Posts share Trump deepfake after reported call with Putin

"Trump officially confirmed his call with Putin," read part of the traditional Chinese caption of an X video shared on February 11, 2025.

It was shared after the New York Post newspaper reported on February 8 that Trump had spoken to Putin on the phone to try to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war (archived link). The paper said Trump made the comments during an exclusive interview aboard Air Force One.

The video supposedly shows Trump telling the White House press corps about the call.

"Look, I did have a phone conversation with him. I told Vladimir this needs to be stopped and he agreed but said that Russian interests must come first," he appears to say, his remarks partially drowned out by the voice of an interpreter.

Trump seems to tell the press corps that he told Putin to either take a fair deal or Russian territories will be given to Ukraine, before concluding "And believe me, people are going to love it".

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Screenshot of the false X post taken on February 14, 2025

The false claim was also shared on Weibo and Facebook.

While Trump would later reveal he had a "lengthy and highly productive" call with Putin on February 12, in which they agreed to "immediately" start negotiations to end the Ukraine war, at the time the video was shared neither Washington nor Moscow officially confirmed any communication between the two leaders (archived here and here).

The video circulating online was likely generated by AI.

Plane crash press briefing

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the false video led to similar footage shared on the White House's verified YouTube channel on January 31 (archived link).

The video is titled, "President Trump Holds Press Briefing on Aviation Disaster".

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Screenshot comparison of the false video (left) and the White House's YouTube video (right)

Trump was briefing the media about the mid-air collision of an airliner and a military helicopter near Washington's Reagan National Airport in the late evening of January 29 (archived link).

During the press conference, Trump confirmed the deaths of 67 aboard both aircraft and also cited pilot error on the helicopter in the night-time crash.

But he chiefly used the press conference to open fire at what he said were left-wing diversity practices under his predecessors Joe Biden and Barack Obama that he said kept out good employees at the Federal Aviation Administration.

At the video's 27:22 mark, Trump is asked whether he has spoken to Putin -- a follow-up to an earlier question about crash victims who were foreign nationals. Former Russian world pairs champions Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were among the 64 people on board the airliner.

Trump responds, "I have not, no. Not about this."

He does not make any further mention of Putin or calls about negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine.

'Lip-sync deepfake'

Several experts told AFP on February 14 that the video appears to be a deepfake.

Walter Scheirer, a professor of engineering at the University of Notre Dame, said the video "appears to be a very low-quality deepfake" (archived link).

He pointed to a visual clue at the 36-second mark of the video, where the scene sharpens as Trump moves out of frame.

"This is likely due to the algorithm applying a small amount of blur to Trump to hide artifacts induced by the editing of his face," Scheirer explained.

Matthew Wright, endowed professor of cybersecurity at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said the video quality being "much degraded from the original" is an indication of manipulation and noted the audio has a "robotic tone" (archived link).

Saniat Sohrawardi, a research assistant at the institute, also noted "bits of robotic voice" in the video. He went on to say some stitch points can be seen -- such as at around the 18-second mark of the clip -- indicating it is not genuine. 

Hany Farid, a media forensics expert at the University of California-Berkeley, said the video appears to be a "lip-sync deepfake", with Trump's mouth made to "be consistent with an AI-generated voice" (archived link).

AFP has previously debunked other deepfake audio and video targeting Trump.