President Donald Trump stepped into a new role Sunday night—one that revealed as much about his deepest insecurities as it did about the shifting power dynamics in American culture.
For the first time in history, a sitting president didn’t just attend the Kennedy Center Honors. He hosted it.
After purging the Center’s traditionally bipartisan board and installing himself as chair, Trump transformed what’s typically a dignified celebration of artistic achievement into something else entirely: a personal audition for cultural approval.
And at the heart of this unprecedented move lies a rivalry with someone who wasn’t even in the room—late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
The Rivalry That Wasn’t Really a Rivalry
Trump made his motivations crystal clear the day before taking the Kennedy Center stage.
I’ve watched some of the people that host. Jimmy Kimmel was horrible. If I can’t beat out Jimmy Kimmel in terms of talent, then I don’t think I should be president.
There’s just one problem with Trump’s declaration: Kimmel has never hosted the Kennedy Center Honors.
He appeared onstage once in 2014 as part of a tribute to David Letterman, but that’s it. Kimmel has hosted the Oscars multiple times—and Trump appears to have conflated the two events, or perhaps decided the Kennedy Center Honors would serve as his equivalent platform.
What Trump lacks in factual accuracy, he makes up for in clarity of purpose. This wasn’t about celebrating artists. It was about outdoing a vocal critic and proving he could command a stage with the polish of Hollywood’s elite.
When Politics Becomes Performance Art
Trump and Kimmel’s feud reached a boiling point in September when the comedian was briefly suspended from his ABC talk show after falsely suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was associated with MAGA.
The suspension appeared to be Disney-ABC’s attempt to curry favor with Trump. It worked—at least in the short term.
But it also revealed something deeper about this moment in American politics: the right has decided that if they can’t win cultural approval organically, they’ll seize it through political power instead.
Trump’s performance Sunday night embodied this strategy perfectly. His delivery of the line “many of you are miserable, horrible people” directly to the audience—apparently in earnest—was genuinely funny, the kind of transgressive humor that gets attention.
Yet even with control of the venue, the board, and the microphone, something essential remained out of reach: authentic cultural cachet.
The New Culture War Strategy
Conservative essayist Tanner Greer explained the shift in thinking to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp back in September, offering rare insight into how right-wing figures now approach cultural battles.
They remember 2020, and they feel like if Jimmy Kimmel had gone against Black Lives Matter, he would’ve been taken off the air without the state. And we don’t have that same activist network [as the left], but we do have the state. And so we should try to create the same sort of structural cultural change that was imposed upon us in the Great Awokening.
In other words: replace soft power with hard power.
After years of complaining about “cancel culture” and social media mobs, prominent conservatives now openly advocate using government authority—threats of fines, jail time, regulatory pressure—to achieve what grassroots cultural movements accomplish through persuasion and public pressure.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter exemplifies this approach. Rather than building a right-wing social platform that could compete with Twitter’s cultural influence, Musk simply bought Twitter and transformed it into X—a place where racial slurs flourish but using the word “cis” can get you banned.
The Thing Money and Power Can’t Buy
Trump’s movement isn’t unpopular. Far from it.
He won the popular vote in 2024. His supporters are famously devoted. Republicans control every branch of government. And the right has made genuine inroads with edgy, outsider cultural figures—the Joe Rogans and Theo Vons who command massive audiences outside traditional media.
But there’s a specific type of approval Trump still doesn’t have: mainstream, middle-of-the-culture acceptance from widely beloved cultural elites.
That sheen of movie star cool. That effortless cultural legitimacy. The kind of respect that comes from being invited, not from forcing your way in.
Trump was a reality TV star, but never prestigious enough—or safe enough—to host the Oscars. Too unpredictable. Too liable to say something racist or mean-spirited. Too prone to creating bad headlines rather than managing them.
Power as Substitute for Popularity
So Trump found another way.
He became president, purged the Kennedy Center board of ideological opponents, installed himself as chair, and transformed a venerable cultural institution into his personal stage.
It’s a stunning display of raw power. But it’s also deeply revealing about what drives him—not just political dominance, but cultural validation from the very people who’ve always kept him at arm’s length.
Sitting in the redesigned Oval Office, reshaping institutions, flirting with foreign conflicts—none of it seems quite enough. Trump doesn’t just want to be president. He wants to be a beloved entertainer, welcomed into the upper echelons of cultural respectability.
This phase of MAGA is characterized by exactly this clumsy reach for approval: the recognition that conservative politics can’t naturally command the cultural influence that progressive movements have cultivated over decades, paired with the determination to take it by force.
The Question That Haunts Everything
Trump can fire boards. He can install himself as chair of prestigious institutions. He can command television cameras and millions of social media followers.
But can any of it give him what he’s really seeking?
The answer seems to be no. Approval seized at gunpoint—or through political pressure—never quite satisfies the way genuine cultural acceptance does.
You can host the Kennedy Center Honors after purging everyone who opposed you. But you can’t force the cultural elite to think you’re cool. You can’t legislate your way into being beloved. You can’t buy the ineffable quality that makes someone a cultural icon rather than just a powerful figure people fear or resent.
Sunday night’s performance was Trump at his most revealing—not as a political strategist or policy wonk, but as someone still chasing the approval of people who will never give it to him, no matter how much power he accumulates.
And that might be the most human thing about him.