Viral Images Of Donald Trump Getting Arrested Are Totally Fake

Have you seen photos of former president Donald Trump getting arrested by police? They’re fake. Or, at least they were at the time of this writing on Sunday afternoon. Images purporting to show Trump getting arrested have gone viral on social media platforms like Twitter. But Trump hasn’t been taken into custody—at least not yet.

One image, shared by a Twitter user that goes by The Infinite Dude, looks realistic enough if you don’t look too closely. The fake Trump, wearing his signature red tie and blue suit, can be seen getting led away by three police officers in a nighttime scene.

While The Infinite Dude has only about 800 Twitter followers, the image has been viewed over 600,000 times. There’s no disclaimer that the image is actually fake, though zooming in on the fingers reveals a monstrous mess.

Artificial intelligence-driven image creators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have struggled with creating fingers, often giving people way too many digits, as you can see in the screenshot below. Teeth also seem to be difficult, with AI giving fake people far too many teeth.

But AI image creators are relatively new and seem to be improving by the day. Another fake image, shared by Twitter user called O’Keefe Reborn, includes a mugshot of Trump, though again it’s clearly been created by AI.

For starters, the numbers behind Trump don’t appear to be a coherent representation of anything, a major red flag for AI-created images. But, again, if you’re just scrolling through social media it might not be something that some people question.

Trump has claimed he’ll be indicted on Tuesday, though it’s unclear whether that’s accurate or not. There were reports on Friday that the Secret Service was preparing for the possibility of an indictment early this week, something that would be exceptional because no American head of state has ever been arrested. But other wealthy countries regularly prosecute their leaders when they break the law—as we’ve seen in Italy, Taiwan, and South Korea just to name a few.

Trump has spent the weekend delivering several all-caps screeds on his social media platform Truth Social. The former president has called for his supporters to protest his potential arrest, leading many to worry about possible violence. Trump staged a so-called “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, where the then-president told rally-goers to descend on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

“I FIND IT VERY HARD TO BELIEVE THAT A RACIST, SOROS BACKED D.A., WHO LETS MURDERERS, RAPISTS, AND DRUG DEALERS WALK FREE, AND WHO HAS PRESIDED OVER THE BIGGEST VIOLENT CRIME WAVE IN THE HISTORY OF NYC, IS USING THE POWER OF HIS OFFICE TO PERSECUTE, INDICT, AND PROSECUTE A FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA — FOR NO CRIME! THE WITCH HUNT NEVER ENDS, BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump wrote in one of many unhinged messages on Sunday.

If Trump does get indicted this week it’s unclear whether we will get to see photos of Trump getting arrested or even a mugshot. Trump’s army of lawyers and stooges have reportedly been working on a deal behind the scenes to allow him to voluntarily turn himself in to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, according to CNN, if he really does get indicted.

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a SWAT Team descending on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and club, but that’s still another fake image that’s been floating around social media over the weekend.

If you’re seeing images of Trump getting arrested right now, they’re definitely fake. But if Trump is correct about being indicted on Tuesday, we could get images of an anti-democratic leader finally getting his comeuppance. We just don’t know what that will look like quite yet.