How Jazz Great Chuck Redd Gave American Culture a Gift This Christmas

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.