The 2025 Kennedy Center Honors will be broadcast tonight, celebrating this year’s class of honorees and their contributions to the performing arts. Viewers can watch the ceremony on CBS and Paramount+ starting at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

President Trump’s administration has made sweeping changes to the Kennedy Center, including ousting the chairman of its board of trustees and its president, and installing in their place Mr. Trump and one of his allies, former Ambassador Richard Grenell. Last week, the White House announced the board had voted to rename the institution the Trump-Kennedy Center.

This year’s Kennedy Center Honors, which was recorded earlier this month, marks Mr. Trump’s first appearance at the annual event in his two terms in office. He also hosted the celebration, a departure from past years when presidents would sit with the honorees and watch the show. 

Who are the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors recipients?

Mr. Trump announced this year’s honorees over the summer. They are:

• George Strait
• Gloria Gaynor
• The rock band Kiss: Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Peter Criss and the late Ace Frehley
• Michael Crawford
• Sylvester Stallone

How to watch the Kennedy Center Honors

• What: President Trump hosts the Kennedy Center Honors, celebrating George Strait, Gloria Gaynor, Kiss, Michael Crawford and Sylvester Stallone.
• Date: Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2025
• Time: 8 p.m. ET/PT
• On TV: On CBS television stations. Find your local station here.
• Online stream: Paramount+

George Strait, the King of Country Music

With hits like “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” “Amarillo by Morning” and “Check Yes or No,” George Strait is known as the King of Country Music.

The multiplatinum artist has won dozens of awards from the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association, as well as a Grammy for best country album. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

When Strait received a lifetime achievement award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in 2021, he said his father taught him the ways of the cowboy life and that he’s tried to hold on to his Western heritage throughout his career. But he also said he was challenged early on to stay true to himself.

“When I first signed with MCA Records in 1981, you know, they, all the people, were going, ‘Take the hat off,'” he said, pointing at his trademark 10-gallon cowboy hat with a grin. “Now, can you imagine if I would have done that?”

A producer also floated the idea that Strait change his name. “My dad was so glad I didn’t do that,” Strait said.

Gloria Gaynor, the Queen of Disco

Gloria Gaynor‘s 1978 hit “I Will Survive” has stood the test of time, surviving far longer than disco did and crowning the New Jersey singer as the genre’s queen.

The song won a Grammy for best disco recording. When it was added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2016, the library said “I Will Survive” became known as an “emblem of women’s empowerment” and an anthem in the LGBTQ community.

“That song taps into the inherent survival instinct and it taps into the tenacity of the human spirit,” Gaynor told CBS News in 2016.

As she recalled recently, when she recorded the hit, she was paralyzed from the waist down while recovering from a serious spinal injury after a fall onstage.

“I had been in hospital for over three months, hoping I’d survive, you know, this trauma that I was going through, hoping that I’d survive the fact that my mother had just passed away a few years prior,” Gaynor said. “Yeah, I was living that song, and I was certain that I wouldn’t be the only one.”

Legendary rock band Kiss

This year’s celebration is a bittersweet moment for the founding members of Kiss. Ace Frehley, the band’s original lead guitarist, died in October, just a few weeks after he, Peter Criss, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were named among this year’s honorees.

“The saddest thing of all is that Ace couldn’t live long enough to see this amazing thing,” Simmons told CBS News.

Kiss is known as much for their hits like “Rock and Roll All Nite,” “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” and “Detroit Rock City” as they are for their signature black-and-white face paint. The group rode the glam rock wave to stardom, selling more than 100 million records worldwide and entering the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.

Simmons and Stanley’s partnership has lasted for decades, overcoming the difficulties of making it in the music business.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both of us are Jewish and from immigrants who experienced the Holocaust,” Stanley told CBS News. “I think that innately we have inside us compassion for other people but also a sense of survival.”

Tony winner Michael Crawford

Famed composer Andrew Lloyd Webber picked Michael Crawford to play the titular role in the long-running musical “The Phantom of the Opera” when it first opened in London in 1986.

“When he played to me the overture, the hair stood up on the back of my neck,” Crawford told CBS News. “I adored playing and creating it, building him.”

After winning an Olivier Award — the U.K. equivalent of the Tony Award — for musical of the year, the show opened on Broadway in New York in 1988, winning seven Tonys, including best actor in a musical for Crawford.

Crawford’s career has also included roles in movies and on television, but he considered those to be auditions for his next part. For him, playing the Phantom was a gift.

“So, you want to do the eight shows a week,” Crawford said. “You don’t want to miss one.”

American icon Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Stallone wants people to understand one thing about his classic movie “Rocky.”

“Even to this day, I bristle when I hear it’s a sports movie,” Stallone told CBS News. “It’s not. It’s a love story. It starts with love.”

For Stallone, who received Oscar nominations for playing Rocky Balboa and writing the screenplay for what was named 1976’s best picture, the film was about the love between Rocky and Talia Shire’s Adrian.

“This movie will rise and fall on love, not fights,” Stallone said. “Everyone can sort of go, oh my God, it’s the little things in life, it’s the love, it’s the nurturing — that’s the victory.”

Stallone calls the movie his biography when at the time he felt like he couldn’t win. He went into acting in his 20s after growing up with his father, who Stallone said was emotionally and physically abusive. Movies were a way for Stallone to cope, and he said the mythic heroes he saw on screen changed his life.

“I said, ‘I’m going to be that guy,'” Stallone said. “I don’t want to be what’s at the house, but I do want to be this noble creature.” 

New Kennedy Center Honors medallion

The rainbow-colored ribbons adorned with three gold bars that have long been given to honorees were replaced this year with new gold medallions.

Designed by Tiffany and Co., each medallion features an etching of the center on one side with rainbow colors running through it. The other side bears each honoree’s name and when they received the award.

Each medallion hangs from a ribbon that’s navy blue, which the center described as “a color associated with dignity and tradition.”