Does a 2025 poll say Germans think President Donald Trump is the greatest threat to world peace just weeks after taking office? No, that's not true: The poll being circulated in February 2025 was actually conducted in 2019, toward the end of Trump's first term in office. The graphic being shared comes from a 2019 Fox News story reporting that Germans surveyed believed Trump was more dangerous to world peace than Russian President Vladmir Putin or North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The claim appeared in a post on Bluesky (archived here) on February 12, 2025. The text overlay on the image said:
FOX NEWS reports:
In just under two weeks, President Trump has emerged as the frontrunner in this poll.
The post includes a graphic from a Fox News story listing the results of a YouGov survey of German citizens to the question of which leader is the greatest threat to world peace. Trump was a clear first choice at 41 percent.
Here is a screenshot of the post at the time of writing:
(Source: Bluesky screenshot taken on Thu Feb 13 14:58:39 2025 UTC)
The poll was not taken two weeks after Donald Trump took office in 2025. The screenshot comes from an actual Fox News story that was posted on Twitter -- now X -- on December 27, 2019 (archived here):
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Feb 13 14:56:34 2025 UTC)
Founded in 2000, YouGov (archived here) describes itself as "a pioneer of online polling," conducting surveys in several countries including Germany. According to the German international broadcaster DW (archived here), the news agency dpa commissioned the survey (archived here), with more than 2,000 Germans responding to the question who is the greatest threat to world peace.
The 2019 survey of Germans was also widely reported at the time in trusted news media outlets, including Axios (archived here) and New York Magazine (archived here).
For more Lead Stories fact checks about claims involving Donald Trump, click here.
For more Lead Stories fact checks about claims involving Germans, click here.
