Fact Check: Trump Did NOT Order Keystone 'To Transport ONLY American Oil'

Fact Check

  • by: Uliana Malashenko

CORRECTION -- STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Fact Check: Trump Did NOT Order Keystone 'To Transport ONLY American Oil' Satire Label

Did President Donald Trump order the Keystone pipeline system "to transport ONLY American Oil"? No, that's not true: The claim came from a site with a satire label that explicitly says "nothing on this page is real". Originating in Canada, the Keystone Pipeline System moves unrefined Canadian petroleum, and some from the U.S. to refineries in the United States.

The claim originated from a post on Facebook where it was published on March 17, 2025. It opened:

Canada's lease runs out next month. It's time we started putting those lines to use for Americans.

The banner shared in the entry continued:

Trump has ordered the Keystone to transport ONLY American Oil.

'Canada has used our land for free for far too long'.

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

Screenshot 2025-03-19 at 12.55.53 PM.png

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Mar 19 16:55:53 2025 UTC)

"The Keystone" is a reference to an oil pipeline system across Canada and the U.S. President Joe Biden in January 2021 revoked the permit (archived here) for an add-on to the Keystone system, called Keystone XL but the rest of the system was still running at the time of publication.Keystone XL was never completed. By the time the XL project was abandoned, less than 10% of it had been constructed (archived here).

The claim reviewed in this article was published by a page associated with a network with a known history of spreading made-up stories. The page's self-description on Facebook read:

A subsidiary of the America's Last Line of Defense network of trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real.

About ALLOD

The "America's Last Line of Defense" is a network of satire websites run by self-professed liberal troll Christopher Blair from Maine along with a loose confederation of friends and allies. He runs several websites and Facebook pages with visible satire disclaimers everywhere. They mostly publish made-up stories with headlines specifically created to trigger Republicans, conservatives and evangelical Christians into angrily sharing or commenting on the story on Facebook without actually reading the full article, exposing them to mockery and ridicule by fans of the sites and pages.

Every site in the network has an About page that reads (in part):

About Satire
Before you complain and decide satire is synonymous with "comedy":

sat·ire
ˈsaˌtī(ə)r
noun
The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined. Any similarities between this site's pure fantasy and actual people, places, and events are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and satirical. See above if you're still having an issue with that satire thing.

Articles from Blair's sites frequently get copied by "real" fake news sites who omit the satire disclaimer and other hints the stories are fake. One of the most persistent networks of such sites is run by a man from Pakistan named Kashif Shahzad Khokhar (aka "DashiKashi") who has spammed hundreds of such stolen stories into conservative and right-wing Facebook pages in order to profit from the ad revenue.

Read more

Other Lead Stories articles mentioning Donald Trump can be found here.

Updates:

  • 2025-03-19T22:43:43Z 2025-03-19T22:43:43Z
    CORRECTION: The original version of this debunk did not distinguish between the operational border-crossing Keystone pipeline system and the Keystone XL project, a proposed 1,200-mile addition that was never completed after President Joe Biden in 2021 revoked the border-crossing permit for the XL line.

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  Uliana Malashenko

Uliana Malashenko joined Lead Stories as a freelance fact checking reporter in March 2022. Since then, she has investigated viral claims about U.S. elections and international conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, among many other things. Before Lead Stories she spent over a decade working in broadcast and digital journalism, specializing in covering breaking news and politics. She is based in New York.

Read more about or contact Uliana Malashenko

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