Fabricated audio of Trump Jr on Ukraine and Russia, spreads online

"Donald Trump's son suggests sending weapons to Russia instead of Ukraine," said one February 26, 2025 post that shared the video on X and has since been deleted.

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Screenshot from X taken February 26, 2025

The clip shows a cursor clicking play on an episode of "Triggered with Donald Trump Jr" on Spotify.

An unidentified speaker opens: "But they forget that Ukraine isn't the kind of country you go all in on. This is ridiculous."

A second voice that sounds like the younger Trump responds: "I honestly can't imagine anyone in their right mind picking Ukraine as an ally when Russia is the other option. I mean, just think about it. Massive nuclear power, loaded with natural resources everyone needs, literally the biggest country on the planet. And there's Ukraine, which has Chernobyl and some radiation-proof dogs. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is like, 'Oh yeah, this is definitely the ally we need. Let's dump all our money into them.'

"Honestly, if anything, the US should have been sending weapons to Russia."

The alleged comments rocketed across X and other platforms as President Trump prepared to meet Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington. 

FactPost, an account operated by the Democratic National Committee, shared the audio in a since-deleted post on X. Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh also amplified it on Threads.

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Screenshot from X taken February 26, 2025

Trump has pushed for a quick end to the three-year-old conflict since taking office, reaching out to Russia's President Vladimir Putin in a shift in policy that has frayed relations with Kyiv and threatened to cripple critical Western support for the longtime US ally.

But the audio of the Republican's son saying the United States should have sent Russia weapons is fabricated.

"The audio in question, which was amplified by the official X account of the DNC, along with countless other major anti-Trump accounts, is 100 percent fake," a Trump Jr spokesman told AFP in a February 26 statement. "It appears to be an AI-generated deep fake."

The younger Trump also shared a post from a Republican strategist on X saying the clip is "100 percent AI generated fake audio" (archived here).

Hany Farid, a media forensics expert at the University of California-Berkeley (archived here) and the co-founder of GetReal Labs, a cybersecurity company focused on preventing malicious AI threats, analyzed the audio using two models trained to distinguish between natural and AI-generated voices.

Each of the models "classifies the voices with high confidence as AI-generated," Farid said February 26.

He added that the sophistication of the fake shows how rapidly AI tools are advancing.

"This was not a simple voice cloning, as it involved the interplay between two voices."

Other indicators also signal that the audio is fabricated.

For example, the video circulating online claims to be pulling from Spotify. But the episode of Trump's show that it purports to play -- "FBI Dream Team, Plus Taking Your Questions Live!" -- had not been uploaded to the music-streaming platform as of February 27 (archived here).

Spotify spokesperson Rosa Oh told AFP in a February 26 email that the episode was not and had at no point been available on Spotify.

Oh also said the falsified clip shows a user interface that does not match Spotify's, with the date formatted in a different style.

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Screenshot from Spotify taken February 27, 2025

Trump's podcast is available on Rumble, however, where it streamed February 24 (archived here). AFP reviewed the episode.

While Trump mentions US money sent to Ukraine midway through the segment, he never says Washington should have sent weapons to Russia.

He also does not welcome on callers, but instead takes questions and comments that appear to have been submitted to him online.

Rumble spokesman Tim Murtaugh told AFP in a February 26 statement that the audio spreading online "is fake, likely generated by artificial intelligence, and is not an actual excerpt from the show."

AFP has debunked other misinformation about Russia's invasion of Ukraine here, and US politics here.