This photo of Hilter was altered to resemble a Trump photo

Nearly a month after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, viral social media posts continue to baselessly claim the incident was staged.

The most recent viral post falsely says that one of the defining photos from the July 13 Butler, Pennsylvania rally where Trump was shot is strikingly similar to a photo of the attempted assassination of former German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

"I knew I had seen it before," an Aug. 4 Threads photo’s text. "Rehearsed and staged, a big lie," another text said. 

The post shows side-by-side images of Trump and Hitler. The photo of Trump is now famous: he has his fist raised and a U.S. flag above his head as two Secret Service agents whisk him away moments after the assassination attempt. The Hitler image appears to depict a similar scene: fist raised, the Nazi flag above, flanked by two people.

The Threads post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.)

Hitler survived assassination attempts but the Threads post’s image of him is altered. The original photo shares no resemblance to the image of Trump on July 13.

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stated on July 11, 2024 in social media posts

BBC News published a graphic quoting President Joe Biden saying, “Let me say this as clearly and simply as I can: [inaudible].”

Some things about the Hitler picture stand out. His expression and the lighting on his raised right arm look similar to how he appeared in a photo that Getty Images said was taken in January 1930. That photo was originally in an archive by Roger-Viollet, a Paris-based photo agency founded in 1938.

But Threads post’s image shows Hitler’s head facing left — not right as it is in the Roger-Viollet image — and his military medals including the Ritterkreuz (a military honor awarded to the highest ranking Nazi soldiers) hanging on his right breast. Historical photos show Hitler regularly wore his medals on his left breast.

In the Roger-Viollet image, Hitler’s military attire is embossed with Nazi iconography, including the swastika, but the Nazi flag in the Threads post is not in view nor is any other person. The person seen to Hitler’s left in the Threads post is Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebells. But that Goebells image appears to have been lifted from a 1933 photo taken during a Berlin speech, metadata by Getty Images shows. We couldn’t find the image source for the woman seen in the Threads post, although her face may resemble that of Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife.

PolitiFact has previously debunked claims that the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump was staged.

We rate the claim that this image shows Hitler in a similar scene as Trump False. 

RELATED: Claims that the Secret Service staged Trump rally shooting lack merit