The Trump-Kennedy center backfired. Rick Grenell is gaslighting everyone

The renaming of the Kennedy Center had immediate results. The artists canceled the performance. A long time relationship broke up. Programming began to disappear from the calendar. of Rick Grenell The response is to insist that it’s none of his business, and to threaten those who say otherwise.

That order is important.

After the Trump-appointed board voted to add the president of Donald Trump the name of John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center, cancellations soon followed. A veteran jazz group walks away from a New Year’s Eve show. A Christmas Eve jazz concert that has been running for nearly two decades has been canceled. A New York dance company has put back an anniversary performance at a cost of $40,000. These were not symbolic gestures. They involved real money, professional risk, and decisions that artists don’t make lightly.

Grenell, the Kennedy Center’s interim president/executive director and a senior Trump loyalist, responded by denying the relationship for all to see. He insisted that adding Trump’s name “politicized” the organization. He also emphasized that the artists who withdrew were “far-left political activists”, acting for political reasons. In Grenell’s words, the name change did nothing, and the reaction proved everything.

That position requires believing that politics entered the Kennedy Center only when artists objected to the name change, not when it was named.

Grenell did more than reject the cause. He grew. after chalk red, The longtime host of the canceled Christmas Eve jazz concert was fired, with Grenell publicly threatening him with a $1 million lawsuit. The message was ambiguous. Question the acquisition and face the consequences.

This is the point where denial turns to fear.

The cancellation artists did not issue a partisan manifesto. The Cookers, a veteran all-star jazz septet featuring musicians with decades-long careers, spoke about jazz’s roots in freedom of expression. Doug Varone, The founder of a nationally respected contemporary dance company set to celebrate its 40th anniversary at the Center, recounts the financially disastrous but morally clear withdrawal. These statements point in the same direction. Artists responded to changes in institutions, not to some abstract ideological grievance.

Grenell’s response reiterates that reality. By labeling dissident actors as extremists, he diverts attention from the political act that sets everything in motion. By threatening legal action, he discourages others from making similar connections in public. Denial becomes policy, and enforcement follows.

Grenell emphasized that the arts are now “for everyone.” His act defines inclusive terms. Artists are welcome as long as they perform without objection and accept the renaming as fixed. Compliance is the price of neutrality. Artists who withdraw their labor are re-characterized as political vandals. In this framework, politics becomes invisible when exercised by those responsible and unbearable when named by those affected.

The cost of this strategy is no longer theoretical. This is shown in the table. Performance is lost. Institutions don’t lose artists this way when they are perceived as neutral ground. Artists lose when trust is broken.

Grenell has brazenly argued that Trump “saved” the Kennedy Center. That claim is now testable. A saved organization doesn’t bleed programming weeks after rebranding. A healthy cultural center does not need threats to maintain compliance. The resurrected stage does not rest.

Political naming took a back seat. Cancellations were the response. Grenell’s denials and threats are an attempt to destroy that order.

A calendar keeps records anyway.

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