does have, the authority to capriciously and hastily rename national institutions to salve his fragile ego.
Even the administration’s boast that his appointment to the Chair was unanimous turned out to be a lie. After White House Press shill, Karoline Leavitt announced that the board had “voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center,” board member, Joyce Beatty (D-OH) pointed out that Leavitt was shredding the truth. She said she had been “muted on the call and not allowed to speak or voice my opposition to this move,” and noted the name change had not been on the agenda.\
That Trump did something outside his purview, and his minions have been lying about it, will come as no surprise. The good news is that as easy as it is for this desperate man to stick his name on something, it is as easy to remove it. After all, it has happened many times before. After his bankruptcies, his defunct casinos shed his name. After the miasma of his first term became apparent, apartment owners in Trump-branded buildings rushed to strip their facades of any reference to the mephitic man.
Everything Trump touches turns to dross. He will leave Washington with a White House decorated in a manner that would embarrass the owner of a Nevada whore house. The building itself will either have a roped-off empty space where the East Wing was. Or, at best, a partially constructed, disproportionate monstrosity of a ballroom that will require the new President to hire a demolition company to remove.
If worst comes to worst, FEMA will have to treat DC as a disaster site and spend god alone knows how much taxpayer money to fix the catastrophe and return the nation’s capital and the people’s house to their former historic sobriety.
