In May 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump made a state visit to China accompanied by prominent U.S. tech executives including billionaire SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. During the visit, an image (archived) spread online claiming to show the three men standing with raised fists in front of the Chinese Communist Party flag.
The image shows Trump, Musk and Huang — in matching dark suits and crimson ties with their right fists raised — in front of a red flag with a yellow hammer and sickle, which is the emblem of the ruling Communist Party of China. The image had a CCTV logo for the state broadcaster as well as a text chyron at the bottom.
(Image via X use @P_Kallioniemi)
The above image is fake. There is no authentic photograph showing the three men posing in front of this flag. We also found several flaws in the image indicating that it was generated by artificial intelligence or created using other digital editing means.
The first problem in the image is that the three men are wearing identical suits, with the same color tie. Getty Images photographs of Trump (wearing different-colored ties over the two days), Musk (not wearing a crimson tie) and Huang (also not wearing a crimson tie) taken over the two-day trip at events where all three were together showed that at no point were they in matching outfits.
The men's closed fists are also blurred, with Musk's thumb appearing to merge into his finger's knuckle (AI generation tools often have issues with hands). The fold in Trump's and Huang's right shirt sleeves are also exactly the same. Musk's shirt sleeve appears blurred under the black suit. All of these points indicate the image was AI-generated or otherwise digitally edited.
Snopes spoke to a Mandarin Chinese speaker who translated the chyron for us. It stated, "Evening News: Trump, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk sworn to join the Chinese Communist Party" — indicating that the image may have been intended to be humorous or satirical.
Reverse image search tools brought up no reliable news coverage that published the above image. Were this actually real, there would have been more widespread coverage and commentary. The national Chinese broadcaster, CCTV, also did not have the image available on its site and in its coverage of the meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
It was not clear who originally posted the image or what tools they used. A scan with Google Gemini's SynthID Detector, which checks for an invisible watermark that appears only with content generated with Google's AI platforms, found it was not created with Google's AI tools..
For further reading, Snopes has debunked claims about numerous fake images of Trump.