A deepfake video of Trump is shared with false claims of him calling the Knanaya people ‘smartest’
A video (here and here) showing the US President-elect Donald Trump saying “the sharpest people I know are the Knanaya people they own all the gas stations in Chicago,” has gone viral on social media. The Knanaya community (here and here) is a Christian ethnic group living in India who migrated from Mesapatomia in 345 AD. We fact-check this video through this article.
Claim: Viral video shows Donald Trump calling the people belonging to the Knanaya group ‘the smartest people’ he knows.
Fact: This is a digitally manipulated video. In the original video, which is an interview Trump gave to NBC in 2017, does not include any mention of the Knanaya people. Therefore, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the viral claim’s veracity, we searched the internet using relevant keywords. This did not lead us to any related news reports. Next, we checked Donald Trump’s official ‘X’ handle using advanced search to see if he had tweeted anything on this. However, we did not find any tweet in which he spoke about the Knanaya group in such a manner.
To find more details about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search on a few of its keyframes. This search led us to the original video (here and here) from which the viral video was clipped.
This is an interview that Donald Trump gave to NBC News in May 2017 when he was the president of the United States. The visuals at the 12:30 timestamp match the visuals seen in the viral clip. He does not talk about the Knanaya people in this portion of the interview. Not just here, but nowhere in this interview did he speak about the Knanaya people being the smartest ones that he knows.
Suspecting that the viral video could have been created by using digital manipulation tools, we ran the video through a tool known as True Media, which detects video created using digital manipulation tools.
The analysis report showed us that the viral clips contain ‘Substantial Evidence of Manipulation.’ Apart from this, the True Media report also suggested that the video is a Deepfake (here and here).
To sum up, a deepfake video is viral as a real video of Trump calling the Knanaya group the smartest people he knows.