Is a photo from the Daily Mail showing Byron Noem wearing a light blue T-shirt with large fake breasts and a dog in the background real? No, that's not true: That image of the husband of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is not one of the photos published by the British tabloid. The authentic photos of Byron Noem in the newspaper are close-ups and do not show a dog.
The claim appeared in a March 31, 2026, post on X.com account @huntichon (archived here). It opened:
The dog has me fucking cryingg I can't DMDMWMMDMWDMQ
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post from @huntichon on X.com.)
The Daily Mail (archived here) published a series of photos of Byron Noem posing in fake breasts on March 31, 2026. In some of the photos Byron is wearing a light blue T-shirt stuffed with two balloons, with the knots positioned to mimic nipples. There is not a dog in the background, as these screenshots show:
(Image source: screenshot from The Daily Mail.)
(Image source: screenshot from The Daily Mail.)
The dog in the fake photo is likely a reference to Byron's wife, Kristi Noem, shooting and killing one of the family dogs, which she wrote about in her book "No Going Back." The South Dakota Searchlight reported (archived here) the dog was a German wirehaired pointer.
Lead Stories fed the photo into the Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool, which concluded the image was "likely to be AI-Generated" with an aggregated score of 55.6 percent. The higher the score, the greater the AI content. Here is a screenshot of the results:
(Image source: screenshot from Hive Moderation website.)
