What was claimed
A 2014 post from Donald Trump on Twitter, now X, said that “any president that tries meeting with Putin is a tyrant and should not be president”.
Our verdict
There is no evidence this was posted by Mr Trump. The image supposedly showing his post has been circulating since at least 2018.
A screenshot of a social media post, supposedly from US President Donald Trump’s X (formerly Twitter) account in 2014, saying “any president that tries meeting with Putin is a tyrant and should not be president”, is being shared on social media.
The supposed X post has the date 17 June 2014. But Full Fact could not find any posts from President Trump’s account with this wording.
The earliest instances we could find of the purported tweet were versions posted in July 2018 when President Trump and President Putin met for closed-door talks in Helsinki, Finland, and Mr Trump defended Russia over accusations of interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
The screenshot of the supposed tweet appears to be circulating again in light of the latest meeting between the two leaders in Alaska in an attempt to reach a ceasefire in the Ukraine-Russia war.
All the versions of the supposed screenshot we could find that included the number of likes and retweets showed exactly 24,000 retweets and 17,400 likes. If the post were real, you might expect more than one screengrab of it to have been taken and later have been shared online.
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