A fact-check by a Newsweek journalist on a humorous tweet from former President Donald Trump appears to have backfired.

“Trump Posts Fake Image of Himself as a Star NFL Player,” the news outlet wrote in a headline on October 21.

Following up on a social media post on X, Newsweek wrote, “Donald Trump has shared what is likely an AI-generated image on his Truth Social account showing him as a player for the Pittsburgh Steelers.”

Instantly, the tweet and news story were lampooned and memed by users on X.

“[W]hat is likely an AI-generated image” thank you for clarifying because there could be someone out there who was confused and could not tell that this absolutely hilarious image was not real. You people really don’t have an ounce of humor left in your bones,” MrsLibertyBelle wrote alongside a screenshot of Trump’s original post.

“Wait you’re telling me this is “likely” FAKE???? Absolutely nothing gets past the honest and fair media!!! Thank you guys,” Tommy Smokes posted.

Referencing another viral meme of a woman having a freakout about what appeared to be a nonexistent figure on an airplane, The Right to Bear Memes posted, “THAT MFING TRUMP-STEELERS IMAGE IS NOT REAL!!”

This meme came as there has been a swirl of accusations about Trump’s recent appearance at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania being staged. The satirical newspaper The Babylon Bee appeared to fuse the meme and the accusations in a headline, “Investigations Reveals Trump’s Role In ‘Home Alone 2’ Was Staged.”

Libs of TikTok tweeted an image of the headline.

Trump initially posted the image on his Truth Social account on October 20. The image shows the 78-year-old clad in a Steelers uniform with a buff and younger physique.

Aside from the well-known fact that Trump is not a septuagenarian professional football player, the image has obvious signs of being AI-generated. The logos on the uniforms are slightly blurred, and a player’s name behind Trump is gibberish. Human proportions are distorted, including the size of one player’s helmet, which is substantially larger than his body, and the edges of Trump’s fingers.

The image also has a glossiness and indistinctness of all the figures in it, aside from Trump, which is often a tell-tale sign of an image being AI-generated.

It is not immediately clear why Newsweek found this fact-check necessary, and the attendant article expatiates at length with a list of fact-checks of other images that it purported to expose as altered by Trump. These included an image of Trump and others as superheroes and another of Vice President Kamala Harris as a communist.

The fairness meter attached to the bottom of the story rated the story as the most extreme version of “unfair left leaning,” indicating that there was a consensus amongst readers who responded that the story had an overwhelming bias.

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