In April 2026, a Threads post (archived) shared an image of the U.S. flag and Australian flag on display together at the Eisenhower Executive Building, part of the White House compound, claiming the Trump administration accidentally displayed the latter flag for British monarch King Charles III's visit to the White House that month. The post, which also included other images of Australian flags flying alongside U.S. and Washington, D.C., flags on lampposts, wrote:
The US Protocol Office has raised the "British" flag in honour of the visit of King Charles III and Queen Camilla.I kid ye not...
(Threads user @graeme_from_it)
The image of the Australian flag on the Eisenhower Executive Building appeared alongside the claim that the U.S. Protocol Office raised the flag elsewhere on Threads (archived) and on X (archived). (The Office of the Chief of Protocol is in charge of welcoming foreign leaders.)
Snopes readers sent emails and searched the site wondering if the claim was true.
In short, the image of the Australian flag on the Eisenhower Executive Building was from the Australian prime minister's visit to the U.S. in 2019. Although it was a real photo, meaning not generated or edited using artificial intelligence or other digital tools, it did not show a flag the Trump administration displayed in honor of King Charles III or Queen Elizabeth II, the U.K.'s monarch at the time. Therefore, we've rated the image miscaptioned.
However, the District Department of Transportation, which is part of Washington, D.C.'s, local government and not affiliated with the White House, did mistakenly display a few Australian flags for a couple of hours on April 24, 2026, days before Charles' arrival, as a DDOT spokesperson confirmed to Snopes. That context, which
Miscaptioned Eisenhower Building image
The image of the U.S. and Australian flags displayed side-by-side on the Eisenhower Executive Building is an official White House photo by taken on Sept. 18, 2019, by Andrea Hanks, according to The Trump White House Archived's account on image sharing platform Flickr. This particular photo was part of an album documenting then-Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's visit to the White House on Sept. 20.
A U.S. Department of State transcript of remarks made by U.S. President Donald Trump and Morrison at a Sept. 20 state dinner confirm that Morrison visited the White House at that time.
A photographer for photojournalism database Getty Images captured several photos of a DDOT employee replacing Australian flags on lampposts with U.K. flags on April 24, 2026. One of those photos included the facade of the Eisenhower Executive Building in the background. Upon it was a Betsy Ross-style American flag celebrating the nation's 250th anniversary.
Another Getty photographer also took a picture directly of the Eisenhower Executive Building on that same date. That photo more clearly shows the American flag celebrating the nation's 250th anniversary alone on the front of the building, with neither a U.K. flag nor an Australian flag alongside it.
Australian flags on display ahead of King Charles III's visit
One of those Getty photos was primarily focused on a DDOT employee removing an Australian flag from an lamppost on April 24, 2026, a few days ahead of King Charles III's planned April 27 arrival to Washington. Other Getty photos show the same thing, confirming that there were Australian flags on display around the White House before Charles' appearance in the city.
A DDOT spokesperson confirmed in a phone call that it displays flags along the streets around the White House for all foreign state visits. It raised 232 flags meant to be the U.K.'s for Charles's visit, but at first 15 of them were mistakenly Australian flags.
Another Getty photo shows a British flag across the street from an Australian flag, supporting the notion that only some of the flags raised were Australian.
Both flags incorporate the Union Jack, which is the nickname for the U.K.'s flag. The difference between the two flags is that the Union Jack makes up the entirety of the U.K.'s flag but only the top left quarter of the Australian flag. The rest of the Australian flag is a blue background featuring six white stars.
According to the DDOT spokesperson, flags of a foreign state are stored and labeled together. In the process of cleaning and moving the flags, small errors sometimes happen, leading to flags of one country to get mixed up with flags of another country in storage. This can lead to an incident like what happened with the Australian flags.
DDOT noticed the error and corrected it within about two hours, the DDOT spokesperson explained. By the time King Charles III arrived a few days later, all of the lampposts DDOT raised the flags upon correctly displayed the U.K. flag.
The White House was not involved in the raising of DDOT's flags.