Is this image of Trump hiding in plane catering cart authentic? Don’t believe your eyes

In August 2026, a rumor spread on the internet that a photograph authentically showed U.S. President Donald Trump hiding in an airplane catering cart as he was being smuggled from one plane to another for security reasons. 

The image circulated after the New York Times reported on Aug. 10 that, in July, Trump had to be smuggled from Air Force One onto a military jet in a catering container to leave Turkey because he faced a credible threat from Iran.

The image appeared on Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn and X. Anthony Scaramucci, who was the White House communications director during Trump’s first administration, also posted the image from his X account on Aug. 11, saying the president was “livid” that the image became public (archived):

The image showed Trump’s face peering out from behind a plane food tray in a small airplane catering cart or trolley that was open on the side. 

However, the image was fake. The New York Times did not say he was smuggled out in the type of service trolley flight attendants push up and down the aisles when they serve refreshments to passengers. Instead, the story said he was transported from Air Force One to the military plane in a “catering container.” A video included in the New York Times article showed the container was large enough to hold multiple people and that a flatbed truck moved it from one plane to the other. 

Further, a search on Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing turned up no credible report that this image was authentic. 

The earliest posting of this image we could identify came shortly after the New York Times article was published on Aug. 10. A Bluesky account named Matt Ortega shared the photo: 

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— Matt Ortega (@mattortega.com) 10 August 2026 at 21:30

The account belonged to a congressional candidate in California who lost the Democratic primary on June 2, 2026. His campaign website indicates Ortega has a long history of satirizing political content. During the 2012 presidential election, Salon identified Ortega as “the man behind Mitt Romney memes,” referring to the then-Republican presidential candidate (Romney lost to former Democratic President Barack Obama). 

We reached out to Ortega seeking confirmation that he fabricated the image.

Details in the photograph suggest it was generated via artificial intelligence. First, it is implausible that a person of the president’s size could easily hide in the narrow trolley. Further, while catering trolleys on airplanes have doors, they do not include curtains. The curtains on the trolley in this image resembled those that separate seats on airplanes, to distinguish first, business or economic class. 

We also ran the image through the ZeroGPT AI image detector, which suggested that the image was AI-generated with 97% certainty, though AI image detectors can be unreliable. 

This image was not the sole example of fabricated image making light of the story that Trump was smuggled out of Turkey in catering equipment. Snopes found other examples on X and Facebook.

For further reading, Snopes has investigated several fake images of Trump, including one that showed Trump asleep in the Oval Office of the White House, with his face on the Resolute Desk.