President Donald Trump regularly posts some of the most bizarre content on the internet, from images of himself as Jesus Christ to AI videos of diarrhea being dumped on liberal protesters. But there’s been a weird trend over the past year: social media users take Trump’s strange fake photos and make them only slightly weirder. And then those fakes go viral, with most people never realizing they’re looking at something Trump never actually posted.
The most recent example of this is a tweet posted Tuesday to X by a user called Glenn Tunes.
If you just glanced at this tweet in your feeds you wouldn’t think much of it. It appears to show a post on Truth Social post sent by Trump himself. The AI-generated image depicts the president, Mahatma Gandhi, President John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. And, yeah, Jesus looks quite a bit like Jared Leto for some reason. Would some religious folks be offended by such an image? Perhaps. But it’s exactly the kind of thing Trump might post. In fact, the president posted something identical on Monday, as you can see below.
But why? What drives someone to post an image that’s only slightly weirder than Trump’s original image, and clearly inspired by it? There’s also the fact that both images look like they were made by low quality image generators. Mainstream image generators like Google’s Nano Banana can create photo-realistic images whereas these look like they were created with the first version of DALL-E.
It’s unclear if Glenn Tunes is a real person. The account appears to be based in Norway and seems to post with an extreme focus on American politics. Many of the tweets are all-caps screeds about Trump and it reads like any other liberal U.S.-based “resistance” account.
“YOUR A SPECIAL KIND OF STUPID IF YOU STILL BELIVE THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS A HOAX,” one tweet reads, using the wrong “your” and misspelling the word “believe.” So we’re not sure what to believe about the motivations behind this account.
Another example of this slight tweaking phenomenon occurred this week when a user shared another post that appeared to come from Donald Trump’s Truth Social account. The image shows Trump driving with South Park’s animated version of Satan. Meme-ified JD Vance is in a nearby car as well and they’re all chasing a white Ford Bronco carrying Barack Obama and Melania Trump. The image is inspired by OJ Simpson’s low-speed chase in 1994, of course. If you’re too young to know what that means, read the Wikipedia entry.
The image featuring Trump with Satan is super weird and Trump never actually posted this image. But it’s very similar to one Trump really did post in July 2025. The image below on the right is the one Trump posted, and the image below on the left is one that has been altered and has gone viral recently.
It appears that the person who posted the altered image has deleted it from X after being told Trump never posted it, but it speaks to where we are on social media these days. Trump posts something absolutely bizarre, people tweak it even further, and then regular people see the tweaked versions and think that’s what Trump posted.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s might not seem that important. Who cares if some fake images that are maybe 10% more weird go viral and people believe they were posted by Trump? Most people won’t care. But if you want to have the most accurate picture of the world and what powerful people are saying, you probably will care.
We’re sort of obsessive about the truth here at Gizmodo. We want to make sure we know what the president has posted and don’t want our mind clouded by all the fakes that we see every day. Trump posts some unhinged stuff, but the truth matters, and it’s strange that people are posting images that are only slightly more weird than Trump’s original posts.
Or perhaps it’s not that weird when you look at the incentive structures of social media site like X. Elon Musk instituted a creators program that allows some people to make money from posting on X. The site rewards engagement, which means that people often post the most outrageous bullshit they can come up with, whether it’s true or not.
It’s very likely that this trend will continue, as long as the incentives are the same. Social media sites want engagement at all costs, and they don’t care about the truth, regardless of political leanings. And they’re going to keep rewarding people for making fakes, which are too numerous to even debunk at scale anymore.