Much about the nature of the second Trump presidency could be grasped throughout 2025 in its imperious conduct toward The Kennedy Center. There have been murmurings, sure to resurface periodically, of changing the name to the Trump Center. The president will host the next Kennedy Center Honors event himself, he has declared. There will be no jazz musician among the honorees — which is not unprecedented, although typically there’s someone jazz- or blues-adjacent, which cannot be said for KISS and George Strait. Gloria Gaynor, maybe, but I won’t get into it (you will survive).
To peruse the Kennedy Center website now is to see a fractured country in microcosm. There’s still a Social Credo page, talking up the Center’s Social Impact program, which is now all but gone. Q-Tip is still listed as Artistic Director for Hip Hop Culture. Muriel Bowser and Chuck Schumer are still listed on the Ex Officio Board of Trustees, and all our living First Ladies are listed as Honorary Chairs.
Pianist Jason Moran, the Center’s Artistic Director for Jazz since 2011, stepped aside on his own terms in early July. Kevin Struthers, Jazz Coordinator since 1995, was fired in early September. His time at the Center dates to when late pianist Dr. Billy Taylor founded the position that Moran would later occupy. Struthers has area expertise and institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced — which would be a problem if the current leadership had any interest in replacing it.
If we look to dance at the Center we can see where this is probably going. Longtime dance director Jane Raleigh and her team were let go in late August; in her place came Stephen Nakagawa, who displayed his ideological fitness by decrying the prevalence of “wokeness” and ideas around diversity, equity and inclusion in the dance field. I imagine finding and installing the jazz equivalent of Nakagawa isn’t far off.
This is all of a piece with Trump’s censorious moves against the Smithsonian, in particular the National Museum of African American History and, as Adrian Carrasquillo has reported for The Bulwark, the proposed Museum of the American Latino. Letting jazz artists engage in free expression at The Kennedy Center would undercut the state-sponsored revisionism underway in the museums. Better to turn the former into a conduit for Christian Broadcasting Network agitprop, or a prayer vigil for Charlie Kirk — who Roma Daravi, the recently named Vice President of Kennedy Center Public Relations, called “a champion in the culture war” from her personal account on X.
The standard MAGA response, already aggressively in use by the Center’s new MAGA director Richard Grinnell, is that anyone bothered by the shift in Kennedy Center programming simply can’t bear to be around Republicans. They are all just intolerant of other points of view. We are blameless, say the MAGA culture warriors; it is someone else’s fault. I’ve started to call this SEF, which I argue must be understood as a kind of social virus. SEF is the entire core credo of the MAGA movement, its first recourse in every scenario, without fail.
If the “other point of view” we’re supposed to tolerate is that there should be no real jazz at The Kennedy Center — that the past, present and future of American music and theater and dance should be presented only in a way that is acceptable to white Christian nationalists — then yes, I and the broad majority of our readers, along with our friends and colleagues in every arts discipline, are indeed intolerant of such a view and will challenge it vigorously at every step, as is our duty and fundamental right. JT