What was claimed
A video shows Emmanuel Macron saying “The way Trump had police stop me on the streets of New York is really disgusting. All of this happened just because I acknowledged the existence of Palestine.”
Our verdict
False. The French president did not say this. The audio in this clip is not authentic.
A video that appears to show Emmanuel Macron claiming his car was blocked by US president Donald Trump’s motorcade in New York because the French president recognised Palestine as a state isn’t real.
Although it’s true that Mr Macron’s car was blocked by police officers making way for Mr Trump’s motorcade in New York last month, the original footage used to produce this clip dates back to a Bloomberg interview in May 2024—more than a year before France formally recognised Palestine as a state at the UN General Assembly in September 2025.
In the viral video Mr Macron appears to say: “The way Trump had police stop me on the streets of New York is really disgusting. All of this happened just because I acknowledged the existence of Palestine”.
But Mr Macron didn’t actually say this. Full Fact traced the original footage back to an interview with Bloomberg in May 2024, in which he discussed EU spending, mergers and acquisitions of banks and China. At no point did he mention Palestine or his car being blocked by Mr Trump.
We’ve not been able to determine whether the audio was generated with artificial intelligence, has been edited in some other way or simply features an impersonator, but there are several clues that it isn’t genuine.
For instance, the video appears to repeat and reverse a short clip taken from the Bloomberg interview (approximately 2:16-2:25). As experts have previously told us, the presence of background music, as featured in this clip, may also be used to hide sound imperfections in fake audio.
The video has also been manipulated (likely using AI) to make it look as though Mr Macron is saying the words falsely attributed to him, in an example of a lip-sync deepfake.
Although Mr Trump condemned moves by several major countries, including France, to formally recognise a Palestinian state, there is also no evidence he blocked the French president’s car in New York in retaliation.
We’ve seen various suspected deepfake audio clips of other politicians in recent years, including of the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, health secretary Wes Streeting, the Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan and former US President Joe Biden. There’s no evidence that any of these were real recordings of the politicians in question.
You can read more about how to spot AI audio, and the challenges of doing this, in our guide.
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 false because President Macron did not say this and the audio in the video is not authentic.
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