Did the official White House account publish a sauna picture of Donald Trump surrounded by five bare-chested men? No, that's not true: Neither the White House account nor archived copies of it showed such a post. What looked like a screenshot originated from a page that was previously identified by Lead Stories as a source of satirical content.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X where it was published by @aintscarylarry on Oct. 15, 2026. It opened:
The White House is tailoring its messages to its second largest target audience: Closeted republican [sic] homosexuals. First largest? Child-raping pedophiles.
The shared picture, which displayed the @WhiteHouse handle, read:
We heard people have strong opinions on what to wear at the gym.
Here's our opinion:
This is what the image seen what was presented as a screenshot of the official White House account looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @aintscarylarry on X.)
A reverse image search on Google showed that @aintscarylarry was not the first account that published the supposed screenshot. The picture appeared to have originated from another source: the @GaryPetersonUSA on X that published (archived here) the image several hours earlier on Oct. 15, 2026. That user was known for satirical content, and Lead Stories wrote about it here and here.
Lead Stories searched the posts published by the @WhiteHouse account on X on Oct. 14 and Oct. 15, 2026, but they did not include the image of Trump attending a sauna with a group of bare-chested, athletic-looking men.
Lead Stories manually reviewed archived versions of the @WhiteHouse account from October 2026, but they did not show such a picture.
Two online detection tools -- Hive Moderation and Sightengine -- concluded that the image in the 'screenshot' was AI-generated:
(Image sources: Hive Moderation and Sightengine.)
Under the Trump administration, the @WhiteHouse account on X did post AI-generated images more than once (archived here), and such instances would typically be documented by established media organizations. When Lead Stories ran a search on Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here), that did not show any media coverage confirming that the real White House account ever uploaded the sauna image to X.
