On Sunday night, President Donald Trump took to the stage in Washington, DC to host the annual Kennedy Center Honors. Presidents traditionally attend the awards, although Trump declined to do so in his first term. Now, after purging the Center’s traditionally bipartisan board of ideological rivals and installing himself as chair, Trump has become the first president to emcee the night. For Trump, the event seems to have been an opportunity not just for vengeance against “woke” Hollywood but for vindication of his own cachet as a TV host.
“I’ve watched some of the people that host,” remarked Trump, former Apprentice host, on the Saturday before the event. “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.”
Kimmel has never hosted the Kennedy Center Honors, although he appeared onstage in 2014 as part of a tribute to David Letterman. Kimmel has, however, hosted the Oscars, and Trump appears to have decided that the Kennedy Center Honors are his equivalent. More importantly, Kimmel has been a vocal Trump critic, and Trump, in his turn, has been vocal in his hatred of Kimmel. In September, their feud climaxed when Kimmel was briefly suspended from his ABC talk show, in an apparent bid for Trump’s favor by Disney-ABC, after the comedian falsely suggested that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was associated with MAGA.
Trump, with his characteristic thin-skinned narcissism, seems to have taken the Kennedy Center Honors as a chance for him to one-up Kimmel, to be funnier and more attention-grabbing and to host a more prestigious event. (In fairness to Trump, his line “many of you are miserable, horrible people,” delivered directly to the audience in apparent earnest, was genuinely quite funny.)
The power of sitting in the Oval Office, now redesigned to his liking as he reshapes the White House and flirts with declaring foreign wars, is not quite enough for Trump. He cannot just be president. He also has to be a good TV star. He has to win the approval of the culturati, which is the one thing he will never quite get.
It is this clumsy muscling for approval, in many ways, that characterizes this phase of MAGA: the sense that since the right cannot naturally command the cultural cachet that the left has won, they will have to take it for themselves, with political might or with cold hard cash. Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X is one version of this strategy. Right-wing social media networks have never gone mainstream among elite audiences the way Twitter did at its peak, so instead of building a new one, Musk simply bought it. Then he remade it as a place where racial slurs are acceptable, but use of the word “cis” is grounds for banning.
Kimmel’s brief ousting shows another version of this strategy. As the conservative essayist Tanner Greer explained to Vox’s Zack Beauchamp in September, right-wing figures thought Kimmel’s false claims about Kirk’s assassin were just as offensive as an anti-Black Lives Matter statement would have been during the George Floyd protests of 2020. They also knew they didn’t have the public support it would take to create an outcry against Kimmel from the ground up. What they had, instead, was the president.
“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,” Greer told Vox. “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.”
The idea here is to replace the soft power of persuasion and earned popular support with the hard power of government. After spending a decade decrying the left as a bunch of social media bullies ruling by public shaming and cancellation, the right is attempting to match the left’s cultural power through the objectively much harsher mechanisms of threatening heavy fines and jail time.
This is not to say that the right is fundamentally unpopular. It takes fervent supporters to win over every branch of government, as the right has. Trump’s core supporters are famously committed, and he won the popular vote in 2024. Their movement has real adherents, and it has made real inroads among the edgy-hip hugely popular outsiders of popular culture, where the Joe Rogans and the Theo Vons live.
But they still don’t have the thing Trump craves most of all, which is mainstream, middle-of-the-culture approval. Acceptance among widely beloved cultural elites. The sheen of movie star cool. Finding themselves unable to earn it, they are attempting to bully their way toward it instead.
Trump was a TV star, but he was never popular enough to get a job hosting the Oscars: too weird, too mean and racist, too liable to go off script and say something that made bad headlines. So instead he became president, fired the board of the government’s central cultural institution, and installed himself as head and de facto host instead.
Will that ever be enough for him?
