X posts – The ‘American Queen’ Vanity Fair cover of Melania Trump is fake but fooled people anyway

First lady Melania Trump has been featured on magazine covers before, but an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair isn’t among them. 

A fake image of the magazine’s cover shows what appears to be Melania Trump as “The American Queen,” wearing a gold crown, red lipstick and a black turtleneck.

The picture spread widely on X. An account called Next News Network shared it Aug. 28 with the caption, “LEAKED: Vanity Fair’s upcoming Melania Trump cover has staff in REVOLT! Source inside VF tells me 3 senior editors threatened to resign during today’s emergency meeting. One reportedly screamed ‘I won’t work for a MAGA propaganda machine!’” Next News Network is a site the Chicago Tribune reported promotes conspiracy theories, and it was demonetized in 2023 by YouTube.

Other X accounts shared the supposed cover, including Fox News host Laura Ingraham, conservative influencer Laura Loomer and Charlie Kirk, founder and president of the conservative group Turning Point USA. Ingraham and Kirk later acknowledged the cover wasn’t real. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., jumped on the fake Vanity Fair cover trend, posting a similar image of himself as “The American King” (“Hair, Gel, and the Art of Being so Handsome,” read the teaser text.)

Vanity Fair’s real September issue features American actress Jennifer Aniston on its cover.

PolitiFact contacted the White House and Condé Nast, which publishes Vanity Fair, but received no response.

Next News Network, a conservative news YouTube channel, was the earliest account to share the news, PolitiFact found. The Next News post referenced a real Aug. 24 Semafor story that the new editor of Vanity Fair, Mark Guiducci, had floated the idea of putting Melania Trump on the cover to appeal to a broader audience. 

It’s not clear where the image originated, but it appears likely to have been generated with artificial intelligence. We ran the image through Hive Moderation and WasItAI, programs that help determine whether images were generated with artificial intelligence. These programs are imperfect, but Hive Moderation concluded that the image was “99.9% likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content.” WasItAI said it was “quite confident” that the image, or most of it, was “created by AI.”

Melania Trump has not appeared on a U.S. Vanity Fair cover. Vanity Fair Mexico, however, featured her on its cover in February 2017. Vogue has featured other first ladies on its cover.  Trump,  the former model, was on the cover of the February 2005 issue, after she married Trump in January that year. 

We rate the claim that Vanity Fair featured Melania Trump on its September 2025 cover Pants on Fire!