President Trump announced the 2026 Kennedy Center Honorees on Monday, and the same establishment that spent decades treating a taxpayer-funded stage as its private patronage machine is suddenly very concerned about partisanship.
The honorees — Oscar-nominated actor Andy Garcia, Pulitzer-winning playwright David Mamet, singer Paul Anka, country artist Barbara Mandrell, and legendary producer David Foster — will be celebrated at a Dec. 7 ceremony. But for the first time in the event's 49-year history, it won't happen at the Kennedy Center itself. The venue is closed amid renovations and a legal fight over Trump's attempt to put his name on the building. Instead, the honors move to Capital One Arena.
Trump called the honorees "amazing artists whose lifelong work has shaped American culture and inspired generations of audiences," according to a press release reported by HuffPost.
HuffPost framed the selections as politically motivated, noting that Mamet has defended Trump in interviews and that Anka once described Trump as "an old friend of mine for 50 years." The outlet also highlighted that Trump shared a reworked rendition of "My Way" featuring lyrics by Anka that referenced the White House and Mar-a-Lago. The implication: these picks are patronage, not merit.
Which is an odd complaint from the people who ran the place. The Kennedy Center was built in 1971 as a "living memorial" to JFK and has been subsidized by Congress to the tune of $257 million for upkeep alone. For decades, that institution doled out honors to artists acceptable to the coastal tastemaker class. Nobody in the press called that partisanship. The moment Trump's name goes on the marquee — literally — the rules change.
And they really did want his name on the marquee. Trump took over the venue and attempted to rebrand it the Trump-Kennedy Center. A federal judge ruled in May that the name was added illegally without congressional approval and ordered it removed. Trump told Time he won't allow renovations to proceed unless his name goes back on the building.
Last year's ceremony, hosted by Trump himself, honored Sylvester Stallone and Gloria Gaynor. HuffPost noted that CBS broadcast ratings hit an all-time low — a detail that tells you more about who stopped watching than who was honored.
The HotAir editorial frame is worth noting here: the outlet cast the current political moment as a stark "time for choosing" between preserving America's constitutional order and surrendering to a Marxist transformation. That's the broader context in which the Kennedy Center fight sits. The institution isn't neutral ground. It never was. It's a publicly funded cultural battlefield, and one side is only now realizing it doesn't hold the high ground anymore.
The question isn't whether the Kennedy Center is political. It always has been. The question is why the people who ran it for decades only noticed when they lost control.
