Manipulated video misrepresented as French president reprimanding Trump
- Published on October 17, 2025 at 14:19
- 3 min read
- By Samad UTHMAN, AFP Nigeria
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After French President Emmanuel Macron was delayed by street closures caused by US President Donald Trump’s convoy when they were both in New York for the UN General Assembly, videos circulated online claiming to show Macron lashing out at Trump over the incident. However, AFP Fact Check found that the clip was altered, with the French president’s words replaced by AI-generated audio. The original video shows Macron giving an interview in 2024 in which he discussed the possibility of French banks being acquired by European rivals.
“Emmanuel Macron claimed the real reason Trump asked the police officer to stop him on the street was because he had done something ‘sorry’ to Trump,” reads the caption of a Facebook post shared on September 25, 2025.
Shared more than 8,000 times, the post features a video purportedly showing Macron giving an interview in which he purportedly describes how Trump effectively stopped him on the streets of New York as “disgusting”.
“All of this happened just because I acknowledged the existence of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly. This affected Trump’s interests, and he even thought I was rewarding Hamas, but I firmly believe this is the right way to promote peace,” Macron appears to say in the video.
New York incident
In late September, Macron was in New York to attend the UN General Assembly. He was rushing to a meeting from UN headquarters when, to his astonishment, he was told to go no further by police as the street was blocked by Trump’s convoy.
In a conversation that was caught on camera, the French president reportedly phoned Trump (archived here).
“I’m waiting in the street because everything is frozen for you,” Macron told Trump in fluent English, according to footage broadcast by BFMTV and Brut online media.
During his speech at the UN General Assembly, the French leader joined other countries in formally recognising the State of Palestine and reaffirmed that a two-state solution remains the only path to lasting peace — a stance at odds with Trump’s (archived here).
The same claim has been shared elsewhere on Facebook (here and here).
However, the audio in the video was doctored using artificial intelligence (AI).
Altered with AI
Throughout the video, Macron’s lip movements do not quite match his words, and the shape of his teeth morphs unnaturally – typical indicators that AI was used to manipulate the footage.
We extracted the audio and ran it through Hiya, an AI detection tool that looks for specific forensic traces left by voice generators.
The tool flagged the audio as “very likely AI-generated” with 99 percent probability.
Using Google Lens to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the footage, AFP Fact Check found the original video was published more than a year before Macron’s trip to New York (archived here).
@bloombergpolitics President Emmanuel #Macron said he would be open to seeing a major French #bank being taken over by a #EuropeanUnion rival in order to spur the deeper financial integration he sees as critical for the bloc’s future prosperity. “Dealing as Europeans means you need consolidation as Europeans,” Macron said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait on the sidelines of the Choose #France investment summit in Versailles near Paris. Tap the link in bio to read more. #worldnews#politics#geopolitics#EU#Europe#money#economy♬ original sound - Bloomberg Politics
The video was published on TikTok by the US-based financial media outlet Bloomberg on May 13, 2024.
The clip shows Macron in an interview on the sidelines of the 2024 “Choose France” summit at Versailles Palace near Paris, where he discusses his openness to the possibility of French banks being acquired by European rivals as part of efforts to strengthen cross-border financial integration within the European Union and boost competitiveness in the region’s banking sector.
France-based publisher Euronews covered the interview here (archived here).
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