Trump “Caught Sleeping” at the Fourth of July Fireworks — But Someone Made This Photo with AI
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On July 5, an X account called @LucasSa56947288 posted a photo that appeared to show President Trump asleep with his mouth wide open during the Fourth of July fireworks on the National Mall. The caption said, “This was Donald Trump last night! He went to sleep while the fireworks were displayed in Washington DC. So embarrassing!” Within hours, the image had spread to X, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook, and people shared it as proof that the 80-year-old president had dozed off during America’s 250th birthday.
Here’s the thing: Trump did briefly close his eyes during the fireworks. Real video from the Diario AS YouTube channel shows him sitting next to First Lady Melania Trump with his eyes shut, then jolting slightly as the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’” played over the speakers. Snopes rated that real video as true. But the mouth-open photo never matched any real image from the event, and both Snopes and Lead Stories flagged it as likely AI-manipulated.
Lead Stories pointed to the skin, which they described as “too smooth and plastic-like.” Snopes ran the image through Google’s SynthID Detector, and the tool found no sign of Google AI but could not rule out other tools. Snopes also ran a reverse image search and found zero news outlets that had published the mouth-open version — authentic photos from the event, including on Getty Images, show Trump with his eyes open as well as closed, though none show him with his mouth open. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle called it “fake news.”
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Skin Too Smooth Lead Stories found that the skin in the photo looks “too smooth and plastic-like,” without pores or texture anywhere on the forehead, cheeks, or chin.
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No News Outlet Has It Snopes ran a reverse image search and found zero news outlets that published the mouth-open version. Every real photo from the event, including Getty Images, shows Trump with his mouth shut.
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A Real Source Photo Exists Getty Images has real photos of Trump at the fireworks with his eyes closed and his mouth shut. Someone likely took one of those and used AI to open his mouth and make the sleeping pose look worse.
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SynthID Found Nothing from Google Snopes ran the image through Google’s SynthID Detector, and the tool found no sign of Google AI but said it could not tell whether someone used a different AI tool to change it.
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🚨 Someone Used AI to Make a Real Moment Look Worse
Trump did briefly close his eyes during the fireworks — real video confirms that. But the dramatic mouth-open photo does not match any real image from the event. Someone took an authentic Getty Images photo and used AI to make it look much worse than what happened.
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An X Account Posted a See-Through Squid That Google’s Own AI Made
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On June 30, an X account called @ScienceThing5 posted a video of a squid so transparent you could see its organs floating inside it, and the caption called it “the real invisible man of the ocean.” People shared it as real deep-sea footage. Lead Stories ran it through Google’s Gemini, and the tool detected SynthID signals, which confirmed someone made the video with Google’s own AI. Real glass squid do exist and their bodies are mostly clear, but this video showed something too smooth and too perfect to come from a real camera underwater.
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An AI Fake News Site Called “The Editorial” Invented the Collapse of 47 Alabama Newspapers
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A site called The Editorial published a 1,900-word story with the headline “The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama,” claiming a company called Alabama Community News LLC spent $3.2 million to buy 47 weekly newspapers and then killed them all. The piece named real papers — the Shelby County Reporter, the Centreville Press — and it read well enough that journalists shared it on social media. Then Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton checked several of the allegedly dead newspapers, and they all seemed to be operational and still publishing. The company, the people it quoted, and the entire story were all made up by AI, and no one has figured out who runs the site or why it exists.
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YOUR REALITY DETECTOR TOOLKIT |
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Today’s Skill: When a Real Event Gets an AI Upgrade
The most believable fakes start with something that really happened — and make it worse.
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Check Other Photos from the Same Event
Before you share a dramatic photo from a public event, search for other photos from that same event. In today’s story, real photos from the July Fourth fireworks show Trump with his eyes both open and closed — but none of them show his mouth hanging open. If only one version of a photo shows the most dramatic moment, that’s the one to doubt.
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Search for the Less Dramatic Version
AI fakes often start with a real photo that someone edits to make more extreme. Look for a calmer version of the same scene. In this case, Getty Images has the original photo — eyes closed, mouth shut — that the fake was likely built from. The real version tells a very different story than the AI version.
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Check If Any News Outlet Published It
At a public event with hundreds of photographers, the most important moments get caught by professional cameras and published by news outlets fast. If a dramatic photo only shows up on personal social media accounts and no real news outlet has it, that’s a sign. In this case, no outlet published the mouth-open photo — it only lived on social media.
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