The King’s Court

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

 

Of all the ways the year in politics might have ended, a 2017-vintage liberal boycott was among the least likely.

 

Woke is dead, you may have heard, a casualty of last year’s presidential election. Twitter, once a dynamo for progressive cancel-culture mobs, is now a Nazi-friendly platform known as X. Under our new postliberal norms of free speech, you’re welcome to use words like “retarded” in polite company but publishing a news story about the president’s yearslong friendship with a pedophile makes you a threat to national security.

 

The Resistance as we knew it in its pussyhat-wearing heyday is defunct. The best America could do to match that spirit in 2025 was the “No Kings” demonstrations, where many protesters felt obliged to dress in cartoonishly innocuous costumes so that the president wouldn’t have a pretext to send the military to attack them.

 

How strange, then, to read news yesterday about anti-Trump artists canceling their upcoming performances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

 

There were two waves of performer boycotts this year, actually, with slightly different rationales for each. The first came in February when the president purged the center’s trustees, replaced them with MAGA stooges like diplomat Richard Grenell, and was duly elected chairman by the new board. The coup led the producers of Hamilton and actress Issa Rae, among others, to cancel future show dates in protest.

 

Some artists remained scheduled, though—until the stooge-ified board took the next step in stooge-ification by voting this month to rename the Kennedy Center after Donald Trump. That was too much for jazz acts like the Cookers and Chuck Redd, who promptly pulled the plug on holiday concerts they were planning. Folk singer Kristy Lee also canceled a date to play the, er, Trump Kennedy Center in January, admitting on social media that forfeiting the cash would “hurt” but that “losing my integrity would cost me more than any paycheck.”

 

You don’t need to be MAGA to have misgivings about this.

 

Against boycotts.

 

Dispatch friend and contributor Megan McArdle isn’t thrilled with it. Neither is Free Press essayist Kat Rosenfield. There’s a case to be made that the boycott will do more harm than good, assuming it’s doing any good at all.

 

For one thing, Megan correctly notes, it’s impossible to shame Donald Trump. The president isn’t going to pull his name off of the building or remove his cronies from the board of trustees because Chuck Redd suddenly convinced him that megalomania is obnoxious. He would sooner book Kid Rock to play Hamlet than appease artists who hate him by renouncing his cultural vanity project. If the point of boycotts is to pressure the target into changing some offensive policy, this one will surely fail.

 

It could also damage the Kennedy Center institutionally long-term. Imagine that every artist who’s currently booked to play the venue cancels in protest of the name change. That will mean fewer shows over the next three years than patrons are used to, and almost certainly shows of a lower quality. (Through the magic of AI slop, we can visualize the horror.) Regular attendees might lose their passion for going to the theater and not return when President Ozymandias finally passes from the scene.

 

There’s also a social cost. A bedrock Dispatch belief is that Trump’s norm-breaking doesn’t justify breaking norms in response; all that accomplishes is normalizing norm-breaking, which plays into postliberals’ hands. Artists disappointing ticket-holders (some of whom surely share their politics) by canceling performances at the last minute to make a political statement is in fact a violation of cultural norms. It also signals hostility to the president’s millions of supporters, not just to him: Refusing to perform at “his” venue denies him the respect that his predecessors enjoyed notwithstanding the legitimacy he gained last year by winning the popular vote.

 

On top of all that, a snowballing boycott among performers has more than a whiff about it of faddish woke virtue-signaling circa 2019. Did Kristy Lee really put her integrity above her paycheck by pulling out of a show at the Kennedy Center? Or did she simply protect other future paychecks by joining the bandwagon, not wanting to alienate fans by insisting on playing for Trump after other artists began canceling in protest?

 

There are many downsides to postliberalism’s cultural advance, but easing professional pressure on people to conform to whatever the left is screaming about on a given day isn’t one of them.

 

So there are reasons to think this boycott is lame, if not actively harmful. They’re just not very convincing.

 

For boycotts.

 

The problem with playing the “Trump Kennedy Center” is that you wouldn’t be playing for the audience. You’d be playing for Trump.

 

Remaking the center in his own image is obviously part of his plan to convert the presidency into as much of a monarchy as the law will (or won’t!) allow. The garish palatial gilding of the Oval Office is part of it, as of course is the ever-expanding ballroom he has planned on the White House grounds. The president wants his face on the currency, his name on the fleet, and his birthday as a sort of quasi-official federal holiday. If he can’t be king, he at least wants as many of the trappings of royalty as possible.

 

The newly rebranded “Trump Kennedy Center” is plainly meant to be the entertainment arm of the king’s court, one which he oversees personally, where the jesters gather to pay tribute and amuse him.

 

It’s a sick, third-world, anti-American project, and it’s where the argument about artists owing Trump the same respect that other presidents received breaks down. Other presidents didn’t try to turn the center into a monument to their own imperial grandeur. Under the circumstances, there’s no way to perform there without implicitly validating what he’s trying to do. He’s the legitimate president, but not the legitimate king.

 

And if his supporters perceive disrespect toward themselves in a performer boycott, that’s good. They deserve it. They’ve enabled this degenerate quasi-monarchy at every step. It’s strange, frankly, to worry about the tiny social cost of boycotting a performing arts venue when half the U.S. population has made clear—three times—that it’s prepared to indulge a corrupt Putin manqué in any form of autocratic viciousness he wishes to pursue provided that he makes groceries cheaper. That’s a social cost, substantial enough that Americans will never see each other the same way now that it’s been imposed, nor should they. The least we should expect from our artist class are small symbolic gestures recognizing that fact and signaling that the cost has, at long last, gotten too high.

 

As for Megan’s claim that Trump won’t be shamed into taking his name off the center, it’s both true and beside the point.

 

It won’t shame him emotionally but it could “shame” him as a political matter. A YouGov poll conducted 10 days ago found that 52 percent of Americans strongly disapprove of him renaming the Kennedy Center after himself while another 14 percent somewhat disapprove. Strong majorities of Democrats (95 percent), independents (67 percent), and non-MAGA Republicans (59 percent) oppose the rebranding. The artist boycott will keep the story in the news and hopefully further inflame opinion against it.

 

With any luck, public scorn for the Trump Kennedy Center will grow until the venue becomes a place no one apart from Ted Nugent or Kevin Sorbo wants to play, visit, or even watch on television. And if that happens, it might make the president think twice about installing an 800-foot statue of himself on top of the White House or whatever other insane stunt he’s planning to celebrate his own greatness.

 

Another way to put that is that there is a benefit to trying to deter Trump’s most Nero-ish tendencies with more than three years still left in his term, even at the risk of Kennedy Center patrons falling out of the habit of attending by 2029. The first priority is clearly more urgent than the second, although for what it’s worth, I think McArdle’s fear that the center will lose its audience permanently is overblown. It’s easy to imagine big-name acts flooding in to play there in 2029 at the invitation of a new Democratic president, reclaiming the space after Trump tried to turn it into a symbol of postliberal cultural hegemony. I wouldn’t be surprised if it became a hot ticket.

 

But even if Trump is in no way shamed by the boycott, it’s still worth doing. That’s because it’s not designed to shame him. It’s designed to shame everyone else.

 

More shame, please.

 

For my money, the story of the year in American politics was the titans of academia, business, and corporate law meekly capitulating to Trump’s mafia model of government. Repeatedly, even before he took office, people who wield immense cultural and financial power—and who were known until recently as progressives—groveled to him to avoid being harassed by arms of his mafia state.

 

Nothing in my lifetime has disillusioned me about American exceptionalism or the caliber of the ruling class as much as that has. Trump has an excuse for his shamelessness in that there’s obviously something wrong with him psychologically, but the consistent shamelessness of his richest and most influential courtiers was a revelation to a naive chump like me.

 

Plainly we’ve overcorrected for the excesses of the woke era. The decade before the Trump restoration was spent trying to convince institutions and their leaders that they should be ashamed of their part in America’s cultural sins; the 11 months since the Trump restoration has seemingly liberated those same leaders and institutions from feeling shame about anything, including and especially servility toward a boorish dark-age autocracy.

 

So it would be churlish under the circumstances to scold a bunch of performers for trying, however ineffectually, to encourage a sense of shame in the president’s enablers by refusing to enable him themselves. When Chuck Redd and Kristy Lee say “no thanks,” they’re not aiming to change Trump’s behavior, they’re aiming to change the behavior of anyone who’s reconciled themselves to quasi-monarchy out of cowardice or greed. They’re attempting to reduce the social cost of Trumpism by creating social pressure to resist it. If I can say no, you have no excuse to say yes.

 

America needs more shame about what it’s willing to tolerate on the off-chance that there’s still a way to un-boil the frogs. In a political era without virtue, I’ll take whatever virtue-signaling I can get, including from the empty stage at the Kennedy Center.

 

And if there isn’t a way to un-boil frogs, if Americans simply will not be exhorted into better behavior (as I suspect), I sympathize nonetheless with the boycotters for demonstrating a bit of dignity for its own sake. “It is financially devastating but morally exhilarating,” the head of a dance company told the New York Times after he canceled plans for his troupe to perform at the Kennedy Center, and plenty of conservatives can relate. If you move in right-wing circles and you’ve refused on principle to kowtow to Trump or his movement, you’ve sacrificed something since 2016—professionally, personally, or both.

 

Integrity, to borrow the word Lee used, is another thing America could use much more of.

 

Law and stigma.

 

There’s also this: Renaming the center after himself wasn’t merely a case of Trump behaving monarchically, it was a case of him behaving illegally. Yet, as has often happened since January 20, there seems to be little that the law can do to stop him.

 

The West Wing has become a sort of open-air market for criminal pardons, but the president can’t be touched for his role in it thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling granting presidents broad immunity for official acts. He’s being sued for knocking down the White House’s East Wing to make way for his ballroom, but the demolished structure obviously won’t be rebuilt even if he loses. His tariffs might yet be struck down but only after weighing down the U.S. economy unlawfully for many months. His missile strikes on suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific may or may not be legal, but the 100-plus people killed in them aren’t coming back either way.

 

Trump does stuff that can’t be undone and then lets others worry about whether he was allowed to do it or not.

 

The Kennedy Center name change can be undone, of course (and eventually will be by the next Democratic president), but I’ll be surprised if the lawsuit that’s been filed in the matter results in a judge ordering someone to pry Trump’s name off the building’s exterior or the institution’s homepage. Even if that happens, the president and the center’s stooge-ified trustees will continue to refer to it as the “Trump Kennedy Center” just as the White House insists on referring to the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” The law is an imperfect deterrent to a grandiose authoritarian sociopath.

 

If, in lieu of a legal remedy, a bunch of performers want to step into that vacuum and try to create a social stigma around the center to punish lawlessness, more power to them. The president acted in this case on the usual assumption that no one could stop him. The boycotters are at least trying—not by forcing him to change the name back, which they can’t do, but by defeating the purpose of his self-glorification project via delegitimizing it.

 

Stigmatizing illegal behavior will do in a pinch when it can’t be strictly prohibited. What’s a better alternative? A new round of “No Kings” rallies? A general strike (giggle)? Lobbying Congress to act (guffaw)?

 

I’ll end with this: Maybe some of these performers remember how Trump’s last presidency ended, are tracking the trajectory of his current one to gauge where it’s headed, and don’t want a gig that’s likely to come back to haunt them in the future.

 

You would think more people would be sensitive to that consideration at a moment when photos of Jeffrey Epstein hobnobbing with practically every member of America’s ruling class, including Donald Trump, surface in the news every day. As dark as the president’s first year back has been, it can and probably will get much darker. He hasn’t invoked the Insurrection Act—yet. He hasn’t interfered in an election—yet. He hasn’t pulled out of NATO or formally abandoned Ukraine—yet. But the night is young, politically speaking. His villainy will get worse.

 

Given how bad it could plausibly get, why would anyone outside of the MAGA right want to risk associating with him in a high-profile, publicly documented way?

 

I suspect that some of the artists who canceled on the Kennedy Center feared being confronted by hardcore liberal fans demanding to know why they would honor a villain by appearing at “his” performing arts venue. But come 2029, it might not just be Resistance types who hold that against them. When this is over, having performed for the king could be like having taken a photo with Epstein: It won’t prove that you condoned what he did but it will suggest that you didn’t have nearly as much of a problem with it as you should have.

 

Happy new year. May the next one be better than this one was, unlikely as that may be.