U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks at Red Rock Casino Resort Spa in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., August 5, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A judge has ordered the Kennedy Center to pay more than $250,000 in legal fees to a musician who canceled a Christmas Eve concert after President Donald Trump attempted to add his own name to the building. According to Bloomberg, jazz drummer Charles “Chuck” Redd was accused of breach of contract for refusing to host the holiday “Jazz Jam.”
As Bloomberg reports, “Redd had hosted the Christmas jazz concert at the Kennedy Center for years. After Trump’s appointees to the board of trustees voted to add the president’s name to the center, however, Redd announced he wouldn’t perform. The center then sued him. A judge dismissed the case in June, finding the Kennedy Center was unlikely to win and had retaliated against Redd for exercising his right to public advocacy. The center later eventually removed Trump’s name from the building after losing a separate court fight.” D.C. Superior Court Judge Tanya Jones Bosier found that Redd was entitled to recover legal fees as the “prevailing party,” rejecting the center’s claim that the fee was “out of all proportion to the issue at stake,” and ruling that Redd’s lawyers had asked for “reasonable” compensation.
Over the course of his second administration, Trump has taken an unusually oversized role in the Kennedy Center. In the early days of his term, he fired its board members and replaced them with loyalists like former Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who promptly voted Trump chairman. He went on to become directly involved with programming decisions, naming himself host of the annual honors gala, all of which resulted in a wave of performers canceling events in protest.
Late last year, the Trump-appointed board voted to add his name to the iconic cultural institution, deeming it the Trump-Kennedy Center — a move Maria Shriver, the former First Lady of California and niece of President John F. Kennedy described as “downright weird.” Then on May 29th — Kennedy’s birthday — a judge slapped down the renaming, declaring, “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
According to Bloomberg, “The decision Monday marks the latest high-dollar fee ruling in court fights over controversies stemming from Trump’s second term. In recent weeks, judges ordered the US Department of Defense to pay more than $450,000 to attorneys who sued over research funding cuts and directed the National Endowment for the Humanities to set aside money in anticipation of a future million-dollar fee fight.”