President Trump on Wednesday announced that Rocky and Rambo star Sylvester Stallone, country music star George Strait, singer Gloria Gaynor, rock band Kiss and Broadway star Michael Crawford will be his first Kennedy Center Honors recipients.
The announcement came after Trump named himself chairman of the Kennedy Center and reshaped its board, while vowing to halt drag performances. He said Wednesday he was “about 98% involved” in choosing the honorees and had “turned down plenty” of people, including some who were “too woke.”
Last month, congressional Republicans set aside $250 million for renovations to the center as part of the tax and spend package Trump dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The bill also provides tax cuts for the wealthy and steep cuts for Medicaid and SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Republicans also added an amendment to the bill to rename the Kennedy Center’s Opera House after Melania Trump, but the name change has not yet occurred.
Stallone is among Trump’s best-known Hollywood supporters, and the president named him one of three “ambassadors to Hollywood” earlier this year, along with Jon Voight and Mel Gibson. In praising Stallone’s work on 1976’s Rocky on Wednesday, Trump also took a moment to praise Voight’s 1979 boxing film The Champ.
Trump also spoke for more than a minute about how Stallone, after he wrote the script for Rocky, ended up playing the role of lovable lug Rocky Balboa, the pride of Philadelphia who goes from obscurity to battling heavyweight champion Apollo Creed.
Trump explained that other actors of the era had the face, but not the build, for the part of Rocky. He said executives tried to convince Stallone to accept various 1970s actors for the role, but none measured up. (It starts at the 2:30 mark in the video above, which you can also view here.)
“He said ‘it can’t be successful if you’re going to pick a movie actor with a bad build — a nice face but a bad body’,” the president of the United States explained. “He knew what a boxer’s body was. So they brought him one [actor] and I won’t tell you who it was, but it was a big name. But the chest wasn’t exactly what you need. One shot and your heart would pop out. That wasn’t too good.
“Then he did another [actor] who was fat, sloppy — but had a good face. Then he did another one and another one and another one, and he turned it down. He wouldn’t take $1 million. He wouldn’t do it. Then when they saw him, they said, ‘you know, you’d be actually pretty good for this role.”
Trump Will Host Kennedy Center Honors
Trump also said he would host this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, and that he didn’t want to, but had been invited to do so and agreed.
“GREAT Nominees for the TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops, I mean, KENNEDY CENTER, AWARDS,” he wrote on Truth Social, vowing to return the the site to what he called the “the “absolute TOP LEVEL of luxury, glamour, and entertainment.”
“It had fallen on hard times, physically, BUT WILL SOON BE MAKING A MAJOR COMEBACK!!!” he wrote.
The Kennedy Center Honors have traditionaly been chosen by a bipartisan advisory committee, The Associated Press noted. Past recipients have included George Balanchine, Tom Hanks, Aretha Franklin and Stephen Sondheim.
In 2017, during the first Trump Administration, honoree Norman Lear announced that he wouldn’t attend a White House celebration in protest of Trump’s proposed cuts to federal arts funding.
Trump and first lady Melania Trump subsequently skipped the Kennedy Center event and did not return for the remainder of Trump’s first term, during which time such Trump critics as Cher, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sally Field were honored, AP noted.
Main image: Donald Trump announces the Kennedy Center honorees. The Hill.