Does a real video show Donald J. Trump's name being removed from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts after a judge ordered the name to be removed? No, that's not true: While a judge did order the removal, a viral social media clip that showed the letters being taken down while a crowd cheered was generated with AI. The account where the video was first uploaded has a bio that reads "Using AI to comment about our wondrous but twisted world".
The video appeared in an Instagram post (archived here) from an account named "cabracabaret" on May 30, 2026 with a description that read:
The pushback has begun. Judge rules Trump's name must be removed from Kennedy Center #kennedycenter #pushback #whitehouse #dcmonuments
According to reporting from NPR (archived here) on May 29, 2026 a judge did indeed rule the name had to come down but there have been no news reports yet about it actually happening.
The opening frame of the video looked like this:
(Image source: cabracabaret video on Instagram.)
There was no direct AI disclaimer on the video post itself but the account that uploaded it (archived here) has a bio that reads:
Using AI to comment about our wondrous but twisted world
The video showed several glitches typical of AI-generated footage, such as weird misspellings ("Eedy" instead of "Kennedy", "Danald" and "Rnald" instead of "Donald") and the word "MDRIAL" falling down instead of the word "Trump".
(Image source: collage of glitches from the cabracabaret video on Instagram.)
For comparison, this is what the actual sign looked like, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Dclemens1971, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
