By: Jeff Gorman

By any honest reckoning, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has survived wars, assassinations, recessions, and cultural upheavals. It was born in tragedy, consecrated in memory of a fallen president, and sustained by a bipartisan covenant that the arts—whatever their ideological valence—should belong to the whole nation. Yet now, as The New York Daily News has reported on Thursday, a self-styled coterie of left-wing artists has chosen to stage a boycott not over censorship, not over the silencing of expression, but over a name on a building.

The latest to defect is Béla Fleck, a multi-Grammy-winning banjo virtuoso who announced this week that he will cancel three performances with the National Symphony Orchestra after President Trump’s hand-picked board added the president’s name to the Kennedy Center’s branding. Fleck lamented, according to The New York Daily News report, that performing at what he derisively called the “Trump Kennedy Center” had “become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music.”

One almost admires the irony.

For years, the cultural Left has insisted that art is inseparable from politics, that silence is complicity, that every stage is a platform for protest. Yet now, confronted with a president they loathe asserting his administrative prerogative over a federally chartered institution, they suddenly rediscover a yearning for “apolitical” sanctuaries.

As The New York Daily News has reported, Fleck’s withdrawal follows a wave of cancellations that began after President Trump replaced the Kennedy Center’s board in February 2025, naming himself chairman in a move he said was designed to cleanse the institution of “woke” programming. Last month, when Trump’s name was added to the outside of the building, the exodus metastasized into a full-blown campaign of cultural abstention.

Jazz drummer Chuck Redd abruptly canceled his long-running Christmas Eve performance of nearly two decades. New York City-based acts—Asian AF, Wayne Tucker and his band The Bad Mothas, Doug Varone and Dancers—followed suit. Stephen Schwartz, the Oscar-winning composer of Wicked, Godspell, and Pippin, declared he would never again “set foot” in the building, which he claimed no longer represented “free artistic expression.” Each denunciation was dutifully amplified by The New York Daily News, which has positioned itself as the paper of record for the boycott.

The center’s interim president, Richard Grenell—a veteran diplomat and unapologetic Trump loyalist—has not hidden his disgust. In a post on X quoted by The New York Daily News, Grenell excoriated Fleck for surrendering to ideological hysteria: “You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties.”

That line, for all its bluntness, captures the essence of the controversy. Who, precisely, is politicizing the Kennedy Center? A president who appoints a board and rebrands a public institution under his authority—or performers who refuse to play for half the country because they detest the name above the marquee?

Grenell was equally categorical in reaffirming the center’s mission: “The Trump Kennedy Center believes all people are welcome—Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics.” This inclusive vision, ironically, is what the boycotters reject. Their boycott is not a defense of neutrality; it is an assertion of ideological ownership over a national institution.

The building in question was created by Act of Congress as a “living memorial” to John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963. That designation was always symbolic rather than theological. It never meant that the institution must be frozen in a 1960s amber or immune to contemporary leadership.

Trump’s critics portray the addition of his name as an act of desecration. But from a legal and historical perspective, the president is well within his rights to shape the governance and branding of a federal institution. What he has not done—despite endless insinuations—is censor programs, blacklist performers, or demand ideological conformity from those who appear on the stage.

Instead, it is the artists who are imposing conditions. They are the ones turning litmus tests into contracts, insisting that unless the Kennedy Center conforms to their politics, they will withhold their talents from the American public.

Fleck’s statement, reprinted in The New York Daily News, was drenched in regret. He said he looked forward to jamming with the National Symphony Orchestra “under different circumstances.” But what circumstances, exactly? A different president? A different electorate? A cultural landscape in which conservatives are once again expected to subsidize institutions that treat them with barely concealed contempt?

The banjoist insists that he wants the focus to be “on the music.” Yet he is the one who has made the music conditional. He is the one who has transformed three orchestral evenings into a political referendum.

What we are witnessing, as The New York Daily News’s own reporting inadvertently demonstrates, is not the defense of artistic integrity but the consolidation of cultural secession. These artists are not protesting repression; they are protesting pluralism. They are not fleeing censorship; they are fleeing a country in which their ideological monopoly is no longer guaranteed.

For decades, conservative audiences have paid taxes that subsidize institutions that sneer at them. They have endured lectures disguised as performances, manifestos masquerading as musicals. Now, when a president unapologetically asserts that these institutions must welcome “Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics,” the reaction is hysteria.

Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center is not a purge; it is a reset. As The New York Daily News has acknowledged, the president’s stated goal is to eradicate “woke” programming—a term that, stripped of caricature, refers to the ideological monoculture that has alienated millions of Americans from the cultural sphere.

This is not about banning progressive art. It is about ending the assumption that the arts belong exclusively to the progressive Left. It is about reasserting that the Kennedy Center is a national stage, not a boutique salon for Manhattan sensibilities.

In the end, the greatest casualties of this boycott will not be Trump or Grenell. It will be the audiences—the schoolchildren from rural districts, the veterans visiting Washington, the families who saved for months to hear the National Symphony Orchestra—who will find their seats empty and their programs truncated because a handful of celebrities could not tolerate a nameplate.

The New York Daily News may frame this saga as a noble rebellion. But history is unlikely to be so indulgent. It will remember that when confronted with the most modest demand of democratic life—to share a public space with ideological opponents—America’s cultural aristocracy chose flight over fellowship.

The Kennedy Center will endure. It always has. The only question is whether the artists who abandoned it will one day realize that, in boycotting a building, they may have forfeited something far more valuable: the trust of the people they once claimed to serve.