Does a real video or screenshot show President Donald Trump slumped over asleep at the White House Correspondents' Dinner with his mouth hanging open? No, that's not true: A deepfake video appears to be based on real footage from the dinner but has been altered to make Trump appear to fight sleep in an over-the-top, absurdist way. The video was posted on YouTube with a "Made with AI" disclaimer by a satire account. Still images from the deepfake video that were posted present a slightly more believable but still fake picture.
A screenshot from the fake video appears in a post (archived here) by the Facebook page @VoteBlueCoalition on July 28, 2026. It is captioned:
"My dad lived in a nursing home before he died and I can confidently say I've seen this look before."
This is the still image with the post:
(Image source: post by @VoteBlueCoalition on Facebook.)
The image above is not real. It appears to have been generated using authentic footage from the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) Dinner (archived here). The dinner was held on July 24, 2026, after the original April 25, 2026, event was disrupted by gunshots from a foiled assassination attempt (archived here).
The screenshot below is an example from 20 seconds in a news video published on YouTube by ABC affiliate WFAA on July 25, 2026 (archived here). Details visible in the fake image -- the folds of the blue backdrop, the shadow cast by the flag's tassels and the lights reflected in the goblets -- are consistent with details in the real image. There were times during the dinner that Trump's eyes appeared closed or downcast and he was possibly dozing off, but he never slumped to the side as in the fake image in the Facebook post.
(Image source: post by @WFAA on YouTube.)
A reverse image search with Google Lens using the Facebook image (archived here) points to a July 25, 2026, post on YouTube titled WHCD Sleeping (archived here). The post was made by "Mr. Newberger's AI Funnies" with a bio (archived here) which says in part:
Mr. Newberger's AI Funnies is your favorite political satirist and YouTube creator. His daily videos expose corruption, grift, hypocrisy, all while entertaining and generating some laughs. Mr. Newberger does bits, sketches, music videos, and art pieces.
The video, with a silly music soundtrack and snoring sound effects (embedded below), was published with a "How this was made" disclaimer:
Made with AI
Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated.
Lead Stories uploaded a short clip from this video to the Hive Moderation tool for AI-Generated Image and Video and Deepfake Detection (archived here). The result (pictured below) did not classify the clip as AI-generated. However, the tool gave the clip a 65.1% score of being likely to be deepfake (archived here). Hive defines a deepfake as "images in which AI has been used to map one person's face onto another's." Hive explains how their detection works:
Our Deepfake Detection model works by first detecting each face within the image. It then performs a classification step on each face to determine whether or not those representations are deepfakes. Each face is assigned a confidence score. In the response, the model returns the highest confidence score overall, which is used to determine if the entire input is a deepfake.
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
