Altered Trump video spreads amid Iran-Israel war

"We need to avoid getting involved in this conflict #trump #maga #israel #iran #middleeast #wwiii," says a June 15, 2025 post sharing the video on Instagram.

The clip -- also shared to X, TikTok and YouTube -- claims to show Trump saying the United States should stay out of the conflict between the two arch enemies, which began when Israel targeted Iranian military bases and nuclear sites in a June 13 attack and has seen Iran respond with barrages of missiles and drones.

"I think we should skip it," Trump appears to say in the video. "I don't know. I'm just not really feeling it. World War III folks, hard pass."

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Screenshot from Instagram taken June 20, 2025

Referencing nationwide protests against his agenda, Trump supposedly continued: "We've got enough going on stateside. We've got the 'No Kings' riots set to kick off this weekend. 'No Kings.' We like kings, actually, folks. We like one king in particular, quite frankly. The king of kings, our lord and savior."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been working to draw elevated support from Trump, but the Republican US president said June 20 that Iran had a "maximum" of two weeks to avoid possible US air strikes, indicating he could take a decision before the fortnight deadline he set a day earlier. He had spent weeks before the attack pursuing a diplomatic path towards a deal to replace the nuclear deal with Iran that he tore up in his first term in 2018.

The video purporting to show him saying the United States "should skip it," meanwhile, is altered.

Reverse image searches reveal the footage was lifted from a May 28, 2025 event -- more than two weeks prior to Israel's strikes on Iran (archived here).

Former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who was sworn in at the ceremony as the interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, can be seen standing behind Trump throughout.

The video and transcript show the president mentioned Israel's war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the US efforts to reach a deal with Iran, but he did not call for the United States to stay out of a conflict between the two Middle Eastern nations (archived here and here). He was asked at one point whether he warned Netanyahu against taking any action that could disrupt his talks with Iran, but he said he was pushing to follow the diplomatic path.

The president made no mention of the "No Kings" protests.

The manipulated video appears to lift footage from around the 18:36 mark of the May 28 footage, based on Trump's hand movements. In that moment, the president was talking about inflation.

The voice cloning detection tool in the Verification Plugin, also known as InVID-WeVerify, found that the audio on the altered version is "very likely AI-generated."

Some of the earliest posts sharing the clip included disclaimers saying it was a parody generated by artificial intelligence.

AFP has debunked other misinformation about the Iran-Israel war here.