Did President Donald Trump post on Truth Social that the Department of Education spent millions developing a hybrid of the fork and the spoon (commonly known as a spork) on February 8, 2025? No, that's not true: A screenshot of such a post circulating on social media appears to have been fabricated. There is no such post on Trump's Truth Social timeline and no news outlets reported on it.
An example of such a screenshot can be seen in this post on X (archived here) published on February 9, 2025. The text in the image read:
The Department of Education, as we will all soon find out, is one of the terrible organizations on Earth, with millions wasted over many years developing a hybrid of the fork and spoon in our cafeterias (which no one likes). Millions spent teaching our educators, many of which are very ugly, how to read before they are allowed to teach our children. Tens of Millions, even Billions, reinforcing flawed DEI - or DEWHY as we call it now - policies of extreme radicals to endoctrinate our youth by enforcing peanut bans to accommodate a very small group (very LOUD) who don't like the beautiful nut. This horrible "department" must be stopped NOW!
This is what the image looked like:
(Source: image downloaded from x.com by Lead Stories on February 9, 2025 at 14:14:01 UTC)
Lead Stories checked President Trump's Truth Social account (archived here) on February 9, 2025 and did not see any such post.
Lead Stories searched for the phrase "The Department of Education, as we will all soon find out, is one of the terrible organizations on Earth, with millions wasted over many years developing a hybrid of the fork and spoon" (archived here) on Google News to see if any media outlet had reported on such a newsworthy quote and no results came up.
A Google search for the phrase "The Department of Education, as we will all soon find out, is one of the terrible organizations on Earth, with millions wasted over many years developing a hybrid of the fork and spoon" limited to links containing truthsocial.com/@realdonaldtrump (using the "site:" search operator) returned only a handful of results (archived here), all containing the exact same screenshot, but no results hosted on Truth Social's website, indicating Google didn't recently index such a post.
All screenshots of the supposed post showed exactly the same number of "Likes" and "ReTruths". If the post had been real the expectation would be that there were more screenshots circulating showing different counts and/or layouts (night vs. day mode, mobile vs. web interface...).
