Social media has been lit up with viral discussions surrounding the photograph that popped up online on Sunday. It features Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Robert F Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump Jr. and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s in-flight Trump Force One McDonald’s party. The president-elect’s deputy director of communications Margo Martin shared the photo on X, formerly Twitter, after the group’s UFC outing in New York City.
Soon after the post shook the Internet, as the MAGA group ditched its own “Make America Healthy Again” agenda for the day, an X user claimed, “This 1721 painting by Deitz Nuutzen predicted the Trump-Elon-RFK McDonalds dinner.” The SNS post drew parallels between the weekend snap and a supposedly 18th-century painting that boasted an uncanny resemblance to the MAGA lot’s plane trip. X user @boneGPT posted the comparison tweet on Monday.
Did an 18th century painting actually predict the Trump McDonalds moment with Elon Musk, RFK Jr?
The alleged painting the social media user referred to similarly illustrates four men sitting across each other on a dining table with a fifth person standing in the background. Except for the garbs donned by the ancient-painted personas, with two even wearing crowns, in the “painting” everyone appears to be striking identical poses to Trump’s gathering aboard his plane. If one were to superimpose the images, both compositions would fit each other like a glove. @boneGPT’s post additionally drew the platform owner Elon Musk’s attention, who eventually expressed his laughter-filled reaction to the post with an emoji. The comparison post has in its own right gone viral like the original Trump group’s photo. At the time of writing, it has amassed more than 5.3 million views, 70K likes and 10K reposts.
However, its unforgettably suspicious foundation led even the American news publication Newsweek to “fact-check” the basis of the X user’s claims. On “Google reverse image searching” the said painting, the news outlet found no credible results for the “1721 painting.” Moreover, searches for “Deitz Nuützen” or “Deitz Nuützen painter” also fizzled out in vain. All Google references ultimately led to the Monday post, but nothing else that dated before it. While the user’s X name already appears self-explanatory, their bio details as “founder mode // AI & America” also trace back to their@Vinyl_Vault YouTube channel. It, in turn, is a library of AI-created video content.
The “coincidental resemblance” is likely credited to the “painting” being AI-generated
There’s sound reason to believe that @boneGPT’s “1721 painting” in question was AI-generated. Another close look at the characters in the painting reveals them wearing leather dress shoes, whereas a quick Google search would show you that more buckled options were the typical go-to for men in the century. On top of that, the supposed artist’s name mentioned in the tweet, Deitz Nuutzen, appears to be a play on the internet slang term “Deez Nutz.” Although the expression may literally seem to refer to testicles (these nuts), the euphemism actually works its slang magic more figuratively. People often sneak it an ongoing conversation in an attempt to comically disrupt it. Therefore, @boneGPT appears to be throwing around another one of those “deez nutz” jokes instead of actually putting up the mirror to a real 18th-century painting.
