Trump Deepfake Video Fuels Antisemitism Despite Being Exposed as Fake

A deepfake video of former President Donald Trump advocating for antisemitism has appeared online, National Security News can reveal.

While the signs of manipulation are evident, with some users flagging mismatched lip movements, the video has still managed to fuel antisemitic comments among some viewers, highlighting the ongoing battle against digital disinformation and the concerning trend of increasing hate speech online.

The video, styled as a “Fox News” broadcast with a breaking news banner, falsely shows Trump saying: “If we want to make America great, we’ve got to make antisemitism great again.” The post containing the video has amassed over 175,000 views, 2,400 likes, and 865 retweets.

The video’s credibility is compromised by visible signs of manipulation: Trump’s lip movements do not align with the words spoken, and the audio quality changes midway through the clip, suggesting multiple audio tracks were merged together.

One comment under the video highlighted the believability, stating, “If you weren’t watching his lips this would be believable.”

Even though some users recognised the video as a deepfake, it did not prevent some viewers from being persuaded by its message. One user noted, “Sorry to rain on your parade, his lips don’t match the words. Disinformation, still, Jews are evil,” while another added, “Epic! I can get behind this message.”

Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, stated that the UN is “deeply concerned that anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, racist and xenophobic content could be supercharged by generative AI.” 

The video further claims that the October 7th attacks are “fake news” as the manipulated audio goes on to say, “Jews are masters of propaganda and if you think they aren’t capable of lying about Oct. 7 just look at how much money they made off the Holocaust. Mark my words, antisemites are gonna be the ones that save this country.”

Aside from looking at visual cues, doing a reverse image search is a simple yet effective way to verify the authenticity of this video. On a computer, it is as easy as right-clicking on a still image from the video, or long pressing it if on a mobile device, before selecting “Search image with Google” or “Search the web for image” from the menu.

The reverse image search results in this case shows other videos featuring the same clip but different audio. One video posted on Reddit is labelled as being made with TryParotAI, another is a humorous version promoting a barber shop on Instagram, with a further YouTube video which has Trump explaining Python programming.

NSN contacted X’s press office for comment on fake videos on the platform, but received an automated response which said: “Busy now, please check back later.”

Commenting on a BBC investigation on a deepfake network smearing UK politicians, the social media network said it has a range of policies and features to protect the conversation surrounding elections. X stated: “We will label content that violates our synthetic and manipulated media policy, and remove accounts engaged in platform manipulation or other serious violations of our rules.” They also clarified that 500,000 contributors in 70 countries are involved in X’s reader-operated fact check service.

The Trump video has since been labelled by X as “manipulated media,” with a link leading users to a page on X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy

If you want more guidance on how to spot deepfakes, read NSN’s guide: Deepfakin’ Democracy – Identifying Deepfakes