President Donald Trump hosted the annual Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, praising Sylvester Stallone, Kiss, Gloria Gaynor and the opposite honorees as being “legendary in so some ways.”
“Billions and billions of individuals have watched them over time,” Trump, the primary president to command the stage as an alternative of sitting in an Opera House box, said to open the show.
He said the honorees, who also include country music superstar George Strait and Tony Award-winning actor Michael Crawford, are “among the many biggest artists and actors, performers, musicians, singers, songwriters ever to walk the face of the Earth.”
Since returning to office in January, Trump has made the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which is called after a Democratic predecessor, a touchstone in a broader attack against what he has lambasted as “woke” anti-American culture.
Trump, who said in August that he had agreed to host the show, said Saturday at a State Department dinner for the honorees that he was doing so “on the request of a certain television network.” He predicted the printed, scheduled to air Dec. 23 on CBS and Paramount+, would have its best rankings ever.
Trump assumed a task that has been held previously by journalist Walter Cronkite and comedian and Trump nemesis Stephen Colbert, amongst others. Before Trump, presidents watched the show alongside the honorees. Trump skipped the honors altogether during his first term.
Asked when he arrived for the ceremony how he had found time to arrange, Trump said he “didn’t really prepare very much.”
“I actually have a great memory, so I can remember things, which may be very fortunate,” the president said. “But just, I wanted to simply be myself. You’ve gotten to be yourself. Johnny Carson, he was himself.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, one among several Cabinet secretaries attending the ceremony, said he was looking forward to Trump’s hosting job.
“Oh this president, he’s so relaxed in front of those cameras, as you recognize, and so funny, I can’t wait for tonight,” Lutnick said as he arrived together with his wife, who’s on the Kennedy Center board.
Since 1978, the honors have recognized stars for his or her influence on American culture and the humanities. Members of this yr’s class are pop-culture standouts, including Stallone for his “Rocky” and “Rambo” movies, Gaynor for her feminist anthem “I Will Survive” and Kiss for its flashy, cartoonish makeup and onstage displays of smoke and pyrotechnics.
Trump said persistence is a trait all of the artists share.
“A few of them have had legendary setbacks, setbacks that you will have to read within the papers due to their level of fame,” he said from the stage. “But within the words of Rocky Balboa, they showed us that you just keep moving forward, just keep moving forward.”
The ceremony was expected to be emotional for the members of Kiss. The band’s original lead guitarist, Ace Frehley, died in October after he was injured during a fall. The band’s co-founder Gene Simmons, speaking on the red carpet when he and the opposite honorees arrived for the ceremony, said the president had assured him there could be an empty chair among the many members of Kiss in memory of Frehley.
Stallone said being honored on the ceremony was like being within the “eye of a hurricane.”
“That is a tremendous event,” he said. “But you’re caught up in the course of it. It’s hard to take it in until the following day. ..: but I’m incredibly humbled by it.”
Crawford also said it was “humbling, especially at the top of a profession.”
Gaynor said it “appears like a dream” to be honored. “To be recognized in this manner is the top,” she said on the red carpet.
Mike Farris, an award-winning gospel singer who was performing for Gaynor, said she is an expensive friend. “She truly did survive,” Farris said. “What an iconic song.”
Previous honorees have come from a broad range of art forms, whether dance (Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham), theater (Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber), movies (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks) or music (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell).