OVER the past week, you may have seen this image of a rather gallant Donald Trump floating around the internet.

Yes, quite literally floating. In the picture, which has gone viral in the wake of Hurricane Florence, the US President appears to be rescuing a stranded man on a raft in heavy floodwaters.

The only trouble is the photo is fake. If the poor image quality and extreme unlikeliness of such a scenario playing out weren’t dead giveaways, New York Times reporter Kevin Roose has pointed out the picture was taken in Central Texas in 2015 — long before Mr Trump had entered the White House.

A photoshopped picture depicting Trump rescuing people during Hurricane Florence has been shared 275,000 times on Facebook. The original is from Texas flooding in 2015. pic.twitter.com/woWuPuqSSy — Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) September 24, 2018

The original photo shows three rescuers with the Austin Fire Department reaching out to save a man grasping a chain-link fence.

You’d think the photoshop job was obvious. There’s the fact that Mr Trump isn’t wearing a life vest, the fact that presidents don’t personally take part in rescue operations after disasters, and the fact that they probably wouldn’t wear a full suit in the unusual circumstance that they did.

Yet Roose’s screenshot reveals the image has been shared more than 250,000 times on Facebook, with the caption: “You won’t see this on the news … make it go viral.”

Here is the footage of the original rescue in May 2015, courtesy of the Austin Fire Department:

Of course, we don’t know how many of these shares are genuine and how many are being posted ironically.

If you look closely, you can see Mr Trump actually appears to be giving the stranded man a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat in the digitally altered photo, which … wouldn’t be all that helpful in a flood.

A similar photoshopped image of Mr Trump saving a pair of kittens during a flood went viral last year after it was posted by Facebook group ‘All about President Trump’.

The post, which was captioned “Things the media forgets!” and uploaded in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, amassed 20,000 likes and over 17,000 shares, despite the fact that it clearly wasn’t Mr Trump’s body and the face and body skin tones didn’t match.

Fact-checking website Snopes traced the image back to floodwaters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2008.

To be fair, Mr Trump did throw rolls of paper towels into a crowd of people impacted by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, so … that’s something.

Addressing the backlash to the incident, he said the crowd was “having fun” and urging him to throw them in.

“They had these beautiful, soft towels. Very good towels,” he told TBN. “And I came in and there was a crowd of a lot of people. And they were screaming and they were loving everything. I was having fun, they were having fun. They said, ‘Throw ’em to me! Throw ’em to me Mr President!’”

Earlier this year, Facebook reaffirmed its pledge to eliminate misinformation being distributed on the social media network.

Evidently it’s still ironing out the kinks.