Image showing Sasha Obama wearing MAGA hat is altered

In May 2026, an image circulated online supposedly showing Sasha Obama, the younger daughter of former U.S. President Barack Obama, wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat in public. President Donald Trump trademarked the phrase as a campaign slogan, and red MAGA baseball caps are ubiquitous at his political rallies.

Social media users started sharing the alleged picture of Obama wearing a MAGA hat on May 19. Part of the caption shared with some posts read, “The daughter of DISGRACED former President Barack Obama was reportedly seen in a Washington DC restaurant this morning wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ baseball cap,” and some posts said Obama said, “My father nearly destroyed this country.”

(Snopes screenshot)

Snopes readers contacted us to ask whether it was an authentic photo of Obama or a digital creation.

The image was digitally altered and does not authentically show Obama in a MAGA hat. We’ve therefore labeled the picture fake.

We first uploaded the image into Google Lens to perform a reverse image search. Next, we used search engines such as DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo with the phrase, “Sasha Obama MAGA hat.”

If the scene in the image had actually occurred, journalists with reputable news outlets would have documented it. That was not the case. We did not locate any examples of credible outlets publishing the image or reporting on the alleged event.

While both Sasha Obama and her older sister, Malia Obama, have largely stayed out of the public eye since leaving the White House, they are occasionally photographed out and about. We found an identical image of Sasha Obama — but without the MAGA hat — posted to the Instagram account of Backgrid, a celebrity news agency and paparazzi photography site, on July 22, 2025.

As a result, we concluded that the photo was digitally edited, either manually or using generative artificial intelligence software, to add the MAGA hat.

We uploaded the image into Sightengine and Hive Moderation, two pieces of software that screen visual media for signs of AI. According to Hive Moderation, there was a 90% chance the image contained AI-generated content, while Sightengine returned a 99% chance the image was AI. 

It’s important to note that these types of AI detection tools are fallible, however, and Snopes cautions people against using them for definitive answers on media’s authenticity without supporting evidence. This is one such image where it could go either way — though it doesn’t change our conclusion that the image was edited.

Snopes has debunked similar pieces of media before. For example, we recently traced the source of a fake image supposedly showing a woman attending the Met Gala in a dress made up of newspaper articles about Jeffrey Epstein.

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