Trump's Xi Jinping Photo Looks AI-Altered, Experts Say

AI + POLITICS

Digital forensics experts say a photo President Trump posted of Xi Jinping's arrival at Joint Base Andrews appears to have been altered with AI — editing out an unflattering moment caught on live television.

Published September 26, 2026 · By Daniel Rao

President Donald Trump (file photo; not from the September 23 event). The image he posted on Truth Social of Xi Jinping's arrival is not used here because it is not licensable. Official 2025 inaugural portrait by Daniel Torok — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

On September 24, Donald Trump posted an image on Truth Social that purports to show one of the signature moments of his week with Xi Jinping: the two leaders standing side by side on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, Trump mid-salute, the Chinese president's Air China aircraft rising behind them, a military jet soaring overhead. Above them, the words "Only Trump."

It is a striking image. According to digital forensics experts, it may also be a doctored one.

Within hours of the post going up, side-by-side comparisons with authentic photographs captured by AFP and other news agencies — and with the White House's own livestreamed footage of Xi's September 23 arrival — laid bare a series of discrepancies that experts say point to the potential use of artificial intelligence. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and neither Trump nor the White House has publicly confirmed that the image was created or modified with AI.

This is, to be clear, an unconfirmed allegation. But it comes from people whose job is spotting exactly this kind of manipulation — and what they found is worth walking through in detail, because the differences are not subtle once you know where to look.

The wince that wouldn't go away

The most visible discrepancy is the one Trump appears to have wanted gone.

In authentic photos and video of the September 23 greeting, Trump is captured reacting to the roar of a military flyover overhead — ducking his head, clenching his teeth, wearing what observers described as a pained wince. The moment drew mockery from critics on social media and was mocked on late-night television by Jimmy Fallon.

In the image Trump posted, that moment does not exist. There, he stands upright, composed, arm raised in a clean salute beside Xi — the flyover rendered as backdrop, not as noise. The awkwardness caught by live cameras has been edited out, leaving only the posture of command.

That swap — grimace out, salute in — is the heart of the controversy. A head of state's real-time reaction to a loud flyover is a human moment; replacing it with a stiff pose is the kind of touch-up that changes what the photograph communicates. As one of the experts who reviewed the image put it, the interpretation of a photo can completely change in a manner more akin to propaganda.

The glove, the tie, and the shoes

The pose is only the beginning. AFP's comparisons surfaced a list of small, telling differences between the posted image and the real scene:

The image Trump posted shows him in a plain blue tie and a single black glove. News agency photos and video from the event show him in a striped tie, with gloves on both hands. One glove, in other words, appears to have vanished between the tarmac and the post.

Other details shifted as well. There are apparent differences in the details around Xi's aircraft, in the appearance of White House chief of protocol Monica Crowley, and even — in a detail that underlines how granular the edits appear to be — in the shoes worn by a woman visible in the background over Trump's left shoulder.

None of these is decisive on its own. Ties can be misread in low-resolution frames; crowds move. But the pattern — multiple small alterations, all in the direction of a cleaner, more flattering scene — is precisely what forensic analysts are trained to treat as suspicious.

What the forensics experts found

Three experts, reviewing the image independently, reached the same direction of travel — with the caveat that none of them presents this as proof.

Dr. Joe Ondrak, director at Peryton Intelligence, reviewed the photographs for PEOPLE and said it was "highly likely" that AI had been used "at least in part" to create the image from an original photograph. He suggested the AI may have "hallucinated certain elements" while attempting to alter or enhance the photograph, pointing to the differences involving Crowley and Trump's gloves as indications of possible AI manipulation.

Matthew Stamm, a media forensics expert at Drexel University, told AFP his analysis of the image using specialized software "identified traces left by generative AI with high confidence." He likened those statistical traces to "fingerprints that a criminal leaves at a crime scene" — not a verdict, but the kind of signature that narrows the field.

Walter Scheirer of the University of Notre Dame went further still. "Given the existence of multiple versions of this scene, including a set of originals available via Getty Images that are clearly different from what President Trump posted to Truth Social, I am confident that this image has been altered," he told AFP.

Separately, multiple AI-detection tools indicated the image was likely generated with the technology — a signal that has become harder to interpret as detectors grow less reliable, but which lines up with the human experts' read.

A pattern, not a one-off

Trump, as the Straits Times noted, is known to litter his Truth Social feed with AI-generated images and memes. He is, in the president's own words, a man who uses the technology — though he is coy about exactly how.

On September 13, Trump told reporters: "Whoever wins AI, and we're leading by a lot, whoever wins AI wins." When asked how he personally uses AI, his answer was: "Well, I don't want to tell you that."

There is also a direct precedent involving Xi. After Trump traveled to Beijing in May for a prior summit with the Chinese leader, he posted a different doctored image — one meant to show his predecessor Joe Biden confused with the Chinese president. The flyover photo, if it was altered, would not be his first doctored Xi-related image.

That history matters for one reason: it changes how seriously to take the "innocent touch-up" theory. Scheirer himself drew the line carefully — "Sometimes these edits are innocuous. In other cases, the interpretation of the photo completely changes in a manner more akin to propaganda." The question is not whether the technology can clean up a photograph. It is what the cleaning is for.

The press fight in the background

The image lands in a week when the White House's relationship with the press is unusually strained — which is relevant, because manipulated images and restricted press access are two halves of the same story about who gets to define reality.

Trump has been pushing — so far thwarted in court — to bar journalists from CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House over coverage he branded as "fake news." In solidarity, the top five US broadcasters halted pool coverage of the White House — the system by which one TV outlet films on behalf of all of them for the day.

That context sharpens the stakes. When fewer independent cameras are rolling, an administration's own version of events — its own images, its own edits — carries more weight by default. A touched-up tarmac photo is a small thing. A touched-up tarmac photo in a week when the administration is trying to reduce the number of independent witnesses is a small thing with large implications.

The image itself emerged from the broader Washington summit, where Trump and Xi met for talks covering trade, AI and the wider US-China relationship (see our preview of the September 24 Washington summit for the full agenda). Trump said afterward that Xi "seemed to like" his proposal to rename artificial intelligence "Super Intelligence"; Xi himself never used the term. The summit's substance — chip rules, rare earths, guardrails on AI — deserves its own coverage. But the image controversy has become part of the story of the week, because it is about how the week will be remembered.

What we actually know — and what we don't

Here is the honest ledger.

Verified fact: Trump posted the image on Truth Social on September 24. Verified fact: authentic photographs and the White House's own livestream show a different scene — different tie, different gloves, a wince that became a salute. Verified fact: three forensic experts independently assessed the image as likely AI-altered, with language ranging from "highly likely" to "high confidence" to Scheirer's "I am confident that this image has been altered." Verified fact: the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Unconfirmed: that AI was actually used, by whom, and why. No public confirmation exists from Trump or the White House. Experts' assessments, however confident, are assessments — not admissions. And AI-detection tools, the industry keeps reminding us, are imperfect instruments.

What is not in doubt is the trajectory this episode fits into. AI-generated fakes are growing rapidly in politics, and this week they reached a new marker: even high-stakes diplomatic events now appear subject to manipulation by the very leaders participating in them. The technology Trump brags about leading is the same technology his critics — and now forensic analysts — say may have retouched his week with Xi.

The wince is gone from the photograph. It is not gone from the footage. Somewhere between the two is a question about what an official image is for: a record of what happened, or a picture of what should have.

Sources: The Straits Times; Hindustan Times; Times Now; The Sun; The Daily Caller. Digital forensics assessments by AFP, Dr. Joe Ondrak (Peryton Intelligence, via PEOPLE), Matthew Stamm (Drexel University) and Walter Scheirer (University of Notre Dame).