Kennedy Center Plans $1 Million Lawsuit Against Musician Who Cancelled Performance Due to Trump Name Change

“Kennedy Center – panoramio” by jiazi is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

On Thursday, Dec. 18, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ board of trustees voted to rename the cultural institution as the Trump-Kennedy Center. On December 26, after the controversial renaming was swiftly enacted on the national theater’s website and in new signage on its facade, the Kennedy Center’s president sharply criticized a musician who cancelled his performance in protest, vowing to sue the artist for $1 million in damages.

Jazz drummer and vibraphonist Chuck Redd has hosted his holiday Jazz Jams on Christmas Eve at the Kennedy Center since 2006. Days after news broke that the venerable institution had become the latest target of President Trump’s politicized legislative blitz on the arts, Redd cancelled his return in 2025. “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told the Associated Press.

Redd’s cancellation spurred a wrathful response from the Kennedy Center, expressed first in a letter to Redd from venue president Richard Grenell. “Your decision to withdraw at the last moment – explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure – is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” Grenell wrote in the letter obtained by the AP, which goes on to declare that the “political stunt” would make Redd the target of a massive lawsuit.

“The left is boycotting the Arts because Trump is supporting the Arts,” Grenell, who assumed his post after Trump’s upheaval of the Kennedy Center’s board and leadership in February, wrote in a post to Twitter. “But we will not let them cancel shows without consequences. The Arts are for everyone – and the Left is mad about it.”

In the wake of the Kennedy Center’s renaming announcement, it’s become increasingly clear that the board of trustees – which now includes Pam Bondi and Lee Greenwood, the artist behind Trump’s unofficial 2024 campaign anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.” – does not possess the authority to effect the change. The national theater was legally designated the Kennedy Center in 1964 after the President’s assassination, and since then, it has been understood that Congress alone has the power to vote on any change to its memorial dedication. U.S. Code Title 20 dictates that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Read more about Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center here.