In March 2026, a rumor circulated on Facebook that U.S. President Donald Trump had celebrated actor Kurt Russell at the Kennedy Center Honors.
The posts sharing the claim included an image of the president awarding a smiling Russell a gold medal. One March 30 Facebook post's caption read:
CONGRATULATIONS: Last night, President Donald Trump presented Kurt Russell with the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors — and the moment quickly turned warm and unexpectedly humorous when Trump paused to admire and playfully comment on Kurt's unmistakable elegance and larger-than-life presence.
Snopes readers contacted us to ask whether Trump had indeed presented Russell the award, and whether the image was legitimate.
(Facebook user Msrk Soyin Mee)
We first uploaded post's image into Google Lens to perform a reverse image search and searched DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo for evidence of the ceremony. If the image of Trump presenting the award was real — in fact, if the entire awards ceremony was real — journalists with reputable news outlets would have covered it, and evidence of the award presentation would exist in credible media repositories, such as Getty Images.
That was not the case. We did not locate any examples of credible outlets publishing the image, nor reporting on the alleged events. Instead, we found evidence that proved the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony had not happened, and that the image was created using generative artificial intelligence. We've rated the claim false, accordingly.
First, the award ceremony: The Kennedy Center's website listed the award's recipients for 2025 (George Strait, KISS, Michael Crawford, Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester Stallone), but not for 2026. Checking the dates for past years revealed that the awards ceremony takes place in December — not in March, as suggested by the posts.
Articles from TVInsider and AARP noted that Russell was present at the 2025 ceremony, but not to receive an award. He instead spoke to honor Stallone, his co-star in the 1989 film "Tango and Cash."
As for the image — there were actually two images. Different posts featured two nearly identical images, with the only differences being Russell's suit color and the expression on Trump's face.
There were clear visual signs both images were generated with artificial intelligence. For instance, although the ceremony was supposedly the Kennedy Center Honors, a blue display in the background suggested it was for the "National Achievement Awards." In reality, the "National Achievement Awards" do not exist.
Other discrepancies included inaccuracies in the details around Trump's hand and the medal's ribbon (this was less apparent in the image with the white suit), and the unnatural blurriness and distortion of people in the background.
We also uploaded the images into Google Gemini, to check for a SynthID watermark and other signs of AI. Gemini found that watermark in both images, further suggesting they were AI-generated.
Let us note here: These types of AI detection tools are fallible. Snopes cautions people against using them for definitive answers on media's authenticity without supporting evidence. Still, there was more than enough evidence to disprove this rumor.
Snopes has previously debunked all sorts of AI-generated nonsense. For instance, we previously checked a claim that Russell was being boycotted after saying children should not watch cartoons with LGBTQ+ themes.