Does a video on social media show people celebrating Donald Trump's May 30, 2024, guilty verdict at a pub? No, that's not true: The original footage on the screen documented celebrations after a British soccer game in 2016. Use of the recycled pub scene video has itself become a meme of sorts, an ironic element of posts celebrating some political or other victory. The video has been edited to add CNN's televised coverage of the Trump verdict on a screen in the pub.
The claim appeared in a post on X, formerly Twitter, (archived here) where it was posted on May 30, 2024. The caption read:
This. Is. Awesome.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Jun 3 13:20:39 2024 UTC)
The original context of the video was that soccer fans erupted into cheers after England won against Wales during a June 16, 2016, match. The original video was found by taking a screenshot and inserting that into Google Images. Evidence of the Google Images reverse image search is here (archived here).
A TinEye reverse image search of a frame from the claim showed that this video was not recent relative to the date of the Trump verdict (archived here). The oldest result was a Vine from June 27, 2016 (archived here). While the footage is grainy, viewers can still see similar posters on the wall that are also found in the X claim. The Vine's caption read, "When #royhodgson says he will resign #england #ThreeLions #eng #EURO2016."
The video has been mislabeled multiple times as evidence of public sentiment about various events or ideas, with use of that specific recycled video adding a layer of irony. In June, 2023, Lead Stories' Slovak team found the same video used to illustrate a false claim that a whole bar full of people cheered Slovak President Zuzana Caputova's decision not to seek re-election.
We found a Daily Mail article that included still footage of the crowd in question in the form of an X post. The X post included the same crowd facing a massive television screen, but the screen did not show CNN's coverage of Trump's conviction, it showed a composite bar and line graph with the caption, "At the pub for a 'working lunch.'" Evidence of the post is below:
(Source: Daily Mail screenshot taken on Mon Jun 3 14:15:45 2024 UTC)
Snopes debunked a similar claim in August 2023 when the same celebratory video was used in another bogus claim: that the crowd was cheering shortly after Trump's mugshot had been revealed to the public.
Other fact check agencies have also reviewed the May 30, 2024, claim, including Snopes and USAToday.
More Lead Stories articles about Donald Trump are here.
