Which to the right only proves that all such artists are Trump-hating liberals who booked the Kennedy Center only because of its obvious far-left politics tied to the Biden and Kennedy crime families blah blah blah. The first concert I attended at the Kennedy Center was some visiting orchestra playing the music of that arch-liberal Anton Bruckner.
I'm puzzled at why Pres. Trump's supporters think this is just a benign name change that shouldn't bother artists or patrons. That's certainly not the Trump regime's position. Trump is expressly trying to repurpose the Center according to his own aesthetic (musically and architecturally) which for some reason cannot be separated from the regime's obsession over its own notion of political correctness. His supporters see it as perfectly normal that a sitting President should rename national monuments after himself, instead of that being obviously creepy and narcissistic. If someone has a completely normal reaction to such displays of apparent psychopathy, they're dismissed as "deranged"—just like ordinary people who balk at the sudden hyper-politicization of their previously apolitical institutions are decried as inappropriate "political activists."
As a musician, actor, and other such pursuits I've been invited (nay, even hired) to perform at venues owned and operated by the Mormon church. I've never been made to feel unwelcome or uncomfortable, nor has it been even remotely implied that my participation endorses the church's religious or political messages. The theater just up the street from me sports a former Mormon prophet as its major patron; a handsome oil painting of him hangs in the lobby. Yet this doesn't stop the theater from presenting productions with themes that are thoroughly in contrast with Mormon values. When The Book of Mormon musical was staged, the church just took it in stride and bought advertising in the playbill. Maybe serious people don't want to be associated in any way with a toddler suddenly throwing a self-centered tantrum. If the toddler is making an otherwise unrelated organization a pawn in that tantrum, then those people will be given little choice to but to treat the organization the way the toddler is demanding it be treated.
The arts have previously coexisted with politics by maintaining respectfully blind eyes in both directions. In the case of the Kennedy Center, this detente has succeeded for decades through many political vicissitudes. The sudden shift in the attitudes of prospective artists happens to coincide with the sudden decision that the Kennedy Center constitutes some national artistic and architectural crisis that only Donald Trump can fix. Trump has convinced himself that he is the epitome of all good taste. But the fact remains that people who go to Lee Greenwood concerts don't generally want to do so in a marble building with plush carpets and chandeliers. If the Kennedy Center wants to maintain patronage, it can't do so by bluntly alienating the people that enliven the patronage.
