Trump speech praising Ethiopian PM is a deepfake
- Published on October 10, 2025 at 10:50
- 3 min read
- By Tolera FIKRU GEMTA, AFP Ethiopia
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The post, published on Facebook on October 3, 2025, and shared more than 2,700 times, contains an Amharic caption that reads: “American President Donald Trump has praised Ethiopian Prime Minister Dr Abiy Ahmed and congratulated both Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Ethiopian people for the remarkable developmental progress they have achieved.”
“Ethiopian leader Dr Abiy Ahmed was hailed by Donald Trump,” adds a text overlay on the 46-second video, which includes separate panels containing images and two embedded clips running simultaneously.
One clip displays footage of Trump speaking, while another shows a man silently reacting to the US president. An image of Abiy is also featured in the bottom right corner.
Similar claims about the video have been widely shared on Facebook in Ethiopia (see here and here).
In the Trump clip, a voice similar to the US leader's says: “Congratulations for Ethiopia peoples. Then Abiy is a leader who not only lays the foundation stone, but also implements and executes when is planned (sic).”
Trump appears to add: “We have great confidence in him as a leader who completes major projects and turns them into goals. He has done a commendable job by accelerating the work started in the small and micro sectors and ensuring the benefit of citizens in all sectors and working diligently.”
In conclusion, Trump purportedly says: “The Ethiopian government, led by Dr Abiy, is doing an amazing job by designing various strategies to achieve better growth in the smokeless industry. He is a leader who is building a clean and beautiful country.”
Ethiopian energy projects
On September 9, 2025, Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Africa’s largest hydroelectric project (archived here).
Abiy hailed the $4 billion dam, built on the River Nile, as “a great achievement for all black people”. The GERD is designed to hold 74 billion cubic metres of water and generate 5,150 megawatts of electricity – more than double Ethiopia’s current capacity.
Less than a month later, on October 2, 2025, Abiy launched the Ogaden Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project in Calub, in Ethiopia’s Somali region, a facility that will reportedly produce 111 million litres annually (archived here).
But the claim that Trump praised Abiy’s “remarkable achievements” after these two events is false.
Fake praise
Several clues indicate that the footage of Trump’s speech is fake.
Firstly, Trump’s mouth movements do not quite line up with his words at times, a telltale sign of AI-generated videos.
Secondly, at about 40 seconds into the video, Trump appears to praise Ethiopia’s progress in developing “smokeless industries”. Yet, this is inconsistent with his known policy stance.
Trump has publicly criticised clean energy initiatives, including in a recent speech at the United Nations General Assembly, where he mocked renewables as a “joke”, praised “clean, beautiful coal” and declared climate change the “greatest con job ever” (archived here).
AFP Fact Check ran the audio from the video through an AI detector called Hiya, which is part of the InVID-WeVerify verification toolkit.
The results established a 99 percent probability that the audio was created artificially.
Trump press conference
AFP Fact Check used InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.
The results established that the original video was published more than five years ago on September 17, 2020, by the YouTube channel “Trump White House Archived”, which stores footage from Trump’s first term in office (archived here).
The hour-long video shows a White House press conference during which Trump mainly discussed Covid-19 vaccine distribution plans.
Segments from this press conference were merged with AI-generated audio to create the false impression that Trump had praised Abiy for his “remarkable achievements”.
Trump made no mention of Abiy or Ethiopia in the original press conference.
Online searches confirm that no public record or official statement exists of Trump lavishing such praise on Ethiopia and its megaprojects.
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