Images supposedly showing US President Donald Trump being carried out of the White House after fainting following the US midterm elections have been shared online. But they are fake.
Posts which have been widely shared on X and Facebook, link to an article with the headline: “BREAKING: President Trump Faints and Is Rushed Out of the White House Following Crushing 2026 US Midterm Election Defeat, With His Condition Sadly Confirmed to Be…”.
OpenAI’s detector told us the picture of Mr Trump being carried with a camera flash visible on the left contains an invisible SynthID watermark, indicating it was made or edited with OpenAI tools.
A zoomed out version of the image included in the article appears to show several photographers taking photos of the incident. You might expect that, if genuine, there would be multiple photos and videos of the president being rushed out of the White House posted online, but there are no others.
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A slightly brighter version of the picture appears to have been taken from an AI-generated video of Mr Trump supposedly being thrown into a hazardous waste bin that was shared online months before the elections took place.
The first frame of the video appears to match the other image being shared, with four men holding up the president in the same position. However it has been edited to change the lighting and add camera flashes to the edge of the image.
The same video was recently reshared on X by the Iranian Embassy in India with the caption: “The U.S. midterm elections”.
Signs the footage has been generated using artificial intelligence include one of the men carrying Mr Trump disappearing and the unnatural physics of him appearing to be thrown into the bin.
We could find no footage or credible reports of Mr Trump fainting or being carried out of the White House following the recent US midterms.
Sometimes we fact check things that may seem obviously false to some if not all—we’ve written more about why and when we do that here. In this case, we saw people in the comments of these posts appearing to think the pictures were genuine.
Before sharing content like this that you come across online, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a trustworthy and verifiable source. Our misinformation toolkit contains tips on how to do this.
