Trump’s Cultural Coup: Kennedy Center Ratings Collapse Reveals Hollowness of Authoritarian Spectacle
The president’s hostile takeover of America’s premier arts institution yields historically low viewership—exposing the emptiness behind power without popular legitimacy
In what can only be described as a devastating repudiation of authoritarian cultural appropriation, the 48th Kennedy Center Honors drew its smallest audience in history, averaging just 2.65 million viewers—a catastrophic 35% decline from the previous year’s already record-low 4.1 million viewers. The televised ceremony, which aired on CBS December 23, represents far more than a simple ratings failure. It stands as a powerful testament to what happens when institutional power is seized without cultural legitimacy, when workers are purged for political loyalty, and when art itself becomes subordinated to the vanity of oligarchic rule.
“MAGA supporters are more likely to beat your ass in the parking lot at Denny’s than watch the Kennedy Center Honors.” — Alan Nafzger
The Seizure of Cultural Commons
The Kennedy Center’s transformation into what President Trump brazenly rebranded as “THE TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER HONORS” follows a pattern familiar to students of authoritarian governance: the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions and their reconstitution as tools of personal aggrandizement. In February 2025, Trump fired all 18 Biden-appointed board members, terminated longtime president Deborah Rutter, ousted chairman David Rubenstein, and installed himself as chairman—an unprecedented violation of the Kennedy Center’s 54-year tradition of bipartisan governance.
This was not governance; it was conquest. Trump replaced dedicated arts professionals with loyalists including his chief of staff Susie Wiles, second lady Usha Vance, and Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo. He installed Richard Grenell, his former ambassador to Germany, as interim president, who immediately fired approximately 40 staff members and replaced them with political operatives.
The Labor Dimension: Workers Resist Cultural Vandalism
From a socialist perspective, the Kennedy Center crisis illuminates the fundamental antagonism between capital’s demands for ideological conformity and workers’ insistence on professional dignity. More than 100 employees have resigned or been terminated under Trump’s reign, including nearly every major head of programming and the entire social impact team. Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the acclaimed artist who served as vice president and artistic director of Social Impact, described being fired while literally “taking down everything Black” from his office—a visceral metaphor for the cultural erasure Trump’s administration pursues.
In response to this authoritarian restructuring, approximately 90 remaining Kennedy Center employees voted to form a union with help from the United Auto Workers, expressing concern that the Trump administration seeks to “dismantle mission-essential departments and reshape our arts programming.” This organizing effort represents workers recognizing that their labor—the actual creative and administrative work that makes culture possible—cannot be separated from questions of artistic freedom and social justice.
The Feminist Critique: Masculine Domination Masquerading as Cultural Leadership
Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover exemplifies patriarchal power at its most grotesque: the entitled assumption that institutional legacy, artistic excellence, and collective cultural heritage can be simply appropriated and rebranded according to one man’s ego. His 12-minute opening remarks—mercifully edited down to two minutes by CBS—revealed the narcissistic core of authoritarian masculinity. He boasted on Truth Social about possibly abandoning the presidency “to make ‘hosting’ a full time job,” treating the nation’s highest office and its premier cultural institution as interchangeable props for personal brand-building.
The renaming itself—adding Trump’s name to a memorial established by Congress to honor President John F. Kennedy after his assassination—constitutes an act of symbolic violence against historical memory. It erases not just Kennedy’s legacy but the collaborative, democratic vision that the center was meant to embody. As Joe Kennedy III noted, “The Kennedy Center is a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law. It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial.”
Corporate Media’s Complicity and Resistance
CBS’s decision to drastically cut Trump’s rambling self-aggrandizement and refuse to use his proposed “Trump Kennedy Center” branding demonstrates rare corporate resistance to authoritarian narrative control. According to internal memos obtained by The Washington Post, CBS instructed staff that “we should NOT be calling it Trump Kennedy Center, or the Trump Kennedy Center Honors, unless quoting from those who don’t realize an official name change only comes from Congress.” This journalistic integrity stands in stark contrast to the sycophantic coverage Trump receives from his propaganda outlets.
The Islamic Perspective: Justice, Stewardship, and the Perversion of Trust
Islamic principles of amanah (trust) and adl (justice) provide a powerful framework for understanding Trump’s Kennedy Center seizure. He was entrusted with presidential authority—not to aggrandize himself, but to serve the public good. The Kennedy Center, established by Congress as a public trust and cultural commons, was meant to be stewarded for the benefit of all Americans, particularly in service of elevating diverse artistic voices and expanding access to culture.
Instead, Trump has transformed it into an instrument of cultural exclusion and ideological enforcement. His new programming agenda targets LGBTQ+ artists, replaces diverse cultural offerings with Christian nationalist content, and explicitly seeks to eliminate what he deems insufficiently patriotic. This represents not stewardship but betrayal—the perversion of a sacred trust into an engine of oppression.
The Dismantling of Cultural Diversity
The purge of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact team—dedicated to commissioning works by Black composers and expanding outreach to marginalized communities—reveals the white supremacist core of Trump’s cultural agenda. Marc Bamuthi Joseph described the new leadership’s efforts to “disavow much of the literal color that has made this place special.” Artists including Issa Rae, the producers of Hamilton, and Rhiannon Giddens have withdrawn from Kennedy Center engagements in protest.
In their place, Trump’s programming features Christian Broadcasting Network documentaries, CPAC “Christian Persecution Summits,” and prayer vigils for far-right activists. This represents not cultural leadership but ideological indoctrination—the replacement of artistic excellence with political conformity.
The People’s Verdict: Ratings Collapse as Popular Rejection
The catastrophic viewership numbers tell the story that Trump’s loyalist board cannot suppress: the American people are rejecting this authoritarian cultural project. Vulture’s Josef Adalian called the ratings a “massacre,” noting that performance among key demographics was “roughly HALF of 2024 show.” The demographic collapse proves particularly devastating—advertisers’ most valued age groups abandoned the broadcast in unprecedented numbers, with demo ratings plummeting to 0.14 compared to previous years.
The disconnect between Trump’s base and high culture became starkly visible. As commentator Alan Nafzger observed, “MAGA supporters are more likely to beat your ass in the parking lot at Denny’s than watch the Kennedy Center Honors.” This cutting assessment captures the fundamental contradiction of Trump’s cultural project: attempting to weaponize an elite cultural institution to serve a political movement actively hostile to the very concept of artistic excellence and cultural sophistication that the Kennedy Center represents.
When compared to 2022’s viewership of 5.2 million, the decline reaches 49%—a devastating trajectory that mirrors the Kennedy Center’s broader institutional collapse under Trump’s mismanagement. This isn’t gradual audience erosion; it’s accelerating rejection. The steepest drop occurred precisely when Trump inserted himself as host, suggesting that his presence actively repels viewers rather than attracting them despite his Reality TV background and constant boasts about ratings prowess.
Subscriptions have dropped $1.6 million (approximately 36%), and ticket sales for September and October 2025 hit their lowest levels since 2018, excluding the pandemic year of 2020. These economic indicators reflect not mere consumer preference but active resistance. People are voting with their wallets and their attention, refusing to legitimate Trump’s cultural vandalism with their participation.
The Socialist Analysis: Privatization of Cultural Commons
From a materialist perspective, Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover represents the logical endpoint of neoliberal cultural policy: the transformation of public institutions into vehicles for private aggrandizement and ideological reproduction. The center, which receives federal funding through congressional appropriation, was meant to serve as a commons—a space where diverse artistic expression could flourish beyond market pressures and political interference.
Trump’s installation of Richard Grenell, who immediately mandated a “break-even policy” for every performance and facility rental, subjects art to the same profit logic that governs corporate enterprise. This financialization of culture inevitably excludes experimental work, marginalizes artists without commercial appeal, and reduces artistic value to box office returns. It represents the colonization of the cultural sphere by capitalist rationality—precisely what public arts institutions were designed to resist.
CBS’s Editorial Intervention: Network Resistance to Authoritarian Messaging
The network’s decision to slash Trump’s 12-minute monologue to approximately two minutes reveals the editorial judgment required when broadcasting authoritarian spectacle. Among the remarks CBS deemed inappropriate for broadcast was Trump telling the assembled artists: “If there is one thread that connects all of these amazing artists together, it is the word ‘persistence.’ I know so many of you, and you are persistent. Many of you are miserable, horrible people. But you are persistent, you never give up. Sometimes I wish you’d give up, but you don’t.”
This casual contempt for artists—calling honorees “miserable, horrible people” at an event ostensibly celebrating their achievements—encapsulates Trump’s relationship to culture: simultaneously dependent on it for legitimacy and resentful of those who create it. CBS’s editorial team recognized that broadcasting such remarks would transform the Kennedy Center Honors from cultural celebration into narcissistic humiliation ritual.
The Class Dimension of Cultural Gatekeeping
Trump’s boast about being “98% involved” in choosing “anti-woke” honorees including Sylvester Stallone, KISS, and Gloria Gaynor reveals the class anxieties underlying his cultural politics. He explicitly stated he rejected “plenty” of suggestions because they were “too woke”—effectively imposing an ideological litmus test on artistic achievement. While these artists have legitimate cultural value, their selection alongside the explicit exclusion of artists Trump deems too political represents an attempt to define “real America” against cosmopolitan elites.
The contrast with the previous year illuminates what was lost. The 2024 Kennedy Center Honors under President Biden celebrated filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the Grateful Dead, singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt, jazz composer Arturo Sandoval, and Harlem’s Apollo Theater—the first institution ever honored. This diverse slate represented artistic excellence across genres, cultures, and communities. Trump’s 2025 selections, while featuring talented performers, deliberately narrowed cultural breadth to avoid anyone he perceived as insufficiently loyal or “woke.”
This populist performance obscures the actual class dynamics at play: a billionaire real estate developer, born into inherited wealth, positioning himself as champion of “the masses” while systematically dismantling institutions that provide working-class access to high culture. The Kennedy Center’s rainbow-ribboned medallion symbolizing diversity in the performing arts was redesigned under Trump’s leadership to feature blue ribbons instead—a literal whitewashing of the institution’s commitment to cultural pluralism.
The Kennedy Center under democratic governance honored diverse artists including jazz musicians, filmmakers, theater companies, and cultural institutions like Harlem’s Apollo Theater. Trump’s transformation replaces this cultural breadth with ideologically vetted spectacle—culture as propaganda rather than culture as exploration, challenge, and transformation.
Institutional Resistance and the Path Forward
The irony of Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover becomes even sharper when examining his first-term relationship with the institution. In 2017, Trump and Melania Trump decided not to participate in Kennedy Center Honors events “to allow the Honorees to celebrate without any political distraction”—a decision that followed honoree Norman Lear’s refusal to attend a White House celebration over Trump’s proposed arts funding cuts. Trump skipped the honors altogether for all four years of his first term. Meanwhile, President Biden attended all four ceremonies during his term, maintaining the tradition of presidential participation without demanding center stage.
Despite Trump’s authoritarian makeover, pockets of resistance persist. The National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera continue programming largely undisturbed. Washington Performing Arts moved all Kennedy Center performances to alternative venues. Former NSO music director Leonard Slatkin and former artistic adviser Renée Fleming resigned in protest. The 90 workers who voted to unionize represent organized labor’s recognition that defending artistic freedom requires collective power.
These acts of resistance, however fragmented, point toward the necessary response: mass mobilization to defend cultural institutions as democratic commons, worker control over artistic production, and the subordination of cultural policy to principles of justice, inclusion, and artistic freedom rather than oligarchic vanity and ideological conformity.
The Ratings Collapse as Political Instruction
Trump’s response to the catastrophic ratings reveals the cognitive dissonance at the heart of authoritarian personality. Despite presiding over the least-watched Kennedy Center Honors in television history, he proclaimed on Truth Social: “Tell me what you think of my ‘Master of Ceremony’ abilities. If really good, would you like me to leave the presidency in order to make ‘hosting’ a full-time job?” This delusional self-assessment—proposing a career change based on historically bad performance—would be comedic if it weren’t so revealing about authoritarian psychology’s imperviousness to empirical reality.
Trump’s hosting performance was particularly jarring given the role’s distinguished history. Previous hosts included legendary journalist Walter Cronkite (who hosted from 1981 to 2002), comedian Stephen Colbert, and singer Queen Latifah—all respected cultural figures who understood the ceremony’s purpose was elevating honorees, not themselves. When asked how he prepared for the role, Trump admitted he “didn’t really prepare very much” and claimed “I have a good memory, so I can remember things, which is very fortunate.” This cavalier approach to hosting an event honoring lifetime artistic achievement speaks volumes about Trump’s contempt for the cultural work the ceremony was meant to celebrate.
The historic nature of Trump’s role as the first sitting president to host rather than observe from the presidential box was meant to signal his unique appeal and cultural influence. Trump predicted at the State Department dinner that the broadcast “will be the highest-rated show that they’ve ever done” and boasted “there’s nothing like what’s going to happen.” Instead, it produced the exact opposite: a record-setting audience exodus that demonstrates how Trump’s insertion into cultural events transforms them from celebrations of artistic achievement into exercises in political narcissism that viewers actively reject.
The historic viewership failure of Trump’s Kennedy Center Honors delivers a lesson that extends far beyond arts programming. It demonstrates that authoritarian power, no matter how aggressively wielded against institutions and workers, cannot manufacture genuine cultural legitimacy. Trump can fire boards, purge staff, rebrand buildings, and reshape programming, but he cannot compel people to watch, attend, or participate in the degraded spectacle that results.
This is the fundamental weakness of authoritarian cultural projects: they can destroy but not create, suppress but not inspire, command but not persuade. The 2.65 million viewers who tuned in—compared to 5.2 million in 2022—represent not just audience preference but political judgment. Americans are witnessing the transformation of a cherished cultural institution into an extension of presidential ego and rejecting it accordingly.
Toward a Democratic Cultural Commons
The Kennedy Center crisis clarifies what is at stake in contemporary struggles over cultural institutions: Will they serve as democratic commons where diverse artistic voices can flourish, or will they become instruments of ideological enforcement and oligarchic self-glorification? Will cultural workers have voice and agency in shaping programming, or will they be reduced to implementing the dictates of political appointees? Will public arts funding expand access and experimentation, or will it subsidize billionaire vanity projects?
From feminist, Islamic, and socialist perspectives, these questions demand not merely preservation of the status quo ante but transformation toward genuine democratic control. This means worker governance of cultural institutions, community-based programming that centers marginalized voices, rejection of commercial metrics as measures of artistic value, and cultural policy grounded in principles of justice, dignity, and collective flourishing rather than individual aggrandizement.
The catastrophic ratings for Trump’s Kennedy Center Honors suggest that despite decades of neoliberal assault on public culture and authoritarian attempts to weaponize cultural institutions, Americans retain democratic intuitions about what art should be and whom it should serve. The challenge facing progressive movements is to channel that popular rejection into organized demands for cultural democracy—not just resistance to Trump’s cultural vandalism but construction of genuinely egalitarian alternatives.
The View from Below
Marc Bamuthi Joseph, recording his farewell video while dismantling his Kennedy Center office, articulated what workers across cultural institutions increasingly recognize: “I am grieving and angry and also ready to be rid of the moral injury that has come with being in this place. It’s hard to say goodbye, but it isn’t hard to say goodbye to an oppressive situation. So, may liberation be my liturgy.”
This synthesis of grief and determination, rage and hope, captures the emotional reality of cultural workers navigating institutional destruction. It also points toward the necessary politics: one that refuses complicity with oppression while sustaining commitment to liberatory cultural practice. The Kennedy Center under Trump is lost to democratic culture. The question is what will be built in opposition and eventually in its place—what cultural institutions might emerge that actually embody the principles of justice, inclusion, and artistic freedom that Trump’s authoritarian project seeks to destroy.
The 2.65 million viewers who watched Trump’s Kennedy Center debacle represent the high-water mark of authoritarian cultural legitimacy. The trajectory is clear: declining subscriptions, collapsing ticket sales, artist boycotts, worker organizing, and popular rejection. This is not the arc of a successful cultural transformation but the death spiral of an institution hollowed out by ideological purges and subordinated to oligarchic vanity. What remains to be seen is whether this collapse will catalyze the construction of genuinely democratic cultural alternatives or merely leave ruins in its wake.