President Trump on Sunday was set to host the Kennedy Center Honors after presenting the 2025 Kennedy Center honorees with their medals during a ceremony in the Oval Office on Saturday, hailing the slate of artists he was deeply involved in choosing as “perhaps the most accomplished and renowned class” ever assembled.

This year’s recipients are actor Sylvester Stallone, singers Gloria Gaynor and George Strait, the rock band Kiss and actor-singer Michael Crawford.

Mr. Trump said Saturday they are a group of “incredible people” who represent the “very best in American arts and culture” and that, “I know most of them and I’ve been a fan of all of them.”

Sunday marks the first time a president will command the stage for the ceremony instead of sitting in an Opera House box.

Asked when he arrived how he had found time to prepare, Mr. Trump said he “didn’t really prepare very much.”

“If you look at the great hosts, Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, those are the greats,” Mr. Trump said, while disparaging previous host Jimmy Kimmel, whom the president has criticized on multiple occasions, going so far as to urge ABC to remove him as host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”  

“But no, I think you, you want to be just loose and not a lot to prepare for. You know what you have to be? You have to be yourself,” Mr. Trump said.

“I have a good memory, so I can remember things, which is very fortunate,” the president said. “But just, I wanted to just be myself. You have to be yourself. Johnny Carson, he was himself.” 

Mr. Trump is assuming a role that has been held in the past by journalist Walter Cronkite and comedian Stephen Colbert, among others. Before Mr. Trump, presidents watched the show alongside the honorees.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, one of several Cabinet secretaries attending the ceremony, said he’s looking forward to Mr. Trump’s hosting job.

“Oh, this president, he is so relaxed in front of these cameras, as you know, and so funny, I can’t wait for tonight,” Lutnick said as he arrived with his wife, who is on the Kennedy Center board.

Mr. Trump said in August that he had agreed to host the show. He said Saturday at a State Department dinner for the honorees that he was doing so “at the request of a certain television network.” He predicted that the broadcast, scheduled to air Dec. 23 on CBS and Paramount+, would have its best ratings ever.

Since 1978, the honors have recognized stars for their influence on American culture and the arts. Members of this year’s class are pop-culture standouts, including Stallone for his “Rocky” and “Rambo” movies, Gaynor for her feminist anthem “I Will Survive” and Kiss for its flashy, cartoonish makeup and onstage displays of smoke and pyrotechnics. Country music superstar George Strait and Tony Award-winning actor Michael Crawford are also being honored.

The ceremony is expected to be emotional for the members of Kiss. The band’s original lead guitarist, Ace Frehley, died in October after he was injured during a fall. The band’s co-founder Gene Simmons, speaking on the red carpet when he and the other honorees arrived for the ceremony, said the president had assured him there would be an empty chair among the members of Kiss in memory of Frehley.

Stallone said being honored at the ceremony was like being in the “eye of a hurricane.”

“This is an amazing event,” he said. “But you’re caught up in the middle of it. It’s hard to take it in until the next day. … but I’m incredibly humbled by it.”

Crawford also said it was “humbling, especially at the end of a career.”

Gaynor said it “feels like a dream” to be honored. “To be recognized in this way is the pinnacle,” she said on the red carpet.

Mike Farris, an award-winning gospel singer who is performing for Gaynor, said she is a dear friend. “She truly did survive,” Farris said. “What an iconic song.”

Actor Neil McDonough said he’s presenting the award to Stallone, which he said was long over due for Stallone’s writing and acting. “But that isn’t even the best part,” McDonough said. “The best part is that Sly is one of he greatest guys I’ve ever met.”

Previous honorees have come from a broad range of art forms, whether dance (Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham), theater (Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber), movies (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks) or music (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell).

Mr. Trump upended decades of bipartisan support for the center by ousting its leadership and stacking the board of trustees with Republican supporters, who then elected him chair. He has criticized the center’s programming and the building’s appearance — and has said, perhaps jokingly, that he would rename it as the “Trump Kennedy Center.” He secured more than $250 million from Congress for renovations of the building.

Presidents of each political party have at times found themselves face-to-face with artists of opposing political views. Republican Ronald Reagan was there for honoree Arthur Miller, a playwright who championed liberal causes. Democrat Bill Clinton, who had signed an assault weapons ban into law, marked the honors for Charlton Heston, an actor and gun rights advocate.

During Mr. Trump’s first term, multiple honorees were openly critical of the president. In 2017, Mr. Trump’s first year in office, honors recipient and film producer Norman Lear threatened to boycott his own ceremony if Mr. Trump attended. Mr. Trump stayed away during that entire term.

Mr. Trump has said he was deeply involved in choosing the 2025 honorees and turned down some recommendations because they were “too woke.” While Stallone is one of Mr. Trump’s Hollywood “special ambassadors” and has likened Mr. Trump to George Washington, the political views of Sunday’s other guests are less clear.

Strait and Gaynor have said little about their politics, although Federal Election Commission records show that Gaynor has given money to Republican organizations in recent years.

Simmons spoke favorably of Mr. Trump when Mr. Trump ran for president in 2016. But in 2022, Simmons told Spin magazine that Mr. Trump was “out for himself” and criticized the president for encouraging conspiracy theories and public expressions of racism.

Fellow Kiss member Paul Stanley denounced Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden, and said Mr. Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were “terrorists.” But after Mr. Trump won in 2024, Stanley urged unity.

“If your candidate lost, it’s time to learn from it, accept it and try to understand why,” Stanley wrote on X. “If your candidate won, it’s time to understand that those who don’t share your views also believe they are right and love this country as much as you do.”