Fabricated remarks on Japan's nuclear wastewater release misrepresent Trump interview from 2023
- Published on November 9, 2024 at 09:19
- 4 min read
- By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea
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"Thanks to Trump, the Japanese nuclear waste dumping is bound to stop," read part of a Korean-language caption to an X post shared on November 6.
The post included an image of Trump sitting across a table from Carlson.
"Trump's interview on nuclear wastewater," reads text overlaid at the top of the image.
Korean-language text below the image purports to show an excerpt from the interview, where Trump called on former Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida and his bureaucrats to "drink the treated wastewater every day for five years if they want to prove it is safe".
The quote attributed to Trump goes on to say that the wastewater release is akin to "poisoning the entire world" and that he wishes "that Douglas MacArthur and (Robert) Oppenheimer were alive so that we can drop another bomb on Japan".
The post emerged as Trump made a remarkable return to power following his US presidential election victory over Democratic rival Kamala Harris (archived link).
The claim was also shared on other South Korean forums here, here, here and here.
While South Korea's government endorsed Japan's decision to release more than 500 Olympic swimming pools' worth of diluted wastewater from the Fukushima plant into the Pacific on August 24, public concerns persisted regarding its safety (archived link).
The head of the UN atomic watchdog has said the tritium concentration in wastewater being released is under expected levels while Japan has repeatedly insisted the plan will be harmless (archived link).
Comments indicated some users appeared to believe the remarks were genuine.
"Looks like Trump really doesn't like Japan, it is a good thing he was re-elected," one user wrote.
"He is truly an unpredictable guy, on this account he is completely correct," another wrote.
But the quote is fabricated and Trump did not make the remarks in the interview with Carlson.
Trump-Carlson X interview
A keyword search on Google found the original interview posted on Carlson's official X account on August 24, 2023, with the caption "Ep. 19 Debate Night with Donald J Trump" (archived link).
The image shared in the false posts matches the 4:52 mark of the interview, in which Carlson discussed former US attorney general Bill Barr's account of the death of sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein, not Japan's wastewater release (archived link).
Below is a screengrab comparison between the image shared in the false posts (left) and the original interview posted on Carlson's X account (right):
The interview, which ran for over 46 minutes, involved an exchange between Carlson and Trump on numerous issues including his indictments, an evaluation of US President Joe Biden's administration, and the idea of a nuclear war with North Korea.
But neither person mentioned Japan's nuclear wastewater release, as seen from a transcript of the interview available online and a review of the video by AFP (archived link).
The only reference to Japan by Trump came at the 21:30 mark, where he suggests China has built military installations on islands it took from Japan.
The comment appears to refer to uninhabited islands -- known as the Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan -- that are claimed by Beijing but administered by Tokyo and are a frequent hotspot in bilateral tensions (archived link).
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