Trump’s ‘Gift from China’ Posts Debunked: Images of Ocean Debris Proven to be Outdated and Altered

By Global Times

Apr 27, 2025 12:32 PM

US President Donald Trump recently posted three images of floating ocean debris on social media Truth Social and claiming they are in Pacific Ocean and caused by China, however, these pictures are turned out to be either old pictures or digitally manipulated. 

On April 21, Trump posted three images on Truth Social with the text "A Gift from China in the Pacific Ocean!" – All three pictures showed large amounts of garbage floating in the ocean.

However, fact checks and picture searches demonstrated that the first photo was in Indonesia and released in 2014. The photographer of the picture is Ethan Daniels, the Global Times found.

“Plastic Floating Garbage in Raja Ampat. Bits of plastic garbage wash against a remote island in Raja Ampat, Indonesia. This tropical region is known for its spectacular marine biodiversity and is a popular destination for scuba divers and snorkelers,” according to the image briefing on Dreamstime.

Information provided by the photo website Istock showed that Daniels uploaded the image in 2014.

The second image is from underwater photographer Caroline Power, who released pictures in October 2017 of the "sea of plastic" around the idyllic Honduran island of Roatan where she lives, according to Sky News.

In the pictures, large masses made up of plastic bottles, cutlery and polystyrene plates can be seen engulfing the water's surface, the report said.

Leonardo Serrano, a deputy mayor of the Honduran town of Omoa, claimed communities in neighboring Guatemala are dumping their refuse into a river which is then gathering at sea to form floating "trash islands,” said the Sky News’ report.

Power has disputed Serrano's claim Honduras is to blame, the report said.

The third image posted by Trump is a digitally composited picture. At the same size, the left and right halves of the image can overlap two other images, respectively, according to The Paper on Saturday.

The left half of the image is an Associated Press photo showing a floating boom for collecting plastic litter in the Pacific Ocean, as part of the Ocean Cleanup program, is assembled in Alameda, California, cited by The Wall Street Journal in 2019.

The right half of the image is cited by The Mirror in 2017, said it is estimated by Greenpeace that 12.7million tons of plastic end up in our oceans every year, from bottles and bags to microbeads.

As BBC News cited in 2019, the right half image showed a “trash island” in the Caribbean.

An analysis of the third image using the forensic tool Fotoforensics revealed that the right half of the picture is noticeably brighter than the left, indicating signs of digital manipulation, said The Paper.

The Paper reported that Error Level Analysis further showed that the water in the right portion of the image has a higher brightness level compared to the left, suggesting that this section may have been altered in post-processing.

According to The Paper, citing multiple sources, there are currently five major oceanic garbage patches identified worldwide, one in the Indian Ocean, two in the Atlantic and two in the Pacific. The formation of the Pacific garbage patches stems from diverse causes, and blaming China entirely for them does not reflect reality.

Global Times