{"id":7233,"date":"2025-12-07T22:27:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T22:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/trump-kennedy-center-honors-host-2025-1236130130\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T22:27:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T22:27:30","slug":"trump-kennedy-center-honors-host-2025-1236130130","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/trump-kennedy-center-honors-host-2025-1236130130\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump Says He\u2019s Hosting Kennedy Center Honors Recognizing Gloria Gaynor, KISS &\u00a0Others"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tSylvester Stallone,\u00a0KISS<\/a>, George Strait<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Gloria Gaynor<\/a>\u00a0are among the luminaries being celebrated Sunday (Dec. 7) at the annual Kennedy Center Honors, with Donald Trump hosting the show, the first time a president will command the stage instead of sitting in an Opera House box.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tTrump Presents KISS, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor & More Kennedy Center Honorees With Medals in Oval\u00a0Office\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tSince returning to office in January, Trump has made Washington, D.C.\u2019s\u00a0John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which is named after a Democratic predecessor, a touchstone in a\u00a0broader attack\u00a0against what he has lambasted as \u201cwoke\u201d anti-American culture.<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump said in August that he had agreed to host the show. The Republican president said Saturday at a State Department dinner for the honorees that he was doing so \u201cat the request of a certain television network.\u201d He predicted that the broadcast, scheduled to air Dec. 23 on CBS and Paramount+, would have its best ratings ever.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s going to be something that I believe, and I\u2019m going to make a prediction: This will be the highest-rated show that they\u2019ve ever done and they\u2019ve gotten some pretty good ratings, but there\u2019s nothing like what\u2019s going to happen\u201d on Sunday night, Trump said.<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump is assuming a role that has been held in the past by journalist Walter Cronkite and comedian and Trump nemesis\u00a0Stephen Colbert, among others. Before Trump, presidents watched the show alongside the honorees. Trump\u00a0skipped the honors\u00a0altogether during his first term.<\/p>\n

Since 1978, the honors have recognized stars for their influence on American culture and the arts. Members of this year\u2019s class are pop-culture standouts, including Stallone for his Rocky<\/em> and Rambo<\/em> movies, Gaynor for her feminist anthem \u201cI Will Survive\u201d and KISS for its flashy, cartoonish makeup and onstage displays of smoke and fire. Country music superstar\u00a0George Strait\u00a0and Tony Award-winning actor Michael Crawford are also being honored.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ceremony is expected to be emotional for the members of KISS. The band\u2019s original lead guitarist,\u00a0Ace Frehley, died in October after he was injured during a fall. The band\u2019s co-founder Gene Simmons, speaking on the red carpet when he and the other honorees arrived for the ceremony, said the president had assured him there would be an empty chair among the members of KISS in memory of Frehley.<\/p>\n

\n\tCrawford called it \u201ca beautiful honor\u201d and said, \u201cIt\u2019s humbling, especially at the end of a career.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMike Farris, an award-winning gospel singer who is performing for Gaynor, said she is a dear friend. \u201cShe truly did survive,\u201d Farris said on the red carpet. \u201cWhat an iconic song.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPrevious honorees have come from a broad range of art forms, whether dance (Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham), theater (Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber), movies (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks) or music (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell).<\/p>\n

\n\t\tTrump has taken over the Kennedy Center\t<\/h4>\n

\n\tTrump upended decades of bipartisan support for the center by\u00a0ousting its leadership\u00a0and stacking the board of trustees with Republican supporters, who then elected him chair. He has criticized the center\u2019s programming and the building\u2019s appearance \u2014 and has said, perhaps jokingly, that he would rename it as the \u201cTrump Kennedy Center.\u201d He secured more than $250 million from Congress for renovations of the building.<\/p>\n

\n\tPresidents of each political party have at times found themselves face to face with artists of opposing political views. Republican Ronald Reagan was there for honoree Arthur Miller, a playwright who championed liberal causes. Democrat Bill Clinton, who had signed an assault weapons ban into law, marked the honors for Charlton Heston, an actor and gun rights advocate.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring Trump\u2019s first term, multiple honorees were openly critical of the president. In 2017, Trump\u2019s first year in office, honors recipient and film producer\u00a0Norman Lear\u00a0threatened to boycott his own ceremony if Trump attended. Trump stayed away during that entire term.<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump has said he was deeply involved in\u00a0choosing the 2025 honorees\u00a0and turned down some recommendations because they were \u201ctoo woke.\u201d While Stallone is one of Trump\u2019s\u00a0Hollywood \u201dspecial ambassadors\u201d\u00a0and has likened Trump to George Washington, the political views of Sunday\u2019s other guests are less clear.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tHonorees\u2019 views about Trump\t<\/h4>\n

\n\tStrait and Gaynor have said little about their politics, although Federal Election Commission records show that Gaynor has given money to Republican organizations in recent years.<\/p>\n

\n\tKISS co-founder Gene Simmons spoke favorably of Trump when Trump ran for president in 2016. But in 2022, Simmons told Spin<\/em> magazine that Trump was \u201cout for himself\u201d and criticized Trump for encouraging conspiracy theories and public expressions of racism.<\/p>\n

\n\tFellow KISS member Paul Stanley denounced Trump\u2019s effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden, and said Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 were \u201cterrorists.\u201d But after Trump won in 2024, Stanley urged unity.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf your candidate lost, it\u2019s time to learn from it, accept it and try to understand why,\u201d Stanley wrote on X. \u201cIf your candidate won, it\u2019s time to understand that those who don\u2019t share your views also believe they are right and love this country as much as you do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Sylvester Stallone,\u00a0KISS, George Strait\u00a0and\u00a0Gloria Gaynor\u00a0are among the luminaries being celebrated Sunday (Dec. 7) at the annual Kennedy Center Honors, with Donald Trump hosting the show, the first time a president…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,275,96,94,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genre-country","category-genre-rock","category-music","category-music-news","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}