WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced he would host the Kennedy Center Honors, which will go to actor Sylvester Stallone, rock band Kiss and singer Gloria Gaynor among others during the first year of his chairmanship of Washington, DC’s main performing arts center.

The president also vowed to “fully renovate” the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, including replacing seats and fixing infrastructure, using $257 million from his signature tax and spending bill to make it “a crown jewel of American arts and culture.”

“I think we’ll bring it to a higher level than it ever hit,” Trump said Wednesday during an event to announce the honorees, adding that the building would play a prominent role in next year’s celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary.

This year’s other recipients are country music icon George Strait and the English theater actor Michael Crawford.

The event marked the latest example of Trump’s effort to exert control over the nation’s capital, which he has accused of being overrun by crime and “woke” ideology propagated by Democratic leaders. National Guard troops traveling in armored vehicles began to arrive in Washington this week after Trump federalized the city’s police department and deployed the soldiers.

The moves came despite statistics showing violent crime in Washington reached a 30-year low.

Trump skipped the Kennedy Center Honors ceremonies during his first term, when multiple artists and performers threatened to boycott in protests of his policies. Earlier this year, Trump took over as chairman and the current board of trustees was ousted then restocked with loyal allies. It was a shock to an institution that had enjoyed a long legacy of bipartisan governance.

Trump on Wednesday appeared to revel in his role, likening hosting duties to his former reality television show, The Apprentice, saying, “It’s going to be a big evening. I’ve been asked to host.”

In justifying his control over the performing arts center, Trump has lambasted the artistic choices made under prior leadership as politicized, claimed that the institution was in a state of disrepair and alleged — without evidence — that those responsible for overseeing the institution had spent money improperly.

“We have completely reversed the decline of this cherished national institution. It was being run down,” Trump said. “I should make this political, because they made the Academy Awards political and they went down the tubes. So they’ll say Trump made it political, but I think if we make it our kind of political, we’ll go up.”

It wasn’t exactly clear how this year’s honorees were chosen. Trump said he was “about 98% involved” and that Kennedy Center President Ric Grenell and trustee Sergio Gor, who is also White House personnel director, helped present options.

“I turned down plenty,” Trump said. “I had a couple of wokesters.”

Some of the honorees highlighted Trump’s own cultural tastes and connections with the entertainment world. The president is an avowed fan of musicals — Crawford’s performances include the title role in The Phantom of the Opera — and Stallone is an outspoken Trump supporter, having once compared him to a “second George Washington.”

The president’s changes to Kennedy Center have drawn backlash from the arts world, with prominent performers canceling events and the hit musical Hamilton abandoning plans for a production. Trump reacted by saying he “never liked Hamilton very much” during a board meeting and tour of the facility in March and instead said the center would host Les Misérables.

He attended a performance of the hit musical about the French Revolution in June, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump — an appearance that drew both boos and cheers, according to media reports. A video of Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance being greeted by boos at an event this year circulated on social media and drew condemnation from Grenell, who accused the audience of being “intolerant of diverse political views.”

The Kennedy Center hosts a wide array of cultural programming, including theater, opera, ballet, and orchestral music, and is home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera.

It has long been a centerpiece of the capital’s arts scene and the upheaval engulfing the institution echoes the broader turmoil facing Washington as the overwhelmingly Democratic city grapples with an emboldened Republican president.

Washington is already bearing the brunt of Trump’s efforts to slash the size of the federal government’s workforce and local leaders have offered dire warnings about city services after the Republican-controlled Congress earlier this year stripped Washington of $1 billion from its budget.

There are also concerns about the impact of Trump’s changes to the Kennedy Center on the institution’s financial future. The center’s former chairman, David M. Rubenstein, was the largest individual contributor in the Kennedy Center’s history.

Grenell has said he hopes to keep and expand the center’s donor base and justified the programming changes as necessary to sparking more interest from the public in the institution’s work and securing its future.

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