Kennedy Center president rages as another musician boycotts

Multi-Grammy-winning banjo player Béla Fleck has become the latest artist to cancel planned performances at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after President Trump’s hand-picked board of directors added their boss’s name to the storied venue.

The development appears to have infuriated the center’s interim president, MAGA loyalist Richard Grenell.

Fleck said in a statement on Tuesday that he decided performing at the newly dubbed Trump Kennedy Center “has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music.”

The Upper West Side native said he was therefore pulling the plug on three shows with the National Symphony Orchestra next month, but looks forward to jamming with the group under different circumstances.

“You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties,” Grenell raged on X.

He further declared that “The Trump Kennedy Center believes all people are welcome — Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics.”

Multiple artists have opted against performing at the Kennedy Center after Trump replaced its board with his own supporters and named himself its chairman in February 2025, in a move designed to purge the institution of what Trump called “woke” programming

The wave of cancellations grew last month after Trump’s name was added to the outside of the building, which was designed by an Act of Congress as a “living memorial” to JFK following his assassination in 1963.

Jazz drummer Chuck Redd nixed the Christmas Eve show he’s been performing for nearly 20 years with very little notice. In the days that followed, a slew of other artists also pulled out, including New York City-based acts like the Asian AF comedy troupe, jazz musician Wayne Tucker and his band, The Bad Mothas, and dance company Doug Varone and Dancers.

Stephen Schwartz, the Oscar-winning composer of “Wicked,” “Godspell” and “Pippin,” also boycotted the Kennedy Center in protest of the president’s takeover, saying there’s “no way” he’d “set foot” in the building as it “no longer represents the apolitical place for free artistic expression it was founded to be.”