President Donald Trump, 80, has chosen a few of his cronies to honor for lifetime achievements at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
The prestigious award is supposed to celebrate “the lifetime contributions of some of the world’s most influential artists,” according to the Center’s press release naming the honorees. Now, almost two years after Trump fired most of the Kennedy Center Board and replaced trustees with allies who named him chair, the honorees include several artists with prominent ties to the Trump administration.
The 2026 honorees are playwright David Mamet, musician Paul Anka, composer David Foster, actor Andy Garcia, and country singer Barbara Mandrell. Both Mamet and Anka have clear ties to the president; Mamet is a vocal supporter of his politics, and Anka is a longtime friend of Trump.
The press release clarified that Trump and his MAGA loyalist trustees chose the five artists.
“This year’s Honorees were chosen based on the recommendation of the Kennedy Center’s Special Honors Advisory Committee (SHAC),” it said, “whose members include former Honorees, distinguished artists and members of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, under the leadership of Chairman President Donald J. Trump.”
Mamet, 78, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his play Glengarry Glen Ross and was also a Pulitzer finalist in 1995 for his play The Cryptogram. He grew up a devout liberal, but came out as conservative in a 2008 essay for The Village Voice. During Trump’s first term, the acclaimed playwright became an outspoken right-winger and Trump supporter. He told The Guardian in 2022 that Trump “did a great job as president” and in 2025 defended Trump’s support of the Capitol rioters on Jan. 6, 2021. He’s also called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.”
“If you put everything you see on these little screens aside and look at what happened during the Trump presidency, we told China to knock it off,” he explained. “We told NATO to start paying their fair share. We moved the Embassy of the United States to Jerusalem in Israel... Gas prices were down. There was the lowest black unemployment in history.”
Anka, 85, has not publicly declared whether he supports Trump politically, but he agreed to perform at Trump’s inaugural ball in 2017 before backing out because of a scheduling conflict. Anka wrote the lyrics to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” which he said was Trump’s favorite song and which he planned to perform at the inauguration.
“The president-elect is an old friend of mine for 50 years,” he told TMZ at the time. He continued, “I have a respect for the office of the presidency and an American, and I was doing it in terms of what’s good for our country and respecting the presidency.”
According to Page Six, Garcia is also a registered Republican, but the 70-year-old Cuban exile hasn’t publicly supported Trump. The actor starred in Ocean’s 11 and The Godfather Part III.
Grammy winner Foster, 77, declined to perform at Trump’s first inauguration and has close friends who supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Still, Foster has been “friendly with Trump over the years,” according to a 2016 Washington Post article. Foster has also performed at fundraisers at Trump’s private club in Mar-a-Lago.
Mandrell’s politics are not public. The 77-year-old was a prominent country singer in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
In addition to scrambling to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, Trump’s overhaul means he’s shut down the building for construction for the next two years. The ceremony will therefore take place for the first time at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., according to the press release.
“We are recognizing amazing artists whose lifelong work has shaped American culture and inspired generations of audiences,” President Trump said in the press release. “We are proud to honor this year’s class and to continue a tradition that has defined the Center for nearly 50 years.”
Former Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi contests that Trump is following tradition. He posted on X that this year’s list was “screwed up” and detailed changes from past years, like how, this year, Trump named honorees “just one month before actual awards ceremony” instead of the usual “four-to-five month lead time.” He also said that the Kennedy Center has “no TV deal” to broadcast the ceremony because their “CBS contract expired.”
“Weird list (as usual),” Farhi wrote on X. “And, of course, these are the people *willing* to accept the award. The list of those who turned it down would be more interesting.”
Awardees from before Trump’s takeover include plenty of current-day Trump critics like Paul McCartney (2010), Meryl Streep (2011), Tom Hanks (2014), George Clooney (2022), and Billy Crystal (2023).
