August 15 2025, 08:15 
Following the president’s announcement on Wednesday that he’ll award singer Gloria Gaynor a Kennedy Center Honor for her lifetime of achievement in the arts, The View host Ana Navarro urged her to reject it.
“Don’t do it, Gloria!” Navarro posted to Instagram on Thursday.
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Navarro extolled the singer, 81, best known for her gay anthem “I Will Survive,” while calling out the president as “a stain on the prestige and significance” of the Kennedy Center Honors.
“Look, the woman is a goddess and deserves all the flowers that come her way,” Navarro said of Gaynor. “But I wish she wouldn’t accept an award from the hands of a man who has attacked the rights and history of women, people of color and LGBTQ. The gay community in particular, helped turn her signature song into an anthem.”
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Despite Navarro’s invocation of the gay community, Gaynor’s relationship with LGBTQ+ people could be called tenuous.
Four years after the release of “I Will Survive” in 1978, Gaynor became a Christian and distanced herself from a past she considered sinful.
Asked in a 2007 interview with the U.K.’s Radio 4 if she had any opposition to homosexuality, Gaynor said of the gay community, “I want to lead them to Christ and what he has for them. I want to lead them to Him. I want to lead them to truth.”
She said her “I Will Survive” anthem provided “a platform for my purpose, which is to bring the love of Christ to all of my fans. Because they trust me, I think.”
Gaynor hasn’t responded publicly to Navarro’s suggestion, but following the announcement of the award, she reposted a video to her Instagram story along with congratulations from a friend, according to The Wrap.
Gaynor appeared on The View in 2009 to promote the 30th anniversary of “I Will Survive.”
“It feels great to have such a song like that because I get kids five and six years old telling me they like the song, and then people seventy-five and eighty. It’s quite an honor,” she said in a 2012 interview.
Apparently, Gaynor can count the president among those older fans.
The president shared at a press conference at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday that he was “about 98% involved” in the selection of the honorees, which include Gaynor, right-wing Rambo star Sylvester Stallone, Phantom of the Opera actor Michael Crawford, country music artist George Strait, and glam rock metal band Kiss.
All of the picks made their names in the 1980s, at the same time that the president himself rose to fame on a tide of self-promotion in New York’s daily tabloids. But a Kennedy Center honor has eluded him, he told the press and administration officials assembled to applaud his taste in arts and culture.
“I would have taken it if they would have called me,” the former Apprentice host said in a rambling monologue, which included the news he’ll be hosting the Kennedy Center Honors himself in December.
“I waited and waited and waited and I said: ‘To hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honor,” adding that “maybe next year” he’ll honor himself.
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