What was claimed
Videos show Donald Trump criticising Sadiq Khan for “turning London into a s**tshow” and saying he “needs a Tomahawk [missile] up his a**”.
Our verdict
The audio in these clips is fake. We traced the footage to an old video of President Trump announcing ‘gold cards’ as a path to citizenship in the US, the audio of which has been altered. He makes no mention of Sadiq Khan in the original clip.
Videos shared thousands of times on social media appear to show US president Donald Trump criticising Sir Sadiq Khan for his record as Mayor of London.
In one of the clips the president appears to say Sir Sadiq “is turning London into a s**tshow” while in another he’s shown saying the mayor “needs a Tomahawk [missile] up his a**”.
It’s true that Mr Trump has frequently criticised Sir Sadiq, saying he has done “a terrible job”, and calling him “a nasty person” and a “horrible, vicious, disgusting mayor”. But the audio in these particular clips is fake.
All of the videos use the same clip of President Trump, which we traced to a video posted by The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network, on 25 February 2025.
In the original clip President Trump announces a “gold card” path to citizenship for migrants who pay $5 million (£3.7 million). This has since been reduced to $1 million (£740,000), although a ‘platinum’ version of the card that offers special tax breaks will reportedly be available for $5 million. At no point does he mention Sadiq Khan or London and there have been no credible reports of him making the specific comments in the altered clips.
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There are various other clues that the clips being shared have been manipulated. The original video is higher resolution than the fakes posted on social media, particularly around the mouth. Haziness around the lips and mouth area is a tell tale sign a video has been poorly lip-synced, showing how President Trump was deepfaked to make it seem as if he is saying something different.
Some of the posts including videos with fake audio of Donald Trump follow them with real clips of Conservative London Assembly members criticising the mayor’s spending on staff and crime rates under his leadership. The figures the London Assembly member cites for staff spending appear to be correct. We recently wrote in more detail about crime levels in London under Sir Sadiq here.
We’ve fact checked multiple fake lip-sync videos in the past, including others of President Trump supposedly criticising the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer.
Before sharing content like this which you may see online, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a genuine and trustworthy source. Our Full Fact toolkit and guides on how to spot AI-generated audio, images and deepfake videos can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because the audio in these clips is fake.
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