Trump Wants to Rock and Roll All Nite at the Kennedy Center
On August 13, President Trump revealed the hard rock band KISS as one of this year’s Kennedy Center Honors nominees. KISS will join actors Sylvester Stallone and Michael Crawford and singers George Strait and Gloria Gaynor in the 48th class of Honorees. This year’s ceremony, scheduled for December 7 and hosted by Trump, unfolds in different circumstances than usual due to the unprecedented and controversial involvement of the White House.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has traditionally been a nonpartisan institution. Located in Washington D.C., it is the United States’ national cultural center. It was born out of bipartisan consensus in 1958 as President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, signed the National Cultural Center Act designed by the Democratic-led Congress. Back in 1962, President John F. Kennedy envisioned the Center as a unifying force despite the internal and international divisions faced by Cold-War-era America, reminding the cultural figures attending and viewers at home in his November 1962 fundraising speech for the Center that artistic contribution outlives societies and their politics. After his assassination, the project was renamed in his honor and designated as his “living memorial” in January 1964. Fourteen years later, it started honoring living artists for their lifetime achievements in the performing arts at an annual fundraising gala.
Until 2025, the president’s role has been limited to designating up to 36 additional members to the board, traditionally evenly split between Democratic and Republican nominees, and attending the Honors. Presidents have historically not been involved in the selection of honorees.
Under the new administration, the Center has been anything but a unifying force. Since Trump, famously, did not attend any Kennedy Center events during his first term, it was highly unexpected that he would begin his term by getting involved with the Center’s operations. But on February 7, he announced on Truth Social that he had terminated several board members, including philanthropist and then-chair David Rubenstein, and that he would take over as chair. His motivation was the supposed decline and “wokeness” of the Center, which has hosted several drag shows, a small portion of its roughly 2,000 annual performances. Ultimately, 18 board members, all Biden nominees, were terminated — an unprecedented move, but one that still abided by the Center’s statute, as noted in the Center’s response. Five days later, the new board, now including 34 new nominees such as attorney general Pamela Bondi and director of the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office Sergio Gor, elected Trump as chairman. The Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment regarding its commitment to nonpartisanship.
The restructuring of the board, in turn, influenced the Honors selection process. During a March board meeting, Trump emphasized that the honorees would be more conservative this year. “I turned down plenty. They were too woke. We had a couple of wokesters,” he said during the August 13 press conference, adding that he was 98% involved in the selection process.
Enter KISS.
Founded in the early seventies in New York City by lead singer Paul Stanley, bassist Gene Simmons, drummer Peter Criss and late lead guitarist Ace Frehley, KISS members have rarely been overtly political. However, in recent years, Stanley has repeatedly criticized Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Simmons has known Trump for several decades, even appearing as a cast member on The Apprentice in 2008. Still, he has called out Trump for encouraging political polarization and tolerating conspiracy theories and racism. Only Frehley has publicly expressed support for the current president.
Nevertheless, all four founding members of KISS reacted positively to the announcement. In their statements accepting the nomination, both Stanley and Simmons emphasized the band’s alignment with American values. Simmons called KISS “the embodiment of the American dream,” while Stanley affirmed that “from our earliest days, KISS has embodied the American ideal that all things are possible and that hard work pays off.”
KISS will not be the first rock act to be recognized by the Kennedy Center. Starting with The Who in 2008, the center has since honored musicians, such as Bruce Springsteen (2009) and Paul McCartney (2010), and bands, including Led Zeppelin (2012), U2 (2022) and The Grateful Dead last year. But Florian Walch, Assistant Professor of Music Theory at West Virginia University, highlighted that KISS still stands out in that list. Through their kabuki-inspired makeup and character names (Stanley is known as the Starchild and Simmons as the Demon), the musicians distance themselves from their everyday selves. This “shedding of your civilian self” is unique to KISS and might explain why these past criticisms have not hurt their prospects for the Honors. “Gene Simmons and other people in KISS might have their own personal beliefs, but they’re utterly irrelevant to who they are as KISS and what KISS is,” Walch said. Previous honorees display “popular avant-garde styling,” according to him, meaning that they embody the rock ideal of intellectual self-awareness combined with a working-class aesthetic. In contrast, KISS’ music has often been ridiculed as campy and secondary to the show.
But that is part of its appeal. For better or worse, KISS is known for its extravagant performances, featuring pyrotechnics, Simmons spitting blood and breathing fire, and Stanley flying over the audience.
Walch thinks that Trump might have selected KISS out of respect for their showmanship and success at branding, pointing towards Trump’s background in reality TV. “Other elements of that [shock rock] existed before: pyrotechnics, stage shows, (…) fake self-injury on stage, but never as a unified brand identity.”
For KISS, the Honors will be another opportunity to consolidate its status as part of mainstream culture, but, for Walch, it is unlikely to fuel a major revival of 70’s hard rock. KISS does not belong to a “porous aesthetic” grounded in a time and space that can be easily fantasized about, he explains, a necessary condition for such a revival. “KISS paradoxically, I think, are a little bit victims of these strengths and the distinctiveness of their brand,” Walch said, “it is the price of the branding.”
While the ceremony will be closely watched, Walch relativized the political significance of nominating KISS. “I don’t think he [Trump] would swing any voting blocs by honoring KISS,” he said. For him, it is part of a tradition of political leadership associating itself with aesthetic discernment to prove the quality of its judgment. Depending on the style of governance and personal inclination, this association can express itself in many ways. Trump’s approach is unique in its disregard for tradition, but the phenomenon of leaders investing themselves in the arts has long existed.
Since his inauguration in January, Trump has become very involved in national cultural institutions. The Kennedy Center is ultimately another name on this list. Selecting this year’s honorees to connect the current administration with popular cultural figures might be part of a broader soft power strategy. It might simultaneously be an opportunity for Trump to showcase his artistic tastes. As his often unauthorized use of music at his campaign rallies shows, he appears to enjoy classic rock, which might also explain why he supported honoring KISS.
Despite the debate regarding nonpartisanship Trump’s involvement has thrown the Center into, this year’s Honors are still a due recognition for KISS, according to Walch, as they introduced strong visual branding to rock and metal music. After all, can a band’s visual identity get more striking than a lightning-shaped logo?
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A correction was made on Dec 12, 2025: An earlier version of this article referred to Florian Walch as “music scholar specialized in extreme metal and Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago.” That was outdated and the article has been updated to reflect his current job title.