UNEXPECTEDLY: The Left Melts Down Over Gloria Gaynor Kennedy Center Honor.
[Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Tia Mitchell’s] attempt to frame Gaynor’s honor as a political stunt ignores decades of achievement, cultural impact, and recognition. Reducing her to a “one-hit wonder” not only misrepresents her career but also undermines the significance of the Kennedy Center’s honor.
The real lens through which Mitchell’s criticism should be viewed is clear: Trump Derangement Syndrome. Her insistence that the selection of Gaynor was politically motivated reflects a broader pattern of left-wing media hostility toward anything even remotely connected to the Trump administration. Gaynor’s decades-long contributions to music are ignored, minimized, or dismissed simply because the honoree list exists under a political climate Mitchell opposes.
According to Wikipedia, in 1990, the Kennedy Center honorees were “Dizzy Gillespie, Katharine Hepburn, Risë Stevens, Jule Styne, and Billy Wilder.”
In 2019, the Kennedy Center honorees were “Earth, Wind & Fire, Sally Field, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Sesame Street.”
In 2017, Joseph Bottum of the Washington Free Beacon wrote:
On August 3, the Washington Post ran a column decrying the drift of the Kennedy Center—written, just to give the piece a little more of an imprimatur, by Philip Kennicott, the Post’s official art and architecture critic. Where the Kennedy Center once promoted symphonies, operas, and classic theater productions, the D.C. institution now “abandons the arts for pop culture,” Kennicott fumed. And he pointed out that this year’s Kennedy Center honorees included “television producer Norman Lear, singer-songwriter Gloria Estefan, music mogul Lionel Richie and hip-hop star LL Cool J,” all of whom have innumerable other sources of popular praise. What need have we of the Kennedy Center, when its gold medals are just late imitations of the Grammys, Oscars, and Emmys?
As I wrote on Thursday, if Led Zeppelin, Gloria Estefan, Lionel Richie, and Norman Lear can be awarded Kennedy Center honors, no one should be diving for the fainting couches when Kiss, Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester Stallone show up to receive theirs.
Exit question: “Why on earth would President Trump, elected in an electoral landslide, not remake the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center into institutions reflective of the tastes of the people who voted for him? As president, he has the power to do so. Certainly, the Democrats who preceded him in that office did exactly what Trump is doing, and more.”
UPDATE:
Now you know why Tom Cruise turned it down… he is busily (and wisely) persuing the Michael Jordan theory of audience maintenance https://t.co/osorBcEjlD
— George MF Washington (@GMFWashington) August 17, 2025