Did President Donald Trump's son Eric Trump post a message on X about the "American Golden Age" and threaten "the gloves are off" to those who "defy" it? No, that's not true: Social media posts that claimed Eric Trump deleted the post "within 20 mins" contained a fake screenshot that had a telltale lower case "k" in the view count. Real posts on X use an upper case "K" in that position. The fake post was not indexed by Google or saved by archiving services.
The screenshot appeared in a post on X (archived here) published by @MzSgtPepper on January 27, 2025. It was accompanied by the following text:
Look what @EricTrump deleted. Looks like he is threatening countries and citizens.
The post included the following screenshot:
(Source: Image downloaded from X post on January 27, 2025 at 15:50:19 UTC)
The text of the supposed X post by Eric Trump read:
Any and all who dare to defy the American Golden Age, heed this warning: You WILL lose. Tow the line, or we WILL run you down!
The gloves are off, and we're not playing around this time. For now, it's tariffs, but trust me: We can, and will, do SO MUCH WORSE.
On January 27, 2025, Lead Stories searched (archived here) for the phrase "Golden Age" on the X account of Eric Trump and did not find any matching posts. This means the post in question did not exist on X at that time, though it does not rule out the possibility it was published earlier and then deleted, as that makes it disappear from the search results on X. However, a search on Google (archived here) for the same phrase limited to URLs associated with Eric Trump's account also didn't return any results.
Usually, posts from popular accounts are quickly indexed by Google and according to a help page on X (archived here):
Even if you delete posts, Google and other search engines cache search results, which means that occasionally old information is still searchable until Google and other search engines update their systems to reflect more recent information.
Note that the same type of search for phrases in posts on Eric Trump's account (for example here and here ) does return results with recent posts from the account.
The view count in the screenshot used a lower-case "k", as opposed to actual posts on X that use a capital "K" to denote that the view count is in the thousands, for example in this other Eric Trump tweet (archived here).
(Source: screenshot of this Eric Trump X post taken on January 27, 2025 at 17:51:20 UTC)
According to a Google image search (archived here), several copies of the screenshot circulated online on January 25 and 26, 2025. Each of them showed exactly the same view count and layout. That uniformity was further evidence that the tweet was inauthentic since, if it had been real, the screenshots would likely have varied in the view count they showed, as well as in their layout.
For example, some screenshots would have shown a mobile app layout, others that of a web browser, and some screenshots would have shown the purported Trump tweet in light mode, others in dark mode.
None of the posts on social media that Lead Stories reviewed contained a link to the supposedly deleted tweet. Controversial social media posts usually get screenshotted or sent to archiving services within minutes of being posted, this alleged post left no such traces even though it was claimed it was online for twenty minutes.
