Is there proof a photo showing President Donald Trump kissing a woman, possibly his aide Natalie Harp, while golfing is real? Here's what we know: There is no verifiable information, such as a photographer, subjects, date or location associated with the image. Content detectors do not pick up AI signals from the blurry picture. A sharper AI-generated version of the image is also circulating, but the existence of the AI image does not, on its own, mean the blurry image is fake unless the AI version is proven to have been published first.
The image appeared in a post (archived here) by the @HughGStiffy account on X on Sept. 14, 2026. It read:
Trump got caught it seems!!
#smokefleet
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @HughGStiffy on X.)
A second version of this image (archived here) is also circulating. It is a vertical rectangle that shows more of the subjects' legs and a golf club. The colors of the image are brighter, and unlike the other version, the subjects are in crisp focus. The image has sharp details, notably the woman's gloved right hand -- which has six fingers (pictured below).
(Image source: post by @MykhailoRohoza on X.)
Lead Stories uploaded this sharp-focus image to the detection tools at Hive Moderation and OpenAI (pictured below). The result from Hive's AI-Generated Content Detection Tool showed the image was 99.9% likely to be AI-generated (archived here), while the OpenAI Verify tool found a SynthID watermark, indicating the image was made with OpenAI tools (archived here).
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
(Image source: OpenAI.)
A Sept. 14, 2026, post on X by @MrReaganUSA (archived here) asserts that both versions of the image are fake. However, the post does not say how the account concluded that about the blurry image (embedded below). Lead Stories uploaded the blurry image to Hive Moderation (archived here), OpenAI (archived here) and Google Gemini (archived here). None of these platforms detected signals pointing to AI as the source.
There are 2 versions of a photo that have gone viral that show Trump kissing Natalie Harp.
-- Mr Reagan (@MrReaganUSA) September 14, 2026
One version is clear, the other is low res & blurry.
The clear one is the original image & clearly AI generated. (Natalie's right hand has 6 fingers).
The blurry one is much more...
Lead Stories used Google Lens to search for exact matches for the blurry and focused versions (archived here and here) and then platform-specific text-based searches to seek out the earliest copy of the image. If the AI-generated image came first and was the source of the blurry image, then neither image depicts a real event. If the blurry image came first, regardless of whether it is real or fake, it could be the source for the clear AI-generated image.
A failure to detect an AI source does not prove an image is real, and the presence of an AI-generated copy does not prove the source is fake. It is also common for early disinformation posts to be deleted from social media once they begin to spread -- the earliest existing post may not be the first post.
The earliest image Lead Stories identified is the blurry image. It was published on Threads at 4:24 p.m. on Sept. 14, 2026, by the account @moondonkey (archived here). The caption does not credit a photographer or media outlet, nor mention where the image was found. The caption reads:
Here's another one hot off the press,, let's circulate it
Ten minutes later, at 4:34 p.m., the blurry image was published on Facebook by @teri.taylorking (archived here).
If anyone is aware of earlier copies of either image on social media please contact: [email protected]. If the photographer who took this picture -- or someone who knows them -- is reading this, please contact us as well.
