The White House has confirmed what a six-fingered hand already gave away: a viral photo appearing to show President Trump kissing and holding a blonde woman on a golf course is a fake. Two versions of the image spread across social media by Monday, September 14, 2026, and the sharper of the two is an AI fabrication. “This is clearly a fake photo,” a White House official told the Daily Beast on September 16.
Six Fingers, One Watermark
In the higher-resolution version, the woman holds a golf club with a right hand that has six fingers. Snopes, in a fact check published September 15, found a watermark on that version showing it had been generated or edited with OpenAI tools. The lower-resolution copy carried no watermark and was too degraded to show the usual AI tells, but Snopes and deepfake researcher Hany Farid, co-founder of GetReal, both concluded it was fabricated too — likely built from the clearer version. Neither file contained camera, date or location metadata, and golf equipment and background details in the sharper image never settle into consistent shapes. Snopes updated its check on September 18 and left the claim rated “under investigation,” with Farid calling the blurry version’s quality “a bit of a red flag” while stopping short of a final ruling.
Some social media users claimed the picture was actually a real 2017 photo of Trump exchanging a cheek-kiss with Norwegian golfer Suzann Pettersen. Snopes rated that false too: the original kiss wasn’t on a golf course, and both Trump and Pettersen were dressed differently than the figures in the viral image.
No wire service turned up a real version. Archive searches at the Associated Press, Reuters and Getty Images found no matching photograph, and no credible outlet was found to have published it. Trump did golf on September 13 at his Trump Organization course in Ireland, but that course has no trees in any photograph or satellite view — unlike the fabricated image.
Traced to a YouTube Thumbnail
A reverse image search pushed the picture back to its oldest known appearance: the thumbnail of a September 14 YouTube video posted by political commentator Keith Edwards. Edwards said his thumbnail team found the image online rather than creating it, and that the woman’s identity “can’t be confirmed from this image alone” since only the back of her head is visible. Two earlier Snopes checks had examined images that first surfaced as Edwards’ video thumbnails; in one of those cases, he confirmed he’d used AI to generate the picture himself.
Who Natalie Harp Is
Harp, 35, left her role as a One America News anchor in 2022 to join Trump’s political operation, later becoming a White House aide when he returned to office in January 2025. She’s now executive assistant to the president on a $150,000 salary — one of three aides whose financial disclosures this month showed a $45,000 holiday cash gift from Trump, which a White House spokesperson called “entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.” She’s been nicknamed the “human printer” for carrying a portable printer to hand Trump paper copies of news coverage and draft social media posts. Harp was part of the delegation on Trump’s September 12–13 Ireland trip, and has remained visibly at his side since the photo went viral, including at the UN General Assembly in New York.
The White House never supplied Snopes with authentic photos of Trump and Harp golfing for comparison. Trump addressed the image himself for the first time on September 16, responding on Truth Social with an AI-generated image of his own — one of many he posts on the platform, none of which the White House has commented on.