On Oct. 28, the White House posted an image depicting a pumpkin with a sombrero carved into it with the caption “Spooky szn is here.”
Just days before Halloween, purported screenshots spread online appearing to show that U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House had posted an image of a pumpkin with a sombrero carved into it, along with the caption “Spooky szn is here” — which critics of the administration called a racist connotation.
We checked the White House social media pages, and found the screenshots were authentic. The White House’s X account, Facebook page and other pages posted the image Oct. 28, gaining millions of views (archived).
We reached out to the White House asking what, specifically, the image was referring to, and did not immediately receive a response. We will update this story if we do.
We also ran the image through OpenAI’s AI-generated image detection software, which looks for an invisible OpenAI watermark. The software determined the image had been created with OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tools.
(openai.com)
During the midterm campaigns, as well as Trump’s presidency more broadly, Republicans have focused on the topic of immigration, with deportations reportedly rising to an estimated 660,000 over the past year — still far below the Trump administration’s target of 1 million per year.
As Trump’s party trailed Democrats in polls ahead of the election, the White House connecting a symbol of Mexican heritage to “spooky szn” made reference to Republicans’ campaigning on deportations targeting Latinos.
According to a Pew Research study from November, Latinos are more likely than other U.S. adults to say they worry they or someone close to them might be deported and have otherwise shaped their life around anxieties related to immigration status.
For further reading, we investigated whether rapper Nicki Minaj — who has supported Trump — is a U.S. citizen.
