Did Antifa protesters breach security at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas to hang a banner reading Trump "IS IMPEACHED FOREVER" ahead of Wednesday night's Democratic debate? No, that's not true: the video has been digitally manipulated by a known prankster, and the same footage has been used before with different sayings on the banner.
The claim originated from a tweet published by Paul Lidicul on February 19, 2020, (archived here). The tweet began:
Antifa protesters breach security at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas to hang a banner from the rooftop - ahead of the #DemDebate being held there tonight.
Users on social media only saw this:
Antifa protesters breach security at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas to hang a banner from the rooftop - ahead of the #DemDebate being held there tonight. pic.twitter.com/cFJXw8iWZd
-- Paul Lidicul (@PaulLidicul) February 19, 2020
The video has been viewed more than 85,000 times and retweeted over 3,200 times, with another 8,400 likes.
Some users quickly began to call out the fake, although Lidicul continued to claim it was real.
This the same dude who tweeted this sign, but with a different anti-Trump phrase a few months back. Snopes debunked this and proved it was untrue. Same exact looking video as the last one. This is FAKE. Also I live in Vegas and there was no banner there at all today.
-- Brian Dawe (@DJBrianDawe) February 19, 2020
We wrote about previous pranks by Lidicul. In October 2019, he posted a digitally altered video claiming to be a Greenpeace sign unfurled, also on the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, saying Trump "betrayed and murdered the Kurdish people." Greenpeace quickly denied that the banner was real.
We want to make clear that this is a computer generated animation and not executed by Greenpeace.
-- Greenpeace USA (@greenpeaceusa) October 9, 2019
Last summer, the French news agency AFP shot down another iteration of the prank in which the banner read "concentration camps" on the side of the hotel.
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