A rumor circulating online in late January 2025 concerned a fake video purportedly showing U.S. President Donald Trump announcing he signed an executive order allowing people to call their friends two different slurs.
One X user posting the video on Jan. 29 wrote (archived), “IT’S HAPPENING.” That user’s post received around 18 million views and 200,000 likes. The user later replied (archived) under the post in disagreement with other users who attempted to add community notes clarifying the truth:
The clip — posted by several other users, including in another post (archived) receiving over 11 million views — purportedly showed Trump saying, “Today, I am signing an executive order making it legal to call your friends f*gs and re**rds, if they are doing something f*ggy or re**rded. F*gs and re**rds, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve got to start calling our friends this again. And we will. We’re going to call them f*gs and re**rds again.”
The president never said these words.
While some users understood the video was fake, we located numerous examples of users either asking if the clip truly showed Trump saying the slurs or generally indicating they or others might believe it.
The fake video involved a combination of deepfake technology for manipulation of lip movement and artificial-intelligence-driven, voice-cloning tools to create sound of sentences Trump never actually said.
The unaltered clip used to create the fake video originally depicted Trump delivering an Oval Office address about the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020.
