In a vicious and desperate action, the Trump administration is threatening to sue jazz musician Chuck Redd for $1 million. Redd canceled his annual Christmas Eve jazz concert to protest the decision of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts board of trustees to change the venue’s name to the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”

The threat against Redd is part of the Nazi-like effort to bring popular culture, education and art into line with the administration’s agenda. The Kennedy Center has been transformed from a public arts institution into a weapon of intimidation against any artist who refuses to kowtow to far-right politics.

Redd, a vibraphonist and drummer, had hosted the “Christmas Eve Jazz Jam” at the venue for nearly two decades. The jams have included countless musicians and often feature seasonal jazz arrangements, including adaptations of Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite.

In an email to the Associated Press, Redd said he pulled out of the concert in the wake of the addition—illegal, in fact—of Trump’s name. “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 said.

Redd’s departure from the “Trump Kennedy Center” is yet another blow to the center’s already fatally damaged prestige. Redd is a widely respected musician who gained international recognition playing with the Charlie Byrd Trio and Great Guitars, later performing with figures such as Dizzy Gillespie and Mel Tormé, leading bands linked to the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and teaching at the University of Maryland School of Music.

By pulling out, Redd joins a literal stampede of artists and producers out the Kennedy Center’s doors, refusing to be associated with Trump’s takeover of the institute. Among them are Issa Rae, Shonda Rhimes, Hamilton‑affiliated personnel and other prominent figures, withdrawing or relocating projects rather than perform under a banner bearing the president’s name.

This growing group was joined last week by the American College Theatre Festival, which has collaborated with the Kennedy Center for 58 years. On Monday, the event’s organizers announced they would suspend the festival’s affiliation, citing “circumstances and decisions that do not align with our organization’s values.”

In response, the fascistic administration is lashing out at its cultural and musical critics. Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell, one of Trump’s extreme right-wing agents installed at the Center, sent a furious letter branding Redd’s cancellation a “political stunt,” accusing him of “surrender to left‑wing bullying” and vowing to seek the million dollars in damages for alleged lost revenue and reputational harm. Grenell cynically argued that artists have a duty to perform “for all audiences regardless of politics.”

This of course is the world turned upside down. The administration has transformed the Kennedy Center—supposedly the nation’s cultural center, owned and operated by the federal government—into a hotbed of fascist reaction that it is seeking to normalize in American politics. The center has welcomed a slew of right‑wing festivals, Christian fundamentalist “summits,” collaborations with the Museum of the Bible and patriotic pageants recasting the Kennedy Center as a ceremonial stage for the far right.

Grenell’s hypocrisy and cynicism are underscored by the fact that many of the forces welcomed into Trump’s Kennedy Center, such as Turning Point USA, the Conservative Political Action Conference and others, have repeatedly demanded the deplatforming of left‑wing speakers, student groups and artists, and have backed campaigns to purge schools and cultural institutions of “un‑American” or “anti‑Christian” content—in other words, censorship in the realm of education, media and culture.

The Trump administration itself has been the ringleader of a historic attack on democratic rights. On December 18, the same day the Kennedy Center’s name change was announced, Trump’s Justice Department began receiving reports from intelligence agencies as part of the would-be dictator’s National Security Presidential Memorandum‑7 (NSPM‑7). The document, issued following the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, seeks to brand all left‑wing opposition as a form of “domestic terrorism.”

The highly defensive tone of the Kennedy Center administration’s response to Redd reveals deep nervousness over the growing backlash. The leadership recognizes that the renaming of the Center and the broader political agenda of the Trump administration are deeply unpopular. This was publicly visible when Trump appeared at a Kennedy Center performance of Les Misérables earlier this year and was met with boos and protests.

Membership and attendance at the Center’s various events have fallen sharply in Trump’s second term. This occurs as the economic picture for millions of working people has darkened substantially in the past year. In the Washington, D.C. region—ground zero for Trump’s assault on the federal workforce—data from the Federal Reserve show the area has lost between 20,000 and 40,000 federal jobs in 2025 alone, with one estimate projecting the federal workforce could shrink by about 300,000 nationwide by year’s end.

The renaming and the threat against Redd need to be seen as part of a systematic authoritarian reshaping of cultural life in the US. Following in the footsteps of the Nazis in 1930s’ Germany, Trump’s attack on “degenerate art,” “woke” productions and drag performances allegedly corrupting youth is integrally connected to the social and political counterrevolution his administration represents. Whereas the Nazis claimed to be “purifying” the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) to create a “healthy” (and obedient) population, Trump’s regime does so in the name of inaugurating a national-patriotic “Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” a code name for its own full-scale attempt to politically intimidate and terrorize.