It’s probably safe to say that, despite his storied career, most Americans had probably never heard of jazz musician Chuck Redd before he canceled his annual Christmas Eve Jazz Jam concert at the Kennedy Center, after President Donald J. Trump’s name was slammed onto the national performing arts venue in violation of the law. But Redd’s protest caught the attention of the national media, landing stories in the Associated Press, Politico, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among others. So what did the Trump-appointed president of the formerly prestigious arts palace do? He made Redd famous by threatening him with a $1 million lawsuit.
The grounds for the suit aren’t entirely clear. The thing is, the Kennedy Center lost zero dollars due to Redd’s cancellation; it was a free concert. The only people who lost money due to vibrophonist’s protest were Redd and likely the musicians who were scheduled to perform with him. And, of course, one could argue that Redd’s move actually saved the Kennedy Center money, on staff and heating and the like.
But that didn’t stop Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell from either lying about that or displaying ignorance in his letter threatening Redd: “Your dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support, combined with your last-minute cancellation has cost us considerably,” Grenell wrote to Redd in an undated letter released on December 26. “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”
How one has “dismal ticket sales” for a free concert is never explained. However, the Washington Post reports that sales for tickets that cost actual money, such as those for the National Symphony Orchestra or the ballet, have plummeted since Grenell took over the Kennedy Center, reaching their lowest levels since the pandemic.
What Grenell’s letter achieved was the extension of the story by days, likely familiarizing people with Redd’s discography as they Googled his Wikipedia entry. With that letter, however, Grenell obviously hopes to intimidate other artists into withdrawing from their commitments to the center, a growing number of whom already have. (Ironically, Grenell also accuses Redd of “surrender[ing]” to “the sad bullying tactics” of leftists purportedly pressuring artists to boycott performing at the center.)
Of course, Grenell’s main audience for that letter likely wasn’t Redd or the artists he hopes to cow. It’s the guy in the grotesquely gilded Oval Office, perhaps in a bid for a better gig for Grenell himself.
You see, Grenell never wanted to run the Kennedy Center, as evidenced by his apparent lack of understanding of traditions such as the annual free Christmas Eve concert, which has been running for more than 20 years. The job that Grenell, who served a disastrous term as the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the first Trump administration, really wanted was secretary of state, a position for which he was reported to have actively lobbied. (In fact, Politico reported that MAGA influencers were offered payments up to five figures in exchange for promoting Grenell for the Foggy Bottom position, a deal reportedly never consummated and in which Grenell denied having any involvement.) In addition to his post in Germany during Trump 1.0, Grenell also served a brief stint as the administration’s acting director of national intelligence, so he apparently thought himself well-positioned to lead the State Department, only to see Marco Rubio win the big spot.
Among the strikes against Grenell in his bid for State was the scrutiny he’d be sure to receive in the confirmation process for some of his business dealings, including, according to Politico, a deal with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner for a $500 million hotel project in Belgrade. Then there was his friendliness toward Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, what with its links to Nazism, which marred his ambassadorship and would also surely have come up during his Senate confirmation hearings.
As a consolation prize, Trump named Grenell to an ad hoc position, envoy for “special missions,” but that apparently came at a price: A month or so later, Grenell was forced to add the the Kennedy Center post to his portfolio, despite his lack of any experience in the arts or culture.
As the Trump administration embarked on a rolling purge of Kennedy Center staff, Grenell seemed distracted by his special envoy position, using it to undercut Rubio last May as the latter was negotiating a prisoner swap with Venezuela’s dictatorial president Nicolás Maduro that would have traded Venezuelans detained by the United States in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison in exchange for Americans and Venezuelan political prisoners held by the Maduro government.
The New York Times reported that Grenell swooped into Venezuela in order to cut his own deal, winning the freedom of a single American, Navy veteran Joseph St. Clair in exchange for an exemption for oil giant Chevron from Trump’s ban on Venezuelan exports. The deal Rubio was reportedly near to closing, according to the Times, would have freed some 80 people, including 11 people who were either U.S. citizens or legal residents. Following Grenell’s deal for St. Clair, the Trump administration reversed course, releasing Chevron from the ban. Rubio’s deal never came off.
More recently, Grenell marked the holy season of Advent by defending Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers for her meeting with AfD’s Markus Frohnmaier, a member of the German parliament who, according to a 2019 report in Der Spiegel, was named in leaked Russian documents as being under the Russian Federation’s “total control.” In response to a December 13 post by journalist Michael D. Weiss noting Frohnmaier’s troublesome associations, Rogers took to the platform formerly known as Twitter the next day to claim her meeting was warranted, because AfD is anti-censorship. Grenell then swooped in to tweet that former President Joe Biden never talked to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, so (presumably) Rogers’s meeting with a reported Russian asset in the legislative body of a NATO country was actually a good thing.
And that, in a nutshell, sums up the public career of the man who saw to it that Trump’s hand-picked board of directors had his name added to that of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts on December 19. Five days later, Chuck Redd decided to cancel his Christmas Eve concert, he told the Associated Press.
In between, on December 23, the Kennedy Center Honors program, with the president playing emcee, was broadcast on CBS to its lowest ratings ever—down 35 percent from the year before. Three days later, Grenell fired off his threatening letter to Redd, which certainly knocked that presidential ratings debacle off the front pages. (You know how Trump loves to cite his ratings.) And perhaps that was the actual point of the letter.
Then there’s this: You know who really hated jazz? Nazis. Just sayin’.
