Does a real photo show President Donald Trump and tech CEOs Elon Musk and Jensen Huang raising their fists in front of a Chinese flag? No, that's not true: The image shows common signs of AI generation. There are no credible news reports that the three men pledged allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party, nor any documentation of the fist-raising gesture shown in the image while they were in China in May 2026.
The claim appeared in a post and image (archived here) by the @aintscarylarry account on X on May 14, 2026. It read:
The next time a dipshit MAGA calls you a "communist," reply to them with this photo.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @aintscarylarry on X.)
This fake photo is designed to look like a screenshot of a CCTV (China Central Television) news bulletin, the state-run broadcaster in the People's Republic of China. The Chinese characters along the bottom of the image, "特朗普 黄仁勋 马斯克宣誓加入中国共产党," translate to (archived here): "Trump, Jensen Huang and Elon Musk swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party."
Lead Stories searched Google News (archived here) and Yahoo! News (archived here) for the words: "Trump, Jensen Huang and Elon Musk swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party." Neither search found matching reports. Had the men made such a pledge, major news outlets would likely have reported it widely.
Lead Stories also searched the CCTV website (archived here) using the Chinese characters from the fake news bulletin and found no results (translated to English and archived here).
Signs of AI generation
The image shows several common signs of AI generation. The skin looks unnatural, and the faces blend poorly with the bodies at the neck and collar. The lighting on the figures is too even compared to the background, and the textures appear mismatched throughout. The raised fists also show signs of AI generation -- the fingers appear oddly shaped and the wrists merged into clothing, a frequent flaw in AI-generated images.
