Trump’s Hosting of Kennedy Center Honors Tanks
It's the Least-Watched Ever
While Donald Trump has long treated ratings as a personal scorecard, his turn as host of this year’s Kennedy Center Honors delivered a result he has conspicuously avoided addressing: the lowest viewership in the history of the broadcast. While its clear that the often-addled Trump should not keep his day job, he certainly shouldn’t consider hosting awards programs as an avocation!
CBS 19 News noted that Programming Insider reported that preliminary Nielsen data found that the show on CBS “drew its smallest audience ever … averaging an estimated 2.65 million viewers. To put that in perspective: the 2024 broadcast averaged 4.1 million viewers, which itself had already marked a historical low. Do the math, and this year’s telecast represents a 35% year-over-year decline — a staggering drop for one of broadcast TV’s most traditionally reliable specials.”
Even during past controversies, political boycotts, and years of steady erosion in television audiences, no previous Kennedy Center Honors broadcast had fallen to a viewership low this severe.
The ratings collapse followed Trump’s own effort to hype the event. In a Truth Social post earlier in the day, he wrote that he was hosting “at the request of the Board, and just about everybody else in America,” inviting viewers to judge his “Master of Ceremony” abilities and joking that he might leave the presidency to host full time if the response was strong enough.
Trump’s name was added to the Kennedy Center building on December 19, 2025, just one day after the Trump-controlled board of trustees voted on December 18, 2025 to rename the institution to “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Workers affixed large lettering with Trump’s name to the exterior sign on the center that Friday following the controversial board vote.
The move has drawn legal and public backlash because the center was originally established by Congress in 1964 as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy, and federal law designates it solely under Kennedy’s name—which critics say means only an act of Congress could legitimately change it.
This year’s honorees were:
• George Strait (country music star)
• Gloria Gaynor (singer, known for “I Will Survive”)
• KISS (legendary rock band — Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, and Ace Frehley)
• Michael Crawford (stage and screen actor, including Phantom of the Opera)
• Sylvester Stallone (actor and filmmaker)
Since the broadcast, Trump has not acknowledged the historically low ratings or conceded that the event underperformed. Instead, his post-telecast comments have focused on attacking media critics and entertainment figures, continuing a familiar pattern in which unfavorable numbers are ignored while blame is redirected elsewhere.
For a president who routinely cites television audiences as proof of popularity, the silence is telling. On a night meant to celebrate American culture, the only number that mattered to Trump was the one he chose not to mention.
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