Claims of 'royalties' paid to former president Obama stem from satire

"DOGE stopped an annual payment to Barack Obama for $2.6 million for 'royalties associated with Obamacare.' He's been collecting since 2010 for a total of $39 million taxpayer dollars," reads text over an image, posted to Facebook on February 27, 2025 and shared more than 25,000 times. 

Similar posts, accusing the former president of profiting from a trademark of "Obamacare," the popular name for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, also spread on X, TikTok and Instagram.

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Screenshot of post from Facebook, captured on February 27, 2025

Since starting his second term in January, Donald Trump has vowed to slash government spending, and in a joint interview with Musk on Fox News said that the DOGE team headed by the tech billionaire has become an enforcement mechanism within the federal bureaucracy to enact his administration's agenda.

Musk has used his social media platform X to amplify his team's positions, while also sharing unproven allegations about fraud identified in government agencies.

The claim that the government was paying royalties to the former president is also incorrect.

No 'Obamacare' trademark

A search of the US Patent and Trademark Office database showed no registered trademark for "Obamacare" or the name "Obama." 

The search turned up applications from 12 private companies, unrelated to the former president, 11 of which were denied because of their reference to a public figure (archived here). One is still pending.

Kristelia García, a law professor at Georgetown University (archived here), told AFP that federal law restricts others from registering a trademark of a well-known living person, and it would be atypical for Obama to take it for himself (archived here).

"Government actors, acting in their official capacity don't generally trademark (or, for that matter, copyright) their work product," García said via email.

Even if Obama were to have filed an Obamacare trademark while in office, the mark would likely belong to the government, since the Affordable Care Act is a federal product, according to Erik Pelton, an intellectual property lawyer and Georgetown University professor (archived here).

Pelton pointed to Trump's pending trademark on the term "Space Force," a branch of the military created by the president in 2019, as a legal reference point.

"He created the Space Force. And the name Space Force is a trademark pending that's owned by the US military," Pelton said. "Because it's a governmental program, that's who would own the name."

AFP reached out to Obama for comment, but no response was forthcoming.

'Stolen Satire'

The current claims are a case of "stolen satire" -- when a satirical story is taken out of its original context and framed online as fact or without an apparent disclaimer.

Keyword searches trace the post back to a meme shared by "America's Last Line of Defense" (ALLOD), a satirical social media account that often publishes fictional stories mistaken for real news. The shared image links back to an associated satirical article on its subsidiary website The Dunning Kruger Times.

ALLOD's Facebook page, says: "Network of trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real."

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Screenshot of ALLOD Facebook, captured on February 28, 2025

A watermark from the website can be found in the bottom right corner of some of the circulating posts.

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Screenshot of a Facebook post from America's Last Line of Defense, with elements highlighted by AFP

The meme repurposes a story published on ALLOD's website in 2017 that is no longer publicly available. The story was debunked by Snopes when it originally circulated.

Christopher Blair, founder of ALLOD, told AFP in 2020 that "confirmation bias" causes people to share the content he creates.

"Whether or not a thing is true no longer matters to about 35 million Americans," Blair said. "If it's what they want to hear, they'll pass it along."

AFP fact checked similar claims about alleged fraudulent government spending here.