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This year, in honor of the holiday season, jazz drummer and vibraphonist Chuck Redd canceled his annual Christmas Eve performance at the Kennedy Center. Redd has helmed the holiday concert for 20 years, but declined to appear this year to protest President Trump’s decision to illegally add his name to the institution without congressional approval. The Kennedy Center now bears the awkward name, “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told the AP.
Trump’s apparatchiks were furious. Kennedy Center spokesperson and regime stooge Roma Daravi fumed, “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 officials said they plan to sue Redd for $1 million. Richard Grenell, a longtime Trump sycophant who is now the Kennedy Center president, shared a post about the threatened lawsuit on X and huffed that “we will not let them cancel shows without consequences.” This is a grotesque effort to bully Redd. It’s also meant to intimidate other artists who might consider boycotts or cancelations. The episode is the latest in Trump’s ongoing efforts to stifle free expression. But Redd’s refusal to play along is a reminder that there is substantial and ongoing resistance to those efforts, both from artists and from the public. Artists don’t want to associate themselves with fascismTrump’s hand-picked, supine Kennedy Center board voted to rename the building on December 18 — only a couple of weeks ago. But Trump has been meddling with the institution since almost the moment he became president. In February, he fired members of the board of trustees, named loyalists in their stead, and proclaimed himself chairman. He also said that he would make programming changes. Sure enough, in April the Center cancelled a slate of LGBT pride events in line with the Trump administration’s official policy of homophobia, intolerance, and hate. A note from Aaron: Working with brilliant contributors like Noah takes resources. If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, please sign up to support our work Numerous other events, however, have been cancelled not at Trump’s behest, but as a protest against his garbage. Folk musician and MacArthur Award winner Rhiannon Giddens cancelled her concert at the Center soon after Trump’s administrative change, stating, “I cannot in good conscience play at The Kennedy with the recent programming changes forced on the institution by this new board.” Brooklyn-based Puerto Rican band Balún also refused to appear. Mystery writer Louise Penny cancelled her book launch at the Center, writing on Facebook, “It was, of course, going to be a career highlight. But there are things far more important than that.” The musical Hamilton cancelled a Kennedy Center run; so did actor and comedian Issa Rae, whose appearance at the Center was sold out.
Trump’s spokespeople would have us believe that mass rejection of their Dear Leader is an example of selfishness and intolerance; Daravi, the Kennedy Center spokesperson, made this clear when he insisted the responsibility of a public artist is “to perform for all people.” Ann Telnaes, the editorial cartoonist who quit the Washington Post after the paper spiked a cartoon critical of its lickspittle owner Jeff Bezos and his fealty to Trump, has a different view. The “duty of the artist,” she said on Bluesky, is not to perform for everyone on command. It is “to take a stand through their art.” Audiences take a stand tooAudiences have also rejected the regime’s new fascist vision for the Kennedy Center. Attendance has cratered following Trump’s politicization of the institution. The Washington Post analyzed fall ticket sales at the Center and found that 43 percent remained unsold this year. In contrast, in 2024, only around seven percent were unsold; in 2023 it was 20 percent. And this was before Trump actually put his name on the building. Audiences were also less than enthused about Trump’s decision to personally host the Kennedy Center Honors program earlier this month. Programming Insider reported that based on Nielsen data, "CBS drew its smallest audience ever on the night of December 23, averaging an estimated 2.65 million viewers. To put that in perspective: the 2024 broadcast averaged 4.1 million.” Trump rather pitifully asked his fans if they would like him “to leave the presidency in order to make ‘hosting’ a full time job.” Based on the numbers, it seems that most people would like him to choose another option — leave the presidency and never appear in public again. The Kennedy Center boycott is a more extended version of other mass audience campaigns against Trumpism. The most obvious, and most successful, was the backlash against Disney/ABC after it censored late night host Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel was suspended after making anodyne remarks about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to punish the network, which pulled Kimmel on September 17.
The decision was condemned across the political spectrum — even Ted Cruz compared Carr to a mafia boss — and consumers cancelled Disney+ subscriptions en masse. ABC panicked and capitulated, restoring Kimmel less than a week later. The Sinclair television conglomerate, owned by right-wing oligarchs, initially said it still wouldn’t air Kimmel, but then folded as well. More recently, CBS News, now under the thumb of right-wing goon Bari Weiss, spiked a 60 Minutes segment exposing horrific condition in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has deported people with no criminal record. Sharyn Alfonsi, a 60 Minutes correspondent, said in a memo that the decision to kill the story was “political.” The segment, however, mistakenly aired in Canada. It was quickly recorded, bootlegged, and distributed. A transcript is available at The Nation and numerous version are available online, though CBS continues to try to take them down. 60 Minutes generally gets around 10 million viewers an episode. There’s no way to reliably determine how many people have seen the bootleged segment, but it’s probably more than typically see the show. The Streisand Effect is a powerful force — as is the anger at the Trump regime and the desire to defy its censorship. The right to not speakIn the 60 Minutes case, government-aligned media silenced criticism of the government. That’s the typical understanding of how censorship works. Chuck Redd’s refusal to perform at the Kennedy Center, and the administration’s retaliation, is a little more complicated. Redd, after all, was not going to criticize the government from the Kennedy Center’s stage. He was going to play jazz. But government control of speech isn’t just about silencing criticism. It’s also about forcing praise. Like many a dictator before him, Trump has a bottomless desire to hear others laud him. He insists that his cabinet secretaries constantly tell him how great he is. He viciously insults reporters who fail to give him what he sees as his due — infinite deference. Trump puts his name first on the Kennedy Center because he wants to see himself as a brilliant patron of the arts and because he wants to see himself as greater than John F. Kennedy. And he and his minions sue (or at least threaten to sue) Chuck Redd, and berate him personally and professionally, because he didn’t want his name and his talent to be turned into fascist propaganda.
Trump wants all artists to compose paens to the king and nothing but paeans to the king. But artists like Redd have instead told the king to go soak his head, as have a large number of the king’s subjects. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression is the right to criticize the ruler. But it’s also the right to not play jazz vibraphone if you don’t want to — not even if the ruler says you must for his greater glory. The Kennedy Center is threatening to sue Chuck Redd to enforce the tyrannical precept that we are all, always, everywhere, the king’s performing monkeys. Are our voices our own? Or do they belong to Trump and Trump alone? That’s what’s at stake in the Redd case. It’s why he refused to perform, why audiences are refusing to show up at the Kennedy Center, and why resistance to fascism — even to fascist Christmas concerts — matters. |
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