--- title: KISS, Sylvester Stallone Among Trump's Kennedy Center Honors Picks description: KISS, Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor, and Michael Crawford are the first Kennedy Center Honors recipients overseen by Trump. canonical: https://time.com/7309301/trump-kennedy-center-honors-kiss-sylvester-stallone-george-strait/ author: Philip Elliott article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-08-13T15:48:42.000Z article:modified_time: 2025-08-13T18:49:50.000Z article:section: Politics og:title: Trump Reveals Kennedy Center Honors Recipients og:description: KISS, Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor, and Michael Crawford are the first Kennedy Center Honors recipients overseen by Trump. og:url: https://time.com/7309301/trump-kennedy-center-honors-kiss-sylvester-stallone-george-strait/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6c9817fc6e0b9e0a/6998c8f907a30d626e77d3df/Kennedy-Center-Honors-recipients.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: Kennedy Center Honors recipients og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Trump Reveals Kennedy Center Honors Recipients twitter:description: KISS, Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor, and Michael Crawford are the first Kennedy Center Honors recipients overseen by Trump. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6c9817fc6e0b9e0a/6998c8f907a30d626e77d3df/Kennedy-Center-Honors-recipients.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Kennedy Center Honors Is Now Just Another Trump Show > Sponsored content. 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Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=9f0bf591-3d72-45a9-8033-76a691a2132c&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Trump Reveals Kennedy Center Honors Recipients: KISS, Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor, Michael Crawford [Watch (HLS stream): Trump Reveals Kennedy Center Honors Recipients: KISS, Sylvester Stallone, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor, Michael Crawford](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/OZ9zUq1Q.m3u8) (4:17)  _Published 2025-08-13. President Donald Trump on Wednesday named country music star George Strait, “Rocky” actor Sylvester Stallone, singer Gloria Gaynor, the rock band Kiss and actor-singer Michael Crawford among the first batch of Kennedy Center Honors nominees under his leadership as the center’s chairman and said he’ll host the awards program._  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Updated: Aug 13, 2025 6:49 PM UTCPublished: Aug 13, 2025 3:48 PM UTC President Donald Trump on Wednesday named country music star George Strait, “Rocky” actor Sylvester Stallone, singer Gloria Gaynor, the rock band Kiss and actor-singer Michael Crawford among the first batch of Kennedy Center Honors nominees under his leadership as the center’s chairman and said he’ll host the awards program.  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Updated: Aug 13, 2025 6:49 PM UTCPublished: Aug 13, 2025 3:48 PM UTC _This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up_ [_here_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite) _to get stories like this sent to your inbox._ In his first turn as the chief of the Kennedy Center, President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced he would honor a disco queen, the King of Country Music, a glam-metal original, plus the original [Phantom of the Opera](http://time.com/archive/6711483/theater-music-of-the-night-the-phantom-of-the-opera/%28opens in a new tab%29) and [Rocky](https://time.com/4116452/original-rocky-review-creed/). The choices of Gloria Gaynor, George Strait, Kiss, Michael Crawford, and [Sylvester Stallone](https://time.com/5309975/donald-trump-kim-jong-un-sylvester-stallone/) for the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors signal yet the latest example of Trump putting his thumb on the scale of American culture and tossing it back to yesteryear. It also illustrated just how much Trump’s culture-warrior ethos has bled into almost all corners of his reality as he looks to restore his heyday of the 1970s and ‘80s. Trump visited the arts complex to announce his picks for aprizethat’s typically seen as above politics but couldn’t escape the President’s reach after he [annexed the arts center](http://time.com/7221538/donald-trump-kennedy-center/) as part of his orbit. Trump instead declared the legacy organization would honor this cohort come December and he would host the star-studded evening that is the biggest single night for the center as a piece of his war on wokeness. In a twitch of bravado, he noted the reality show he last hosted a decade ago eclipsed the ratings of some award shows and that his hosting at the Kennedy Center might again draw eyeballs—the latest example of how Trump cannot even let lifetime achievement touchstones exist beyond his own aura. “I shouldn’t make this political because they made the Academy Awards political and they went down the tubes. So they’ll say, ‘Trump made it political.’ But I think if we make it our kind of political, we’ll go up, OK? Let’s see if I’m right about that,” Trump said. It was a brutally honest disclosure about just how much Trump wants to put his stamp on the next stretch of the nation’s history, which will coincide with the United States’ 250th anniversary and the country playing a host role for both the Olympics and the [World Cup](https://time.com/7280401/fifa-world-cup-2026-host-cities-qualifiers-how-to-watch-winners/) next year. Grounded in grievance, Trump nakedly cast his picks—which he said he was deeply involved with—as the latest chapter in his score settling and restoring a bygone era of machismo, glitter, and excess. “I turned down plenty. They were too woke. I had a couple of wokesters,” Trump said, once more injecting politics into what normally is an apolitical event. (Of course, Trump’s list doesn’t include those who he failed to land. The Washington _Post_, citing current and former Kennedy Center employees, reported Tom Cruise was offered the honors but [declined](https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2025/08/13/trump-kennedy-center-honorees/) due to “scheduling conflicts.”) The sprawling session with reporters in the Kennedy Center’s Hall of Nations fell in line with history’s precedent, even as it veered far afield from the stated purpose of the midday event. Presidents have long reveled in associating themselves with the bold-faced names receiving such awards as the Kennedy Center Honors. Yet no President before Trump has framed the recipients as so completely tied to his personal preferences. **Read more:** [_Why Trump’s Kennedy Center Takeover Will Reverberate in Hollywood and Beyond_](https://time.com/7221538/donald-trump-kennedy-center/) Power often gives permission to those who have it to [indulge](https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/19/style/graham-sutherland-winston-churchill-portrait) in some occasional petty impulses, often reshaping cultural identities as second-order effects. Joseph Stalin saw himself as a state [arbiter](https://www.carnegiehall.org/Explore/Articles/2021/03/11/Shostakovich-and-the-Soviet-State) of Soviet taste, going so far as to pencil in edits to poetry translations, order rewrites of opera lyrics, and to [reject](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/can-shostakovich-ever-escape-stalins-shadow) musical works he could not whistle. Prime Minister Winston Churchill so disliked a portrait commissioned for his eightieth birthday that his secretary [burned](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/the-crown-what-really-happened-to-graham-sutherlands-controversial-portrait-of-winston-churchill/) it. President George H.W. Bush [harbored](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-03-22-mn-1244-story.html) a childhood grudge against broccoli and banned from Air Force One, famously telling reporters that no one could make him eat it: “I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it, and I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.” Then there’s Trump, who is showing more than a little bratty flare-up these days. Tying his stewardship of the Kennedy Center to his broader rewrite of Washington, Trump said it is all a piece of his reframing of the nation’s capital to put forward his vision of the United States—down to the smallest detail, whether it be the columns of the Kennedy Center or the landscape itself. “We’re going to redo the grass with the finest grasses,” said Trump, who earlier this year [fired](https://time.com/7221538/donald-trump-kennedy-center/) the Kennedy Center’s board and its chairman and forced out its day-to-day leader. In their place, Trump appointed loyalists, who in turn declared him the chair of the nation’s temple to the performing arts. And since then, performers and tours have canceled stops there in protest, and some marquee artistic partners have resigned their roles advising the center on programming choices. And other major D.C. events, including those around [World Pride](https://time.com/7286144/worldpride-lgbtq-washington-dc-trump/), saw the curtain coming down before opening night. The result has been an overhaul of what for decades was seen as a livingtribute to the slain 35th President worthy of bipartisan support. The Kennedy Center Honors have now become yet another flashpoint in Trump’s never-ending stream of culture-war spats, with the President going so far as to suggest the complex on the Potomac might be better called the “Kennedy/ Trump Center.” After all, before January, the Kennedy Center’s public spaces were adorned only by a bronze bust of JFK. Now, giant portraits ofthe President and Vice President J.D. Vance have joinedalong with those of their wives. House Republicans, meanwhile, have [proposed](https://www.npr.org/2025/07/24/nx-s1-5477484/republicans-want-to-rename-the-kennedy-centers-opera-house-after-melania-trump) renaming the giant Opera House for First Lady Melania Trump. Trump’s cultural reach is spreading far beyond the Kennedy Center’s riverside campus. This week his White House [sent](https://time.com/7309220/smithsonian-review-white-house-trump/) a letter to the head of the Smithsonian ordering it to comport with Trump’s vision for “Americanism.” An exhibit briefly [erased](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/11/smithsonian-trump-impeachment-display-changes/85611633007/) mentions of Trump’s two impeachments before restoring them with edits. And he has [ordered](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/04/confederate-statue-protest-trump-albert-pike/) the restoration of a Confederate statue about a mile east of the White House. Trump, unbowed, seems unable to pump the brakes. Washington is left watching to see if there is even a limit to how fast Trump will accelerate his revenge tour of Washington. It’s doubtful Trump is familiar with former New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1986 [lecture](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/books/review/daniel-patrick-moynihan-was-often-right-joe-klein-on-why-it-still-matters.html) at Harvard that included this observation: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Both, of course, can be true, as Trump’s actions of late have proven in ways that are as consequential as they are petty. He just happens to have Rambo as a sidekick. _Make sense of what matters in Washington._ [_Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite)_._ ## Transcript [00:05] Thank you very much. This is a very exciting project. [00:09] Let's talk about right now the Kennedy Center. [00:11] And I'm delighted to be here as we officially announce [00:14] the incredibly talented artists who [00:18] will be celebrated later this year at the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors. [00:24] It's going to be a big evening. [00:27] I've been asked to host. [00:30] I said, I'm the President of the United States. [00:33] Are you fools asking me to do that? [00:35] Sir, you'll get much higher ratings. [00:38] I said, I don't care, I'm President of the United States. [00:41] I won't do it. [00:42] They said, please. [00:44] And then Siouxsie Wiles said to me, sir, I like it. [00:47] I said, okay, I'll do it. [00:49] That's the power she's got. [00:52] But I just, uh. [00:53] So I have agreed to host. [00:55] You believe what I have to do, [00:57] and I didn't want to do it. [00:59] Okay, they're going to say he insisted. [01:00] I did not insist, [01:01] but I think it will be quite successful, [01:03] actually, this year the board has selected a truly exceptional class of honorees. [01:08] I mean, really exceptional. [01:10] First is country music star, [01:14] actor and producer George Strait. [01:22] Great. Over an extraordinary four decade career, [01:28] George has sold more than 120 million records worldwide, [01:32] amassed 60 number one hits, wow, [01:35] and produced 33 platinum certified albums, [01:40] more than any other living American. [01:42] That is amazing. [01:43] And this man may be the most of all. [01:46] Michael Crawford is being honored. [01:51] Michael was born in England in 1942. [01:56] He made his Broadway debut in 1967. [02:01] I was there. I shouldn't say that, but I was there. [02:05] It seems like a long time ago. [02:07] And he became an international sensation in the 1980s [02:12] for his original portrayal of The Phantom of the opera, [02:17] one of the greatest ever. [02:18] Ever. Ever, ever. [02:19] Next, we look forward to honoring three time Oscar nominee, [02:22] Golden Globe Award winner, [02:24] and action movie icon and a friend of mine, [02:28] uh, very unique man. [02:30] He's somebody that doesn't do these things. [02:33] Uh, a real talent. [02:36] Never been given the credit for the talent there was [02:38] nobody else could have done the roles that he did like he did. [02:41] I'm not even close. And they've tried and they didn't work out too well. [02:44] His name is Sylvester Stallone. [02:49] Fourth will be together celebrating one of [02:54] the most revered singers of the American disco era, Gloria Gaynor. [03:04] Best known for her chart topping 1978 hit I Will survive, [03:11] Gloria won the 1980 Grammy for Best Disco Recording, [03:16] and her song was inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2016. [03:21] Four decades later. And finally, [03:23] we'll be honoring one of the greatest rock bands of all time, kiss. [03:33] So kiss was formed in 1973, [03:38] in New York City by founding band members and incredible people. [03:41] By the way, Paul Stanley, [03:44] Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss, [03:49] Kiss became a global phenomenon and sold more than 100 million records [03:55] worldwide and produced 30 gold albums and lots of other things they produced. [04:00] They made a fortune, [04:02] and they're great people and they deserve it. [04:05] And they work hard and they're still working hard. [04:07] And it's an honor to present Criss Kiss. [04:13] Thank you very much. [04:14] Got it. Yeah. 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