Trump posted Americans ‘can’t even afford cookies?’ No, that’s satire | Fact check
The claim: Image shows Trump post saying ‘you better elect me’ because ‘everything is horrible’
A Sept. 22 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) features what appears to be a screenshot of a Truth Social post from former President Donald Trump.
“Your life is a total mess!” text of the purported post begins. “You’re broke, can’t even afford cookies! Immigrants are taking and eating your pets, folks! Women are miserable – not sexy, not safe! Everything you love is gone, completely destroyed! Everything is horrible! You better elect me so I can fix it, and I will – big time! I know I said this in 2016, but this time I really mean it! Let’s make America great again, again!”
A similar claim on Facebook was shared more than 400 times in two days before it was deleted.
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Trump didn’t post that. The image is a fabrication that originated from an account that posts satirical content but was cropped to remove a label that identifies it that way.
Purported Trump post originated as satire
The text in the screenshotted post attributed to Trump references several topics the Republican presidential nominee has brought up during his campaign for a second term, including concerns about inflation and a debunked claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pet dogs and cats.
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But that post didn’t come from Trump. There is no record of it on his Truth Social account.
Rather, it is a fabrication that was first shared Sept. 21 on X, formerly Twitter, by an account that posts satirical content. The image of the purported Trump post in the X post contains a label in its lower-right corner that identifies it as satire. That notification was cropped out of other versions circulating online, leading the user who created it to state in a subsequent post that he created the image and point out the removal of the satire designation. That user could not be reached for comment by USA TODAY.
Other versions of the purported post include its supposed virality measures – 425 comments; 1,440 reposts, 2,900 likes – and those are identical in versions both with and without the satire notification, another sign it is a fabrication. Many of the more than 7 million accounts that follow Trump on his platform surely would have captured and shared an authentic post at different times and with different totals of likes and reposts.
The Facebook post is an example of what could be called “stolen satire,” in which content originally written and presented as parody is captured and reposted in a way that makes it appear authentic. As a result, readers of the second-generation post are misled, which is what happened here.
Fabricated posts wrongly attributed to Trump have been frequent sources of misinformation. USA TODAY previously debunked false claims that Trump posted about his potential assassins being “0-2,” a meeting with a Civil War veteran and the loss of his “whole ear” in the shooting at his July rally.
USA TODAY reached out to the Instagram user who shared the post but did not immediately receive a response. Several Facebook users who shared the image said they determined it to be fabricated and satirical in nature after doing so.
Snopes also debunked the claim.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: No, Trump didn't post that 'everything is horrible' | Fact check
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